A faster start for Scotland's net zero?
A week on from the launch of the IPCC report on climate change and attention may be elsewhere already – but the threat of climate catastrophe has not gone away. Common Weal has produced so much work on getting not just to net zero but beyond to net negative that it can be hard to know where to begin. Even the 21 for 21 paper we published to coincide with the IPCC report might look daunting to some.
Where to start, then? We can wish Scotland was 'good to go' with transforming Scotland the day after tomorrow but the reality is that there is an enormous amount of work ahead even before we can get properly started. But doing things needed to accelerate that move is very possible and it would signal our serious intent. So, drawing from all our work, what might be some good starting moves if Scotland wants to get serious? Here are six things we could do right now which would fast-forward us towards a post-carbon future.
Start a Scottish Energy Development Agency
Setting up agencies can sound like 'just extra bureaucracy', but tackling climate change will involve a lot of bureaucracy because it needs a lot of planning. Much of the work is essentially a big engineering project and that needs proper development, preparation and management and if it is not done in a sensible, efficient way it will be chaotic, prone to failure and cost much more than it should. Planning for Scotland's energy generation needs is comparatively straightforward because of our renewable energy resources, but if we want to have a proper energy storage system and even more significantly if we want to begin to make serious progress on taking the pollution out of heating, we need a fully-fledged nationwide plan. That's what a Scottish Energy Development Agency is for and why creating one should be such a priority.
Set up a National Housing Company
Scotland has more than 2.3 million households and a dispiritingly small proportion of them are achieving the kind of energy efficiency that a net-zero Scotland needs them to achieve. There is no shortcut to this – they all need to be brought up to the right thermal performance and it is a labour-intensive job. So have a think about it; is the best way to get this done to get fitters to turn up to a house, fit it properly, get it inspected properly and then move to another house on another street, only to come back and do a second house on the first street a year later? That is clearly a horrendously inefficient way to get the work done; we need to go town-by-town, street-by-street and do the work in the most efficient way possible with specialist teams trained to bring entire neighbourhoods up to standard. That's what a National Housing Company is for and spraying around grants and putting the onus on the householder is no substitute.
Get serious about regulation
At the same time that we need to be setting up a (not inexpensive) process for properly insulating existing houses, housebuilders are still building new houses that will subsequently need to be retrofitted because they're just not achieving the right thermal performance standard. The madness of this should be clear to see for all, and it is only one example of many different kinds of public regulation where what we are demanding businesses do now isn't good enough to achieve what we need tomorrow. Setting targets is easy – if the Scottish Government is serious about climate change, it should act quickly to make sure that we 'do no more harm', by regulating now to prevent us having to go back in years to come and fix the things we are doing now.
Create an industrial strategy
What will we insulate the houses with? How will insulate them? What technologies will be used to change our heating and who will make them? If fighting climate change is a big engineering project, we will need lots of materials, lots of technologies and lots of people with the right skills. The difference between a net zero strategy and a Green New Deal is that a Green New Deal uses the work necessary for net zero and designs it to achieve the right kind of social outcomes, creating good jobs and strengthened communities. These outcomes may not be in the interests of big business, and the private sector may be unlikely to invest to overcome some of the barriers (like shortage of tradespeople). What turns an ambition for net zero into a social transformation is an industrial strategy, a plan to guide economic development in a way that creates all the right outcomes and not just some of them.
Set up a National Land Agency
So much of Scotland's climate change agenda is linked to land – for capturing carbon, for installing renewable energy infrastructure, for creating sustainable construction materials for retrofitting housing, for growing food in a way that doesn't pollute. Depressingly, last year Scotland's land actually became a net producer of greenhouse gasses rather than a 'sink' which is capturing them. So if we're serious about climate change, we need to get serious about land: how it is used, how it is managed and how we plan our future on it. This should be the task of a National Land Agency.
Now tell people about all of this
Setting up agencies and fixing regulation is exactly how we do the planning and preparation for the transition we need to make and we can't make that transition without it. Rushing to do 'something (anything!)' rather than planning to do everything properly is why we've made so little real progress on the difficult issues so far. But setting up agencies is not in and off itself exactly inspiring – so we also need to inspire. Because this process of transition has so many great benefits. It creates jobs – a lot of jobs. It is a wonderful way to build a new industry base. It will mean every person in Scotland lives in a warm house that is inexpensive to heat. It means we're future-proofed with energy resilience. It means a better, revitalised landscape to live in. It means so, so much more benefit to people than just doing more of the same. The Scottish Government should start a public information campaign on how a just transition can change all our lives for the better, create enthusiastic public support for it and so get public consent to push forward to a better future for all of us.