Scotland's choice may be act now - or freeze

Robin McAlpine

This is another work anniversary for me – five years ago this weekend we launched the Common Home Plan, the world's first comprehensive, costed Green New Deal, a worked-through plan to take Scotland carbon-negative and address other major issues like soil degradation and plastic pollution.

I'm not naïve; I didn't imagine that the Scottish Government would be on the phone by Monday and the whole thing being implemented by the next weekend. But I must admit that I did think that given the focus there was then on climate change, our intervention might shape the debate such that we began to get prepared.

Which is to say I thought that this year might – just might – have been when we had worked through the mountain of preparatory work and would start to make some sort of systematic headway into the challenge we face.

It is therefore sobering that in the week that marks that anniversary, Scotland all-but formally gave up on serious decarbonisation targets. Barely a jot nor tickle of the preparatory work has actually been done. Yes we had a pandemic in between times, but Scotland is no longer serious about the climate crisis and that's the reality.

Actually, it's worse than that. The balance has tipped horribly in the other direction. In 2019 it seemed vaguely unlikely that the 'oil patriots' would carve out major space in the independence movement again, that Unite would be lobbying against a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations, that the media would be so dominated by oil industry talking points.

The debate on climate change has been pretty successfully turned into a culture war with the arguments for a Green New Deal somehow subsumed under a fight about identity politics. No-one has any serious plans for decarbonisation. And in opposition to this, the youth-driven climate movement has largely disappeared from view.

Nothing demonstrates better the problem than the Starmer government which clearly believes that climate change is a 'musli-eating liberal thing' and mustn't receive too much attention, unless it is the mad, mad decision to plough all our climate change money into a technology (Carbon Capture and Storage), the primary purpose of which is to create a fig leaf for liberals who don't want to deny climate change but certainly don't want to interfere with the corporate interests of oil and gas.

Of course, most dispiriting of all is the drift to the 'drill baby drill' oil-loving hard right in Europe and of course, with Trump, particularly America. The only real consolation in this is that the change is largely in perceptions – it's not like Europe or the US was meddling in the interests of oil and gas anyway and now it is just less hypocritical.

I'd love now to list the positives but they mostly fall into the category of 'happening by chance, as a result of something we did a while ago or are so incremental it's hard to get excited'. There are moments when it feels like this is all unwinnable – it is just a couple of radicals like me, a few scientists and a whole load of ordinary people hoping for progress against the might of the lobbyists of the oil and gas industry and the equity investment industry.

The consequences are increasingly worrying. Sometimes I spin back to narrow self preservation in my outlook and remind myself that Scotland is supremely well positioned to survive the worst of the impacts of climate change and so conclude that we should just prepare for the worst here.

It's just that I usually stick a caveat on that statement – so long as the Gulf Stream holds up. Actually, the Gulf Stream is part of a system more accurately called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) which regulates the planet's temperature by transferring heat from the equator upwards to the northern hemisphere. Basically it makes northern Europe habitable.

And now there is a chance that Amoc could collapse as soon as next year. The chances of it happening before the end of this century are substantial. There are already clear signs that the Gulf Stream is weakening. 

The consequences if it does are likely to be substantial. Scotland's winters could become ten degrees colder overnight, dropping us to Siberian and Alaskan temperatures in the winter months. In the summer we'd be likely to see a sharp drop in temperatures too, perhaps shaving five degrees off temperatures. Life in Scotland will become a hard slog at that point. It could actually reduce average continental temperatures across Europe by 10 to 15 degrees, though no-one knows for sure.

I'm sorry to be dumping all of this on you. I am particularly sorry to be doing it this week given that we all have more than enough reason to feel doom and gloom. But I do it for a reason. I am trying to present to you the starkness of the situation specifically so you are under no illusions about how worried you should be.

Right now it would take a substantial amount of work just to get back to where we were in 2019, where there was widespread social organising and a stronger political consensus on taking action. And we're going to have to put that work in just to get into a position to put on the pressure to get politicians to start the work.

The reason for the starkness of my assessment is really simple; if pressure isn't brought to bear on politicians, they will not offer leadership. At a UK level Ed Milliband is a well-meaning and serious man caught in an administration which is neither well-meaning or serious on the environment. 

At a Scotland level, no-one cares. The SNP has no climate change champion, Scottish Labour are in a 'whatever he said' mode, deferential to London, and the Greens seem constantly to find priorities to talk about which are nothing to do with the environment and, worse, they don't have coherent plans anyway other than banning things and hard-selling heat pumps.

Part of the problem with the climate change movement is that it veers from being too polite to too disruptive without hitting a sweet spot of 'just serious enough'. And serious people don't demand change, they create a plan for the change they want to see. That is not happening.

And that's why, five years on, the Common Home Plan is as urgent and relevant as ever. Nothing fundamental has changed over the last five years other than a few technological advancements. If you are serious about decarbonisation (and wider environmental protections in Scotland), it remains by far the best and most viable plan to do it.

That is a solid basis for people who want to create real, actionable demands. It's not about slavishly following every recommendation we make, it is about understanding the systematic way we went through the work, assessed options and made coherent recommendations. It's not about pulling some loose change from your pocket and asking 'what can I get for this?', its about working out what you actually need to do and coming up for a plan to do it.

I expect all the usual comments from the usual suspects – I should give up because the public is conservative and doesn't want action on climate change and really like their cheap plastic and bountiful petrochemicals. People like me should go and form a commune and knit our own existence somewhere out the way where we can stop irritating the good, solid, ordinary people of Scotland. Who needs pollinators when you've got the Pound Shop?

And you know what, sometimes I feel like it. Sometimes I think to myself that I could quit all this, go find a well-paid job or start some small business that would keep me away from having to read all that upsetting, sandal-wearing scientific climate evidence. Some days I wake up and think 'I've got 30 years left, why am I wasting it making myself depressed trying to change a political culture that seems determined not to change?'.

But there are two things which stop me, which mean I am condemned to keep fighting. I live in the countryside. The older I get the more I become aware of how much the natural environment is part of my own personal mental wellbeing. I am surrounded by life and it makes me feel alive. I talk to the sheep in the field when I go out for a walk, I watch kindly a fly crawling over the back of my hand and I feel better for it.

And this year, for the first time in my life, I didn't see a single butterfly in our garden. Even our bountiful buddleia (known as 'the butterfly bush' and usually teaming with butterflies in the late summer) was barren.

Plus there is always that cliché – I really do love my children to an inordinate amount. I know this is something people say so much it looses its meaning, but my 15-year-old daughter and my 11-year-old son really do mean the world to me and I really can't think about the future without thinking about them. Leon will probably make a good hunter-forager when the time comes, but it'll be grim for poor Valentina.

If I try to disengage mentally, I can't sustain it for long because their faces keep cropping up in my mind. I feel a responsibility to at least try and not condemn them to a life of scratching out an existence in the Siberian winter permafrost of deepest South Lanarkshire and the barren summers of storms and crop failures. And then I worry that this sounds alarmist and I should shut up and just pretend that air source heat pumps might be enough (though they definitely won't).

But if there is something I feel acutely this week it's that my assumption that in my life I would see real progress towards a better world and that all the bad stuff was just a setback on the path might be wrong. This week it feels like the bad stuff may actually be the path. People like me were complacent and didn't think Donald Trump could come back.

Well, people like me also think that the talk of climate change tipping points is mainly a debate line that exists to pressure the government into more funding for heat pumps, not an existential threat. I wonder how many of you genuinely accept what the scientists are saying about the Gulf Stream, how much you really believe it could fail in your lifetime, that Scotland could edge towards Siberia temperatures.

I wonder if you understand fully that people like me can write reports, but unless there is some kind of coordinated public pressure it won't make any difference. I hope you realise that you are the source of the public pressure. Which is to say, right now, you're our best hope.

So I offer you this only as a suggestion; step forward and be the pressure for change or invest in thermal underwear and food stores. The past is not over; the future is not safe and our hopes are not secure. There is no sign people with power plan to change that, so I'm afraid that yet again the responsibility falls on us. On you.