Scotland was aiming to cut emissions by 75% by the end of the decade
The Scottish government is to ditch its flagship target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030.
The final goal of reaching “net-zero” by 2045 will remain, but BBC Scotland News understands the government’s annual climate targets could also go.
Ministers have missed eight of the last 12 annual targets and have been told that reaching the 75% milestone by the end of the decade is unachievable.
A statement is expected at Holyrood on Thursday afternoon.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) – which provides independent advice to ministers – warned back in 2022 that Scotland had lost its lead over the rest of the UK in tackling the issue.
Last year ministers failed to publish a plan it promised – required under the act – detailing how they were going to meet the targets.
Urgency is a word in constant use to emphasise the immediacy and scale at which our changing climate demands action. After more than ten years at the helm of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), I recognise the opportunities that this urgent action offers — economic, social, and environmental — as well as the disastrous consequences of failing to respond quickly enough.
Yet, the meaning of ‘urgency’ seems lost on those who need to grasp it most – our political leaders. They alone have the power to set in motion the rapid transformation that is necessary to deliver on our climate goals. That was recognised by the UK when they hosted the UN climate talks in Glasgow in 2021. We led the world in setting the tough targets we need to avert disaster and to turn this immense problem into a real opportunity to build a better world. Alok Sharma and his team rose to the occasion and, with all its deficiencies, my view is that COP26 set us on the path to Net Zero in 2050.
Yet, necessary as they are, targets are only the beginning of the process and the CCC has consistently emphasised the necessity of a detailed programme if those targets are to be achieved. It was the lack of that which led the High Court to insist that this Government produce a clear delivery programme by the end of March 2023. In response, the Government published a many-paged document which, it claimed, met the Court’s requirement. In fact, upon detailed expert analysis, it became clear that this document gave even less assurance of meeting our legally binding targets than had been previously thought. It was because of this that I took the decision to support a legal challenge in the High Court by Friends of the Earth. Their challenge over the inadequacy of the government’s climate strategy was heard last month alongside two separate, but related, cases brought by Good Law Project and ClientEarth.
I was still in post at the CCC at the time the Government produced its updated climate strategy. In the many years I led the organisation, the CCC would get advanced information about any plans published under the 2008 Climate Change Act. Yet ahead of the publication of the UK’s new climate strategy in March 2023, this failed to happen. The departure from established ways of working has led me to believe the Government did not want its official advisers to examine the draft plan before it was published.
A car gets submerged in flood waters in a pub car park in Sonning on Thames, Berkshire, UK. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/REX/Shutterstock
Government has no credible plan for effects of extreme weather, says Committee on Climate Change
The UK’s plans for adapting to the effects of the climate crisis “fall far short” of what is required, the government’s statutory adviser has said.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has examined the national adaptation programme published by ministers last July, intended to set out how people, buildings and vital national infrastructure such as water, transport, energy and telecommunications networks could be protected from the increasing severity of storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts that are afflicting the UK as a result of global heating.
In a damning verdict delivered on Wednesday, the committee found that the government had no credible plan for making the UK resilient to the increasing effects of extreme weather.
Julia King, chair of the adaptation subcommittee of the CCC, said: “The evidence of the damage from climate change has never been clearer, but the UK’s current approach to adaptation is not working.”
Lord Deben, the Climate Change Committee’s first chair, was environment secretary under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Photograph: Dorset Media Service/Alamy
Refusal by Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish leaders to approve candidates means whole recruitment process may have to be rerun
Ministers in Westminster have been accused of trying to blunt the teeth of the UK’s net zero watchdog by appointing a Tory loyalist to the post of chair of the Climate Change Committee (CCC).
The leaders of the devolved governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have refused to approve any of the six shortlisted candidates, saying they are all too close to the Conservatives and lack diversity.
The row has significantly delayed the UK government’s attempts to appoint a successor to John Gummer (Lord Deben), the committee’s first chair and a former Tory minister, who repeatedly challenged ministers for being insufficiently radical in their policies on combating global heating.
Since the CCC has a statutory duty to oversee climate policies for the UK government and all three devolved administrations, the shortlist requires consent from all four nations.
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In a row that mirrors allegations about cronyism over appointments to chair the BBC and Ofcom, he said the UK government knew that Deben’s successor would be in post for 10 years.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Liz Truss at the launch of ‘Popular Conservatism’. Credit: PA Images / Alamy
The launch of Popular Conservatism saw attacks on “net zero zealots” and the Climate Change Committee.
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.
A branded leaflet handed out at the event, under the heading “what we stand for”, stated: “End net zero zealotry and promote energy pragmatism to provide both security of supply and low prices”.
The leaflet also named the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisory body on hitting its climate targets, as one of the institutions which “stand in the way of meaningful reform”.
Littlewood’s speech criticised the UK’s net zero target, complaining about “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, repeatedly attacked net zero in his speech, which he claimed “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from when it is brought up by “the odd weirdo”.
Anderson said: “if we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”, pointing to the higher emissions produced by other countries.
Anderson argued that net zero would cost voters money, calling for an “opt-in, opt-out” approach to what he called “green levies” on energy bills, adding: “Not one politician can put their hand on their hearts and tell you how much it’s [net zero] going to cost.”
The CCC has estimated the cost of net zero at less than one percent of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Liz Truss used her speech to say: “If we look at the net zero zealots that Lee has just been talking about, the need for cheaper energy is being drowned out by some very active campaigners.” She claimed voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”.
The International Monetary Fund found in September 2022 that the energy crisis was hitting UK households harder than any country in western Europe, due to the UK’s reliance on gas for heating homes.
Tufton Street Links
Politicians fronting the PopCon group have a history of working with anti-green think tanks and supporting more fossil fuel extraction.
Truss (who went to the University of Oxford with Littlewood) has extensive ties to the IEA, which is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian pressure groups and think tanks that oppose state-led climate action.
In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA. Once in 10 Downing Street, Truss hired Porter as her senior special advisor, and has since appointed her to the House of Lords. A number of former Tufton Street figures were appointed to government advisory roles during Truss’s short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
The IEA publicly supported Truss’s ‘mini-budget’, which caused economic chaos by promising large tax cuts without explaining how they would be funded. While in office, Truss lifted the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, a policy advocated by the IEA. (The policy was ditched by her successor Rishi Sunak.)
The IEA has consistently opposed UK government climate policies, preferring “market solutions”. In October 2022, IEA executive Andy Mayer said the government should “get rid of” its net zero target, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
During her 2022 leadership campaign, Truss received £5,000 from Lord Vinson, one of the few known funders of the Tufton Street-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Rees-Mogg also has a long record of opposing climate policies. Earlier this month he said: “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
The UK government’s legally-binding target to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is part of international efforts to keep global warming below 1.5C.
As Business and Energy Secretary in 2022, Rees-Mogg supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking, and said “we have to stop demonising oil and gas” in a meeting with the UAE’s state investment company.
He also receives around £29,000 per month to host a show on right-wing broadcaster GB News. A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked net zero policies. The channel‘s co-owner, Paul Marshall, has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels via his investment fund Marshall Wace.
Science Denial
Several figures with ties to climate science denial turned out for the PopCon launch. They included Lord Frost, a trustee of the GWPF who last year said global warming could be “beneficial”, along with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch.
The IEA and GWPF have both received funding from Neil Record, a Conservative donor who was IEA chairman until July 2023 and remains chair of Net Zero Watch. Record has donated thousands to Tory MP Steve Baker, an IEA ally and former GWPF trustee who has claimed much climate science is “contestable” and “propagandised”.
The PopCon launch was also attended by GB News host Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”. Last year the party received £135,000 from donors who spread climate denial or had fossil fuel interests. Reform leader Richard Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison; it’s plant food”.
Farage posed for a photo at the PopCon event with Lois Perry, director of climate denial group CAR26, who is running for leader of UKIP and last month said she does not believe in human-caused climate change.
Addressing the audience Truss made a series of bizarre attacks on the Left, taking aim at “wokeism” and said the Tories had failed to “take on the left-wing extremists”.
“Wokeism seems to be on the curriculum,” said Truss. “There is confusion about basic biological facts, like what is a woman.
“Look at the net zero zealots, if you listen to the Today programme, I don’t recommend it, you’ll hear demands for more public spending.”
Truss went on to warn that the left were “on the march and actively organising”.
“These people have repurposed themselves, they don’t believe they are socialist or communists anymore. They say they’re environmentalists, they say they’re in favour of helping people across all communities, they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
“So they no longer admit that they are collectivists but that is what their ideology is about.”
She went on to claim that anti-capitalists were being “pandered to” by the Government and that Conservative values were being eroded and said it was “only through Conservative values that we can give the British people what they want”, however fell short on saying what this was exactly.
Former prime minister Liz Truss during the launch of the Popular Conservatism movement at the Emmanuel Centre in central London, in a bid to rally right-wing Tory MPs ahead of a general election this year, February 6, 2024
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Running through a list of enemies almost longer than her catastrophic time in Downing Street, Ms Truss nevertheless claimed that Britain was “full of secret Conservatives — people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it,” while the Tory party had been appeasing “left-wing extremists.”
Painting a picture of a world on the edge of socialism, the former prime minister, best known for crashing the economy in a matter of days, asserted that “the left have been on the march.”
“They have been on the march in our institutions, they have been on the march in our corporate world, they are on the march globally,” she claimed.
Taking on this menace and “changing the system itself” will require “resilience and bravery,” Ms Truss added.
Unfortunately, rather than resilience and bravery, she had to hand only Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, former frontbenchers taking a break from their present gigs on GB News.
