Lib Dems will step up to climate challenge

Scottish Green party co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater listen as Net-Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan ditches the Scottish Government's 2030 emissions reduction target (Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA)

The following year they sent a bumper delegation to COP27 in Sharm El Sheik at a cost of £150,000. Neither the then First Minister nor her ministers had any kind of formal role at the conference, but they got some sun soaked selfies with big hitters on the international stage so perhaps they saw that as justification of a sort.

How shallow that all feels now. Last week the SNP/Green administration announced that it was ditching our national commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 and every annual target on the way to that. That is a monstrous, generational betrayal and leaves any credibility they claimed on the climate emergency in tatters. Why are they doing this? Well it’s hard not to think it has something to do with dodging bad press having missed the yearly targets eight times already.

The Net Zero Secretary once bragged that global leaders were ringing her up to ask advice on how to combat the climate emergency. She never actually provided any evidence this was true, but well, her phone is certainly silent now.

What’s even more astonishing is that at the heart of the government that presided over this u-turn lies the Scottish Green Party. Brought into a power sharing deal with the SNP on the day I became leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats nearly three years ago, pundits were told this was to emulate a similar deal done between Jacinda Ardern’s Labour party and the Green party of New Zealand. On closer inspection this was a very different arrangement.

The Kiwi deal had been signed amidst the ash of Australian bushfires that had raged for months. It had the climate unashamedly at its heart. Take a closer look at the Bute House Agreement and you will see that the central pillar of this coalition is not our warming planet, it’s their shared ambition to break up the United Kingdom.

Remember when Nicola Sturgeon suggested the next general election would be fought by the SNP on a single manifesto commitment, to remove Scotland from the UK? The Scottish Greens signed up to that. They were prepared to relegate every single environmental policy and make the election entirely about separatism. They must be the only Green party in the global environmental movement to so readily exchange environmentalism for nationalism.

The thing is, the Greens have not just been bystanders in this failure on CO2 reduction, they’ve been active participants. They have taken decisions in government that made the 2030 target almost unattainable. They constantly backed uninspiring SNP budgets during the last Parliament. In office, they’ve cut the insulation budget that would have reduced emissions from homes and alleviated fuel poverty; they’ve reduced the number of routes and journeys available on Scotland’s trains and buses; they’ve slow walked the rollout of clean energy in homes and botched a recycling scheme that could have vastly reduced packaging waste.

Targets are hard, but that’s why we set them – they’re designed to stretch us. Simply deleting them won’t hide the incompetence of the Green Party and the public won’t forget this betrayal. Our planet is on fire. We need political leaders to recognise that and act accordingly. If the Green Party will not step up to the challenge of the climate emergency, the Scottish Liberal Democrats will.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats

Lib Dems will step up to climate challenge - Alex Cole-Hamilton