Five reasons why the Scottish Greens are bad for the environment
Given I think climate change is the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, you might expect me to be a Just Stop Oil activist who, when not gluing various body parts to important infrastructure, is out campaigning for the Scottish Greens.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In the days of Robin Harper, I was sympathetic towards the Greens, who seemed like the sensible cousins of their more radical relatives down south. However, as Harper has noticed, they have changed significantly in recent years.
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Hide AdTheir drift to the hard-left has created problems for the fight against global warming. Faced with the extraordinary challenge of transforming our economy from one largely based on fossil fuels to one run on renewable energy, humanity needs to pull together as one.
In this tug of war with a force of enormous and growing size, if we drop the rope and start arguing among ourselves about the best way to pull, we are going to lose. This also applies on a global scale, but good luck to anyone trying to tell Vladimir Putin that he needs to stop killing people in Ukraine because of climate change.
Reinventing the wheel
Returning to the Scottish Greens, the biggest problem is their opposition to economic growth. Responding to the recent King’s Speech, party co-leader Lorna Slater said: “... Keir Starmer is clearly planning to continue with Tory economic and social policy which prioritises wealth and growth over the well-being of people and planet.”
The argument is that economic growth on a planet with finite resources is unsustainable. Therefore, we need to find a new way of running our affairs that no longer relies on expansion. Essentially, in order to tackle climate change, it is necessary to reinvent the wheels on which our economy runs.
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Hide AdHowever, look around the world, and you’ll find the wealthy countries are capitalist ones, while alternative models have failed. Abandoning a tried-and-tested system for something experimental takes the risks posed by climate change and multiplies them.
If the world is to invest in the green technologies of the future, it needs investors attracted by the chance of making money. Governments can create the right conditions and provide incentives in the form of helpful regulations, tax breaks and grants, but it is only by harnessing the power and size of the market that we will succeed.
Nuclear a useful source of energy
A second big problem with the Scottish Greens is their opposition to nuclear power, despite its very low carbon emissions. Once upon a time, I was against nuclear. I came of age about the time the Chernobyl nuclear power station went bang, so I think this was a fairly rational response. If there was a source of energy that didn’t come with the risk of irradiating a large swathe of the countryside, I thought we should use that instead.
However, the threat posed by fossil fuels now outweighs that reasonably small risk, so I think we should use nuclear in preference to coal, oil and gas. So does the International Energy Agency. I suspect the cost of nuclear will eventually mean we no longer want to use it, particularly as the intermittency of renewables becomes less of a problem with greater electricity storage and more efficient cabling. But it is certainly a useful stopgap.
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Hide AdThe Greens refuse to compromise on this point, while demanding others make compromises over their use of fossil fuels. For people who don’t think climate change is a pressing problem, telling them they need to make even bigger changes to their lives because nuclear must go is asking for trouble. It makes the risk of a public backlash even greater.
Competence matters
The third major issue with the Greens can be seen in just such a backlash by angry voters who forced the Scottish Government to drop a flagship environmental policy: the creation of highly protected marine areas (HPMAs). This “key part” of the now-defunct Bute House Agreement between the Scottish Greens and the SNP would have seen 10 per cent of Scottish waters declared off-limits to all forms of fishing.
By over-reaching, the whole scheme had to be shelved. The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation led the outcry, but had not been completely against the idea, instead arguing there should be a pilot scheme so that HMPAs’ effects could be assessed. When you are trying to make the world anew, you need competent ministers who can make things happen. Incompetent ones who fail to grasp political realities tend to achieve little.
Culture warriors
The fourth problem is the Scottish Greens’ embrace of culture wars. Whatever our views on gender, we should all, I suggest, recognise that the rights of transgender people are as important as the rights of anyone else. They are, first and foremost, human beings. However, this is a relatively new issue, and there have been a number of high-profile cases where competing rights have clashed.
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Hide AdThe Greens could have chosen to take a subtle, thoughtful approach to this sensitive issue. Instead, they have dismissed and, at times, demonised those daring to raise concerns, creating a pressure on people to pick one side or the other. The Greens’ ‘culture war’ approach to climate change risks doing the same, leading to division when we need unity.
A gift to deniers
All this leads up to the fifth problem with the Scottish Greens: they are an increasingly bountiful gift to climate deniers and those who pay lip-service to the science but resist all efforts to respond to the crisis it describes.
If it is possible to characterise those concerned about climate change as incompetent, unreasonable, hard-left zealots, it is much easier to dismiss them. The reality, of course, is very different.
The people most concerned about climate change include physicists with a working knowledge of quantum mechanics or, in other words, some of the smartest people on the planet. And we’d be just as foolish as the Scottish Greens to ignore them.
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