Environment

SNP Members back Common Weal’s public energy strategy (again)

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It’s that simple.” – Michael Hureaux-Perez

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The SNP members at their conference this month backed a major energy motion supported by the SNP Trade Union Group (TUG). This motion was developed in consultation with the STUC and with energy experts including myself and deeply integrates several aspects of Common Weal’s proposals for reform of the Scottish energy sector – including by moving forwards plans to bring energy into Scottish public ownership.

The motion was passed by acclaim and without objection meaning that this is now the fourth time that the SNP members have voted for an energy motion including public ownership at their national conference – each time achieving overwhelming or unanimous support. You can watch the presentation of the motion starting from the 1 hour 10 minute mark here.

The motion itself (pictured above) focusses on six key areas which are worth explaining in some detail.

1. Achieving Equity Stakes

Something that Common Weal has long advocated for is for the Government to stop just handing money to very large, often already very rich, companies in the form of tax breaks, loans or outright grants is no longer appropriate for a renewable energy sector that has for many years now demonstrated the ability to make a profit without public subsidy. At the same time, we’ve been shouting for some time about the obscenely high level of foreign ownership in the Scottish economy – particularly within the fundamental economy like energy.

Instead of just throwing money at the sector, the Scottish Government should demand equity – ownership shares – in return for public money and should even demand a public equity share as a precondition for planning permission or the granting of option rights in projects like the successors to ScotWind. Denmark recently did precisely this, calling for a minimum 20% public stake in offshore renewable projects.

This is, of course, a bit easier for Denmark as they have several publicly owned energy companies who, by definition, meet that stake simply by doing their job. Scotland – starting from the position of not having a public energy company – may have to take a position similar to that of GB Energy, being a kind of silent investment partner who merely provide the money and take the profits rather than taking an active role in developing the project.

However this should be merely a first step where small stakes are used as a training ground to build up the experience needed for the Scottish energy company to start joining projects as a co-developer, start to bid for projects on their own and then to move to a “no bid” process whereby the Scottish energy company simply start running all new Scottish energy projects by default.

The second part of the proposal is important for the initial “silent investor” stages. It would not do for the Scottish Government to be effectively investing in and buying ownership stakes in companies who treat their workers unfairly, so this provision would be an additional incentive for companies that if they want the support of Government then they have to meet a minimum standard of workers’ rights.

This is the approach the Scottish Government took to distinguish themselves from the UK with their “Green Freeports” which does show that the Fair Work principles are themselves not strong enough and might be of limited actual impact, but they do still represent a floor below which Government-supported jobs should not fall.

2. Appropriate ownership limits and break clauses

One of the things we discovered when researching for our second ScotWind paper was the discovery that the lease terms for offshore wind projects can stretch into multiple decades despite the turbines themselves reaching “breakeven” and starting to make a profit sometimes after only five or seven years or so. The “NR4” round of offshore wind in England promised a 60 year lease period for wind turbines.

With a normal lifespan of 20 to 30 years, this means that the lease would cover the operational lifespan of two or three generations of such turbines and if the five year payback period is achieved, then the lease could generate up to 50 years worth of energy profits.

Our default position is that until Scotland has the capacity to manufacture and install turbines ourselves then it’s fine to hire a developer to do it for us and perfectly acceptable for them to expect to recoup their investment and make a reasonable profit but that after a lease period that is as short as practical (say, ten years), ownership of the turbine should then be transferred to Scottish public ownership.

There is a caveat here. If the turbines have a 20 year lifespan, then nationalising them on year 19 would effectively just mean letting the corporations take all the profits and then socialising the decommissioning costs (much like what has happened with the Scottish oil sector).

In addition to a short lease there should also be strict break clauses whereby if the developer does not meet minimum standards such as on workers’ rights or if they break promises to invest in local supply chains or otherwise no longer meet reasonable standards as an operator in Scotland then the Government should activate a break clause in the contract, pull the lease in and give it to a Scottish public operator – this is precisely what the Government did in 2021 to nationalise ScotRail.

This is also how Scotland effectively nationalises all of our renewable energy for no cost to the electricity consumer. All we need to do is ensure that the current generation of generators are brought into public hands soon enough that they can pay for their replacements. This doesn’t just need to happen at a national scale with large developments like ScotWind. This can scale down to the community level where communities should be able to take over small onshore wind and solar farms.

That a community in Scotland recently failed to take over their local wind farm because a Scottish public body didn’t even consider the possibility of this shows how badly out of step Scottish policy is with the will of the people right now (I’m told that the community in question is now in the process of trying to buy out the land under the turbines so that they’ll get the rent from that and will control the next round of leases in the future – good luck to them).

3. Local supply and retrofitting

There is a massive mismatch between the Scottish Government’s energy supply policy and their energy demand policy (such that the latter exists). We all recognise that the climate emergency means that we need to use resources more efficiently. We also recognise that the vast majority of fuel poverty is caused by the fact that we need so much fuel to heat our homes. New buildings could be (but aren’t being) built so that they use an absolute minimum of energy (a properly built Passive House can use less energy to heat in a year than yours does in a winter month).

Transport policy could also be built to minimise energy use via much greater use of public transport for the vast majority of people. That traffic jam your stuck in where every car has an average of 1.1 people inside it is just about the least efficient way of moving people that could possibly be devised. Turning that traffic jam from a queue of fossil fuel burning cars into one of electric cars might be cleaner, but it’ll still double Scotland’s current electricity demand (inefficient heating would double it again).

So this part of the motion aims to double down on efforts to retrofit buildings and to boost local supply of materials to do so (for instance, the vast majority of sustainable insulation made from things like cellulose is imported into Scotland despite so much of our land being covered by monoculture sitka spruce plantations)

This week in one of our daily briefings (sign up here to get a short article on a news story that caught our eye every weekday) was on the story that one of the UK’s insulation projects had failed so badly that 98% of homes covered by it need to get it ripped out and redone. We outlined how to do this kind of work better not by relying on throwing money at companies and then not checking their work but by establishing the task as a public works infrastructure project to properly coordinate it and make it cheaper and more efficient to do. This plan has won favour at previous SNP conferences but, as with so many of our plans for public infrastructure, has been ignored by the leadership.

4. Establish an energy company

The SNP membership has supported a Scottish public energy company since we started lobbying for it in 2017. The SNP leadership has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards that support too. The first Scottish Government plan for a Scottish electricity retail company fell afoul of a UK energy market that overwhelmingly favours large cartels over small providers and, as we warned at the time, an energy company that lacked its own generators and other assets would be entirely at the mercy of global energy price spikes. That proposal was dragged along without the reforms we warned would be needed until it was scrapped in 2021.

Earlier this year, another push from members to get the policy back on the books was blocked by the Government under the excuse that it couldn’t be enacted under the limits of devolution. We responded with a paper laying out six ways that Scotland could own Scottish energy assets under devolution – including via a network of municipal energy companies or via a National Mutual model where Scottish residents are shareholders in the company instead of Scottish Ministers (which is the actual thing that the Scotland Act blocks).

“The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.”

This paper forms the heart of this part of the motion and we’re very happy that the SNP conference unanimously supported it. It is now clear SNP policy that Scotland should publicly own Scottish energy assets via whichever means that Devolution allows. I would favour either the Mutual model where the company is collectively owned by all of the people of Scotland or, failing that, by a National Energy Company collectively owned by the 32 Local Authorities.

Either way, the NEC should be combined with a mandate for the NEC to actively support municipal and community energy companies – co-investing with them in Public/Public Partnerships to help them bootstrap each other up to the point where the larger scale proposals outlined above like taking over existing developments at end-of-lease or outright developing ScotWind-scale projects becomes viable.

What is clear now is that the Scottish Government has run out of excuses. Their refusal to adopt a policy of publicly owning Scottish energy has not more legislative barriers left and now flies directly in the face of the will of their own party. I would expect to see their upcoming election manifesto reflect this will and, should the SNP be part of the Government after the elections, I expect to see proposals to bring about the NEC laid down and developed with all possible speed.

5. Invest in training and a Just Transition Jobs Register

The Just Transition is not going well. Despite the best efforts of polluting megacorporations to try to ride their climate emergency through just a few more quarterly shareholder targets, people are leaving the sector in Scotland either through choice or – as the closure of Grangemouth has highlighted – through the choice of others. However, we’re not seeing these skilled workers move into the renewables sectors at anywhere near the rate we need.

A policy passed at SNP conference a few years ago was the idea of a Just Transition Jobs Register. This would track how many people where being employed in the fossil fuel sectors and in the renewables sectors, would measure how many people were moving from the former to the latter each year and would actively seek to improve pathways to increase that flow. When the policy initially passed it was, again, completely ignored by the party leadership so its inclusion here in another motion must serve to highlight its importance.

6. Putting Communities and Workers First

Where the Just Transition is happening it’s too often being seen as a thing to do to workers, not as a thing for and by workers. I’ve seen corporate “Just Transition” plans that were entirely designed to transition the /company/ to a more sustainable footing but did so by replacing older workers with new apprentices rather than retraining existing staff. Meanwhile, studies like the one done by Platform in 2020 show that workers in the affected sectors already have very good ideas about how they’d like to see a transition happen while highlighting their concerns that they lack the power to do it.

Communities have similar ideas but also lack power. There are growing concerns about the flood of renewable developments in and around communities or the rise of electrical pylons designed to shunt energy past communities who are suffering from fuel poverty while not receiving any of the benefits of hosting the infrastructure. Even a plan such as ensuring that solar panels are built on houses and brownfield sites before taking away amenity space or Common Grazing land from locals would go a long way to helping people buy into the transition rather than turning against it because they see their environment transformed only to benefit companies and landowners.Conclusion

This motion represents a major victor for Common Weal’s influence within Scotland’s political circles but it’s an even bigger one for SNP members who have voted, again, for policies like this despite the party leadership trying to tell them that it couldn’t be done. The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.

This isn’t merely an issue confined to the SNP, however. The other progressive parties in Scotland are all overwhelmingly in favour of policies like this too. It would be a Courageous Decision (in the Yes Minister sense) for leadership to continue to ignore not just the will of a majority of Scottish voters on this issue but the unanimous decision of their own party’s membership at their own conference.

Which hasn’t stopped them up till now – and therein lies the issue even with motions like this. There is still a vast gulf between “what members instruct their party to do” and “what the party actually does” with very little in the way of accountability or oversight to bridge that gap.

This is a problem in all political parties and may be a fundamental problem with political parties that limit their ability to manage a democratic government. The solutions to that are probably a topic for another time, but until then I encourage the members who supported this motion to make their voices heard. Do what you can to ensure that its principles make it into the upcoming manifesto. Do what you can to ensure that your local candidates support those principles. And make sure that they understand that your support of their election is dependent on them listening to their members.

And the message to other parties: If the SNP won’t do this despite that election, who will? Perhaps you?

Same Spin Everywhere

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.” – Hank Green

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

(The wind farm site discussed in this article will interpose between this ridge and the mountains in the background)

I was up in Skye this week to give one of my regular talks to activists and campaign groups around Scotland. It’s one of the aspects of my role at Common Weal that I enjoy the most and get the most out of even though it often means a lot of travelling. I’m very grateful to my hosts for not just organising the meeting but also putting me up for the night.

The evening was organised by the Breakish Windfarm Action Group who are currently concerned by plans to build a large windfarm development on a visually prominent part of the island. The estate owner, Lady Lucilla Noble, stands to profit massively from the site as will the Swedish developers Arise while tenant farmers are likely to see their livelihoods disrupted and restricted on what has been up till now land held as Common Grazings. They asked me to give a broader overview of how and why this is happening in Scotland and I duly prepared a presentation based around our proposals for how Scotland can publicly own our energy generation despite the Scottish Government’s excuse that “it’s reserved”. Shortest possible version: It’s only reserved if we want Government Ministers to own the energy. If we allow Local Authorities or communities to own it, it’s perfectly possible. It could even be funded in the same way. The only “downside” is that the Scottish Government wouldn’t get to control it. See Common Weal’s policy paper “How to own Scottish energy” for more details.

What I heard during the night though had both myself and my partner shaking our heads in disbelief. The story in Skye is that a landowner has contracted with a foreign company to extract vast profit from the resources of Scotland over the objections of the local community, without adequately compensating or benefiting said community, while obfuscating the planning process and making it is difficult as possible for the community to “properly” object as processes such as environmental studies and public inquiries cost tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds to complete – trivial amounts for the corporations but far beyond the reach of ordinary people to compete with. Everyone involved fully expects that even if the community is able to punch above its weight in terms of negotiating and bargaining power, Scottish Ministers will just override any objections because the Government’s primary goals are to make the Scottish GDP line go up by means of encouraging “inwards investment” – if doing that pushes climate goals too, then they suppose that’s fine too.

This is precisely the same story that is happening in my village at the moment where a French company is negotiating with a local land owner to build a massive solar farm and battery park. Just about the only thing that differs are the names of some of the people (and even then only some of them because it turns out that Ross Lambie, one of the local councillors for the ward I live in and who sits on our local Planning Committee is an absentee landlord bidding to use some land he owns in Skye to host a temporary housing for the construction workers being shipped in to install the turbines).

We’re not the only two communities facing this. Scotland is awash with largely foreign capital flooding places with applications for developments that even at their best won’t benefit communities nearly as much as they should (the £5,000 per Megawatt of community benefit funding that some of these developments offer is a shadow of the 30 to 100 times as much local revenue retained by full community ownership). Local planning offices report being completely overwhelmed trying to properly scrutinise applications and that goes double for areas with active community councils where volunteer councillors are expected to scrutinise highly technical documents without the resources to do so. Scottish Ministers are far too prone to allow projects to move up to the Energy Consents Unit to ensure that they can make the decisions – overriding local democracy as they do so – but this just concentrates the problem further. The ECU is similarly overwhelmed with more than 4,500 projects having been passed to them since December 2018. An average of almost two new applications per day. Ministers cannot not be expected to properly scrutinise these projects even if this was their only full time job.

And what happens if a dodgy developer does, by chance or fortune, get their application denied or made conditional to the point that they decide the profit margins aren’t high enough? Well, they just resubmit the application and try again or move on to the next community and hope they can’t pay as much attention. Communities need to be lucky every time. Corporations only need to get lucky once.
I’m not against renewable energy as a rule. We need more of it. What I’m asking for is for the Scottish Government to start abiding by its own party-approved policies. We need a Scottish Energy Development Agency (SEDA) to start producing a proper strategic map of Scotland. A map not just of where Scotland’s renewable resources are but where our actual demand is too. The overflow of development without coordination (compounded by frankly idiotic policies from Westminster such as blocking policies like Zonal Pricing) is leading to millions of pounds of consumer’s money being paid to energy generators in constraint payments. Wind turbines already generate profit almost for free once they’re built – the only way to make them more profitable for the multinationals and foreign public energy companies who own them is for them to make the profit without even generating the energy.

In addition to the SEDA we urgently need the Scottish Government to stop its opposition to public ownership of energy and to start allowing Scottish communities to be the owners of these developments.
Communities have been left alone to fight each application individually when it turns out that they are all facing the same spin everywhere. I am very happy to see that communities are increasingly banding together such as the 9CC group in Ayrshire or the recent conference of Community Councils in Inverness, but it’s clear that these groups themselves need support to start talking together, across Local Authority lines. Maybe that’s what it’ll take for Ministers to start paying proper attention. Maybe the next conference has to happen outside Holyrood itself.

The injustice of situations like where I live or in Skye or in hundreds of other communities is going to seriously harm public support for the renewable transition that we need. I’m not against renewable energy. I am against being screwed over by the people who own them. I’m against the injustice of communities not being given a stake in that transition and being told that their voice is irrelevant or a nuisance. But if my experience this week in Skye tells me anything, it’s that communities are ready to make that voice exactly as loud as it needs to be, especially as the elections approach. I hope Ministers will be listening. Or that their replacements might be.

Demolishing Our Future Again

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.” – Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy )

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The demolition of the Wyndford towers in Glasgow marks a sad end for the residents and campaigners who fought for years to prevent their loss. The fall of those towers represents a lot about failings in Scotland – and particularly in Glasgow – around approaches to construction, approaches to place-making and our approach to what we think residential housing is for.

The destruction of the towers was done almost entirely on short term financial grounds and because the owners of the towers were able to pass the costs of the demolition onto others rather than paying it themselves.

There were two chief arguments used. The first was a design argument that said that the buildings couldn’t be adequately retrofitted but this case was expertly dismantled by architect (and Common Weal Director) Malcolm Fraser. The second was a financial one that said that it was cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to retrofit.

This, again, was refuted on the grounds that the demolition plan didn’t take into account of the environmental impact of the resources used to rebuild.

Many of our building materials are carbon intensive – particularly concrete and steel (alternatives to both are coming online but aren’t quite there yet) – thus whenever we have a building in place, we have to consider the “embodied carbon” involved. Once a block of concrete is cast and all of the carbon it emits during its manufacture, transport and curing has been emitted then it doesn’t emit any more. However, grinding it into dust, throwing it into landfill and replacing it with a new block of concrete will result in more carbon emissions. Wood is kind of the opposite but still worth mentioning. Wood absorbs carbon when it grows but emits it when it rots or is burned as waste. Either way, when a building material is replaced with a new one, the “embodied carbon” price has to be paid. Obviously, therefore, to avoid more emissions than necessary, building materials should be used for as long as possible, should be RE-used when possible and replaced as infrequently as possible.

The problem is that we don’t have an effective carbon or externality tax in the UK that would price in such an effect. If it’s cheaper to tear down and building and let the planet pay the cost in emissions, that’s what Capitalism doesn’t just suggest should happen but actively demands must happen.

There is another aspect to the financial case though that has nothing to do with the carbon aspect and that is VAT. Right now in the UK if you want to buy materials for a new building, you’ll pay a reduced VAT rate of 5% but if you want to buy the same materials to retrofit that building you’ll pay 20% VAT. So there is a strong incentive for buildings to be torn down and replaced if that means qualifying for what amounts to a very large tax cut.

There are solutions to this. The obvious one would be to change VAT. In an era of climate emergency and in the absence of a full externality tax, the obvious solution would be a reversal of that situation to actively encourage retrofit over rebuild but most campaigners (like Fraser) would be content with at least an equal playing field.

Unfortunately, the UK Government isn’t moving very quickly in this field (though the previous Conservative government did temporarily cut VAT on some energy efficiency products) and while the Scottish Government is just as corralled by the volume developers who represent the companies who build many of the overpriced, cold and damp blocks of appreciating capital assets that some of us call “homes” but they do have the advantage of not having to worry much about VAT given that it’s a reserved tax. There are devolved options out there though.

Back in 2022, I was working with Malcolm on an idea to write up a proposal for a devolved tax that could try to level the VAT distinction between repair and rebuild. The Scottish Government couldn’t (or couldn’t cheaply) offer a tax rebate to subsidise the VAT on retrofits and couldn’t adjust the reserved tax directly and, as with the problems they have with bringing in a national land tax, they’d find it difficult to bring in a national construction tax. But the Scottish Government DOES have the power to bring in a local levy controlled by Local Authorities. Our idea then was that Scotland could bring in a Demolition Tax to intentionally raise the price of incidents like Wyndford tower to the point that repair and retrofit would be cheaper than the alternative.

But then, we were beaten to the punch by the Chartered Institute of Building who published essentially an identical proposal and did it likely better than I would have so I’ve been more than happy to endorse their work. I’m also pleased to note that the Scottish Greens have done likewise though I think they are currently the only party in Parliament to have done so. I’d like to know the reasoning behind why the other parties haven’t, if they’d like to tell me.

The devil in such a tax is in the detail though. If it’s set too low then it won’t discourage demolitions. If it’s set based on tax arguments like the infamous “Laffer Curve” so beloved by politicians who want to use it as a misguided excuse to cut taxes then it it’ll end up being “optimised” to maximise tax revenue. A properly set Demolition Tax should, in theory, eliminate all but the most essential of demolitions (demolitions on safety and disaster grounds should probably be exempt) and thus shouldn’t actually raise any tax revenue at all. Of course, this also raises the prospect of an owner letting their property simply decay rather either repair OR replace it – something that can be fixed by enforcing already extant regulations around maintaining buildings in good order along with early use of Local Authority powers to compulsory purchase property from landlords who fail in their responsibilities.

There’s an important point in this story that goes beyond the material and the engineering and that’s the lack of social planning and protection of communities. The Wyndford tower has taken 600 homes and will turn them into just 400 homes. Even if every former resident was offered a guaranteed place in one of the new homes (they weren’t) at a price they could afford there wouldn’t be enough houses for all of them. This demolition represents yet another dispersal of a community in a city that has basically defined itself by dispersal of communities for several generations now. Each one, even when they’ve created objectively better living conditions than what was there before (the New Towns project was a decidedly mixed bag in that regard – a subject for another time), that loss of community, of dislocation from friends and family, was often profound and itself generational in its impact. This is why one of our Big Ideas isn’t “Housing” but “Place”, because while four walls and a roof are a necessary component of living well in the modern world, it’s not a sufficient one and where it is and what it is connected to is important. Decidedly unmodern gendered language aside, John Donne was correct to say:

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse…”

— John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624

But if the continent of community is diminished when but a single part is torn away, what happens when every part is blown down and scattered to the winds?

Every decision that led to those towers coming down last week was made either uncaring of the community who called them home or despite those cares. Where the people were considered, it was done on an individualistic basis, as if each island would be fine if it was picked up and placed anywhere else.

I fear that lesson will be missed again. I see little evidence that the replacement buildings will endure for centuries longer than the less than four score and ten that their predecessor will. They’re certainly not being built with the kind of resource-preserving Circular Economy principles that we MUST be using in our constructions during a climate emergency. Otherwise, likely within the lifetime of some of those new residents, I fear that someone will be writing another eulogy similar to this one.

Image Credit: Ian Dick

Where Next For Grangemouth?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Nobody wants to spend money to build a more resilient city because nobody owns the risk.” – Jeff Goodell

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The Scottish Government risks throwing good money after bad in its latest promise to take £25 million from the remaining ScotWind fund and use it to prop up Grangemouth.
This is in addition to the more than £100mn already earmarked between the Scottish and UK Governments amongst which is “Project Willow” – a plan that was launched to reduce the carbon footprint of the refinery and to find uses for it beyond fossil fuels. [Edit: Since writing this, the UK Government has also matched the Scottish Government’s £25mn pledge with an additional £200mn – but it’s for the same schemes so this article is for them now too]

That plan, however, was upended when owners Ineos decided to close down the plant because in this country we let billionaires decide the future of nationally strategic assets instead of our democratic governments.

I’ve written before about my position on a lot of this. I’m a full advocate for a Just Transition for workers who are facing losing their job as their workplace reaches its entirely foreseen and entirely necessary closure or reformation in light of the climate emergency. What I’m appalled about is politicians using that idea of a Just Transition as an excuse to do anything about that transition. As I wrote last week, “No ban without a plan” is an entirely justifiable slogan – except for the people who were supposed to come up with the plan.

Continue reading →

Scotland: We Have Rockets Too

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Sometimes I wanted to peel away all of my skin and find a different me underneath.” – Francesca Lia Block

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Imagine the pitch. You’ve been instructed by Angus Robertson’s office to cut together a bunch of stock footage for a video showcasing Scotland and [don’t look at the fascism] the USA. Quite artistically, the images are juxtaposed to show the common interests between our two [ignore the ethnic cleansing] nations. For the scene to illustrate the line “we share beautiful places”, what images do you think would show Scotland and the US at their best [Hail King Musk and Viceroy Trump]?
The Scottish Government chose the two above.

Continue reading →

We Need a Ban, So Where’s the Plan?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 3 Comments

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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It has been unsettling to watch Scottish politicians line up behind Unite the Union’s “No ban without a plan” campaign to keep Scottish oil fields flowing. I understand Unite’s position on this. They don’t want to see their workers harmed during the largest economic transition Scotland needs to undertake since the oil fields opened. They’ve been promised a “Just Transition” for those workers. And it hasn’t been delivered. The politicians signing up to the “no ban” pledge are the very people who should have come up with “the plan”. They not only didn’t, many have spent their time actively pushing against those who have tried to instead even as news breaks that many of those workers at Grangemouth will be losing their jobs anyway – casualties of being pointed at for headlines but never being heard.

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The Scottish and UK Governments are both wrong on DRS

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 2 Comments

“This book was written using 100% recycled words.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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a green traffic light sitting next to a store

Both the Scottish and UK Governments are wrong on Deposit Return Schemes.
The DRS is back in the news now that Keir Starmer – in yet another show of policy innovation – has decided to copy/paste the previous Conservative Government’s plan for a deposit return scheme – the proposal where you pay a small deposit when you buy things like drinks and receive the money back when you return the packaging to a deposit return machine (sometimes known as a “reverse vending machine”). His plan includes the previous plan to exclude glass from the scheme and he has refused to allow an exemption to the Internal Markets Act that would allow Scotland to both include glass and to introduce the scheme at all without having to wait for the UK to do it.

It really is impressive to me how the UK can be so backwards that it is utterly unable to bring in a circular economy scheme that is already near-ubiquitous across central Europe (and used to be common in Scotland if you’re old enough to remember Barr’s ‘gless cheques’ before they ended their scheme in 2015) and utterly baffling how vulnerable we are to lobbying by companies who want to keep dumping the costs of their pollution onto consumers and the environment. I’ve told this story many times but I remember being in an informal roundtable in Holyrood in the early days of the planning for the Scottish scheme and a representative from a major supermarket and a representative from a major multinational drinks company both argued against the concept of DRS. Both went a bit more silent when I mentioned that in my previous holiday to Prague I had personally deposited a drinks bottle made by the latter into the DRS machine hosted by the former. If they can do it in one country, why not another? As I say – it was never about “could”, but about “why should we, when we profit more by not doing it?”

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The Climate Climbdown

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“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.

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The Shape Of Solar Scotland – Part II

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people’s needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.” – Cornel West

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A year ago this month I told the story of a new renewables development that had been planned for next to my village and how it put me in the very unexpected position of actively opposing something that most would expect me to have been wildly in favour of. A 100MW solar farm, plus another 100MW worth of battery capacity, worth around £150 million that would produce more power than this village could use ten times over. At the time of its initial proposal it would have been the largest solar farm not just in Scotland but in the entire UK (though since then, several larger projects have been proposed – I’ll come back to that in a bit).

My objection has never been about the renewables themselves – we need more in general and we really need more solar power in particular to balance a grid that is a little too tilted towards wind power – but it has been about control and who benefits from a project that would, in effect, turn a semi-rural Clydesdale village into an industrial estate power station with some houses on the edge. We do now have a few updates, courtesy of a meeting facilitated between the company and the local residents association (the unelected body we have representing the village because we don’t even have an elected Community Council here, never mind proper European-style municipal government) and held in the office of our constituency MSP and Cabinet Secretary for Energy and Net Zero Màiri McAllan. I should say that I, personally, wasn’t at this meeting (and neither was Màiri herself as she’s on parental leave) and only found out that it happened at all when the association published the minutes of the meeting on the village Facebook page almost a month after the fact.

My main objection to the project has never been about the renewables themselves but about place, ownership and benefit.

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How Not To Dispose Of Disposable Cups

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

If it can’t be reduced –
If it can’t be reduced
Reused, repaired – REUSED REPAIRED
Rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold
Recycled or composted – OR COMPOSTED
Then it should be – THEN IT SHOULD BE
Restricted, redesigned – RESTRICTED
REDESIGNED or removed – REMOVED!
From production – FROM PRODUCTION
– Pete Seeger

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.
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The Scottish Government still doesn’t understand what a Circular Economy is or how to bring the public with them as they implement it. This has been made clear by their latest ad hoc and misjudged approach to dealing with disposable cups. Their consultation on the levy has been launched here and Common Weal will get our response in in due course, please make sure your voice is heard too.

The proposal shouldn’t be as contentious as this and I should shouldn’t be on the side of fighting it – especially as I both agree with and support the goal behind the policy; to reduce resource use and waste produced by our single-use consumerism.

The policy as it stands, a 25p levy on disposable cups purchased as part of a takeaway drinks order, though risks seeing people as consumers to be punished into doing the “right thing” even as producers are allowed to make it impossible to make the right choice.

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