“If a pandemic can induce governments to take emergency actions, why can’t a climate breakdown that threatens to kill off the very life-support systems of the planet do the same? After this, there can be no more excuses for passivity.” – Andreas Malm

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Scotland – once a nation that held itself up as a world leader in climate ambitions – has formally repealed important carbon emission targets in a vote that would have had unanimous support but for the abstention of the Greens.

The Scottish Government still holds that Scotland will be a “Net Zero” nation by 2045 but has yet to demonstrate how we will actually reach that goal, especially as interim targets like the 2030 target just repealed continue to be missed.

To be clear on why this vote took place, the Scottish Government put the target into actual legislation as a show of force on its climate ambitions. A “mere” government policy target could have simply been broken and forgotten about as is all too common amongst governments of all colours but once placed in law, the government would have been acting unlawfully if the target was missed.

Instead of annual targets (which have been missed in 9 of the last 13 years), Scotland will now have a series of five year “carbon budgets” which Ministers will be under a duty to meet. How this will happen is unclear but it immediately raises the possibility of Governments being forced to undertake drastic action if they spend the first four years continuing to not do enough and look like they exceed the carbon budget in year five (or sooner).

What is clear is the failure of party politics to clean up this whole mess. Not a single party in the Scottish Parliament has a credible climate plan that would result in Scotland meeting the 2045 net zero target (never mind being able to go further and actually start making reparations for the damage Scotland has historically caused to the planet and will continue to cause until we reach Net Zero). We know this because five years ago this month Common Weal published our own blueprint for a comprehensive, fully costed Green New Deal – our Common Home Plan – and when we presented it to each of the parties, they all basically rejected it as going much further than they could imagine planning to go.

Ironically, a couple of years later, the solution to that party political deadlock emerged in the form of the Scottish Climate Assembly in 2021. I was very proud to have been invited to be one of the expert witnesses to the Assembly and to see it working from the inside and while I had advocated for such Assemblies prior to this, the experience left me in no doubt as to their potential.

A random draw of people from across Scotland were sorted into a pool of around 100 delegates who collectively formed a “mini-public” of the whole Scottish population – balanced across gender, ethnicity, income bracket, location within Scotland and other factors. The Assembly then heard presentations on the climate and possible solutions before spending time coming up with a list of their policy recommendations for the Government.

The result was a package of more than 80 policy recommendations including overwhelming support for some of the most radical climate policies I’ve ever seen such as aggressive per tonne carbon taxation (87% support), fully public funded home retrofitting grants (97% support), and the reframing of national economic “success” in terms of climate progress and wellbeing instead of GDP growth (83% support).

Unfortunately, the Scottish Government’s response to the Assembly was disappointing to the point of dismissive. To almost all of the recommendations, they said they either weren’t going to do it or they were already doing something similar (how similar that was in reality can be seen by the fact of this week’s climate climbdown vote). Only one new Government policy actually came out of the Assembly – the promise to create around 100 Resource Libraries – a far cry short of the “one in every 20 minute neighbourhood” the Assembly actually wanted and a number that the Government admitted would not be enough to achieve the aim of the libraries to actually reduce unnecessary consumerism.

This has been the major stumbling block not just in the Scottish Climate Assembly but in Citizens’ Assemblies more generally. Governments set them up to great praise but then ignore them when they present their results.

And so the solution to Scotland’s climate woes lies here. With the Parliament abdicating its responsibility to bring in effective and popular climate policy they must now allow someone else to do it for them. We need a second Climate Assembly, building on the example of the first, and we need to extract a promise from the Government and the Parliament that when it reports back they WILL follow the recommendations in full and with no complaint or excuses.

Democracy can take many forms and the party political structure of Holyrood is just one of them – other tools are possible when that one fails. If Scotland wants to restore its reputation on the climate, perhaps it’ll be up to us, rather than the parties, to do it.