Pledging to raise the bar in the fight against climate change is a bold
move by the SNP, in the wake of four consecutive years of missing the
existing target.
The Scottish Government was praised internationally when it announced its
target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 42 per cent by 2020, but
interim targets have not been met. Last year’s missed target brought a
bullish official response: we’re still on course for 2020. The evidence was
not compelling.
Against that record, upping the stakes to cut carbon emissions by more than
50 per cent in the same timescale is ambitious.
Much of the progress on this front has been achieved through renewable
energy in the shape of wind turbines. Recent figures have been encouraging,
and in January this year, wind power provided almost half of Scotland’s
entire energy needs. There were 22 days when the amount of electricity
generated from wind was sufficient to power every home in the country.
Those statistics look impressive, but harnessing wind power remains a
controversial strategy. Two clear problems have yet to be resolved: what to
do when the wind doesn’t blow, and how to store wind power adequately to
help plug such gaps.
Wind power alone will not solve the world’s climate change problem, but it
can contribute significantly. If energy can be re-used, that clearly makes
sense as a policy to pursue.
In the meantime, the trick is how to achieve base load requirement, and
keep the lights on. Coal power ended with the closure of Longannet this
year, and the SNP does not favour nuclear power. So when the wind doesn’t
blow, where does our energy come from? We can buy it from abroad, but what
if that energy is non-renewable, or nuclear? In the bigger picture, that is
no progress at all.
The new climate change target is admirable but it may turn out to be a rod
for the Scottish Government’s own back. The SNP, if re-elected, could find
that rejecting nuclear power at this stage makes achieving its main
ambition an impossible target.
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