As climate alarmism fades, SNP must come clean about its stance on oil and gas
Just as Scotland stopped burning witches, it’s time to end the persecution of oil and gas workers
It may be just because we have been celebrating Halloween, but I have been reading a fascinating new book by the Glasgow writer and academic Steven Veerapen, called Witches – A King’s Obsession, which details how King James VI and I, the Scot who became first monarch of Great Britain, was a self-styled expert in witchcraft, sparking a century-long orgy of witch-hunting.
Far from James’s reputation as a cultured, well-educated Renaissance ruler being tarnished by this obsession, to the people of the time dealing with witches was a modern, scientific innovation, necessary to preserve the Godliness of post-Reformation nations. It is a salutary reminder of how easily mass hysteria can take hold in a population.
We are foolish to think that such phenomena only occur in the uncivilised past. We had our own Satanic child abuse scare as recently as in the 1990s, when nine children were forcibly removed from their homes in dawn raids but later sent home after the supposed evidence was dismissed by a judge as “incompetent”.
Greta Thunberg’s diminished credibility
Perhaps not quite in the same category, but undoubtedly in a similar vein, is the climate alarmism we have seen in recent decades. Whether it was claims that the glaciers in the Himalayas would all melt by 2035 or that polar bears were disappearing, there were apocalyptic warnings that the world as we know it was going to end, and very soon, unless we ceased creating all new carbon emissions.
The poster child for these scare stories was the Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, who was feted by world leaders. Thunberg is now a much reduced figure, attaching herself to various leftist causes with diminishing credibility.
This week these same world leaders, with some notable and significant exceptions, are meeting in Brazil at the COP30 summit to discuss next steps. But this is against a backdrop where there has been some radical rethinking of the approach to tackling climate change, and a move away from the climate alarmism we have seen in the recent past.
Perhaps the best example of this new mood of climate realism comes from Bill Gates, the US billionaire and Microsoft founder, who recently criticised the “doomsday” view of climate change, arguing that seeking to limit global temperature rise at all costs is diverting resources from the most effective things that could be done to improve human welfare, including reducing extreme poverty with improvements in agriculture and health.
He is not alone in the view that mitigation and adaptation is the way to address climate change rather than focussing solely on cutting carbon emissions.
Watered down efforts
Even the Scottish Government seems to be heading in the same direction. There is no longer a Cabinet Secretary who has the term “Net Zero” in their title – instead we have in Gillian Martin MSP the Cabinet Secretary for “Climate Action and Energy”.
This shift was reinforced by last week’s update to Scotland’s Climate Change Plan. Whilst the long-term commitment to achieving net zero by 2045, five years before the rest of the UK, remains in place, practical measures to achieve that continue to be watered down.
The Heat in Buildings Bill which required all homeowners to switch to greener heating systems, a relic of the period when the Scottish Greens had influence over the SNP under the Bute House Agreement, was scrapped earlier this year. It has been replaced with an aspiration.
This is only common sense. Back in 2021, the estimated cost of removing a million gas boilers and replacing them with heat pumps or electrical systems was put at £33 billion. We can probably double that figure to get a realistic estimate in today’s prices.
No one has any idea how that eye-watering cost could be met. Even for small tenement flats, the cost of decarbonising heating would be in the tens of thousands, and neither homeowners themselves, nor government in these straitened times, could come up with those resources for no demonstrable benefit. Moreover, there simply do not exist sufficient trained professionals to carry out the necessary transition works, even if the funds were to allow.
SNP in state of confusion
So the SNP now inhabit this limbo situation, in which their rhetoric is still committed to tackling climate change, but when it comes to policy they’re making a succession of U-turns and previous commitments are being replaced with “targets”. In the meantime, we have yet more confusion as to where exactly the SNP stand in relation to the future development of North Sea oil and gas.
The former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has come out firmly against granting licences for new North Sea oil extraction, whilst the party’s Westminster leader, Steven Flynn, takes the opposite approach, writing to Labour’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband urging a change in Labour’s policy preventing new fields being opened up.
John Swinney seems to sit somewhere between these two, neither prepared wholeheartedly to commit to future extractions from the North Sea, nor actively opposing them. What the First Minister has been prepared to do is call for an end to the energy profits levy, although in the past the SNP were amongst its most enthusiastic supporters.
It would be of great help to the industry were the Scottish Government now to come clean on exactly what stance they take towards the North Sea oil and gas sector. Conservatives are very clear where we stand – as a country we will depend on oil and gas for many decades to come, and it makes much more sense, both in terms of the environment and also for the economic benefit, for us to produce that ourselves rather than import it.
The new mood of climate realism can only be to the benefit of our oil and gas workers and Scottish industry. Just as we stopped burning witches, we should now stop vilifying such a vital part of our economy.
Murdo Fraser is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Mid-Scotland and Fife
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.