Nobody can doubt that the intentions of successive administrations to make Scotland a world leader in carbon reduction have been sincere. The problem is that in areas from poverty reduction to human rights, the assumption in Holyrood has often been that when laws are passed and press releases issued material results will follow. The abandonment of the 75 per cent emissions target a few weeks ago and the subsequent collapse of the SNP-Green coalition however shows aspirations and outcomes are different things.

Since 1999 Holyrood governments have shown a remarkable faith in the law and policy choices rather than economics as the primary tool of social change – and the Scottish Climate Change act has been no exception. When it was passed in 2009 it was hailed as a landmark not just for the climate, but for Scotland’s aspirations on the world stage. It was a story Scotland’s own politicians and the world at large eagerly lapped up as the country cast itself as a progressive beacon.

Climate change, however, is not a policy problem that can just be legislated for and farmed out to civil society and private enterprise. One of the surprising things about Scotland is that it has made huge progress in an area it does not directly control (energy generation), but failed to make landmark inroads into emissions in areas it could radically act on such as transport and urban planning. Indeed, as many have argued, moving to a carbon neutral society means wholesale reform of the state and its levers, or a new political economy of the state and sub-state. Climate change is multi-scalar, transcends the usual reference points of contemporary politics, and cannot be solved using targeted intervention within the existing planning, economic and energy regimes. It is also global in scope – Scotland is not in control of its own destiny here because climate policy is about managing interdependent global risks. Scotland’s biggest contributions were always going to come in terms not of overall emissions reductions, but in showing what might be possible within a wealthy state in the global north.

Like many other countries committed to reducing carbon emissions, Scotland went for low hanging fruit by focusing on generation over energy use, a process already underway as Scottish coal entered its final days in the 2000s and the wind industry in particular began to accelerate. With nuclear and an enviable amount of renewable potential as well as a pre-existing hydro system Scotland was already in a favourable position, but that position has also meant that initially it did not have to think too introspectively about deeper changes to its infrastructure. Nor was there much consideration of what a new economy built around zero-carbon technologies might look like and how that might be different to the status quo.

Economists talk of productive and unproductive labour, and we can see energy in the same way – simply generating renewable energy does not in itself provide utility beyond making a tiny dent in global carbon emissions. Talk of establishing a public renewables company as part of the Green-SNP alliance came to nothing, whilst the development of ScotWind has been a cause of some controversy after the Government were accused of undervaluing the licences and used revenues to plug fiscal gaps.

The proof of any political project is how it plays out on the ground down the line, and this is where some of the important work being done by energy anthropology comes in. For the past two years I have been travelling around Scotland writing an ethnography of energy and climate change, as well as cooperating with my Glasgow colleague Dr Ewan Gibbs to look critically at the story of Scotland’s energy transition. Beyond all the policy plans and briefings there is a singular truth that emerges from moving around the country – Scotland still lacks a socially transformative project for decarbonisation. There are plenty of wind turbines and grid feeder stations, and the ports of the east coast are full of renewables work, but there is still threadbare public transport infrastructure, some of the worst housing stock in Europe, and a broad hinterland of car-dependent suburbs.

So abandoning carbon targets is perhaps not merely a failure of leadership on the part of the Scottish Government, but a recognition of the fact a decarbonised developed society cannot be brought about without fairly radical reimaging of day-to-day life. The story of decarbonisation in Scotland is not merely one of missed emissions targets, but of the spectre of large-scale societal transformation that remains chimeric.

This blog was published on the Centre for Public Policy news webpage.

First published: 19 May 2024

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