Scotland on course to miss ‘ambitious’ emissions goals without policy shakeup, Climate Change Committee says

‘Too much carrot and not enough stick’ means Scotland is failing to rein in greenhouse gases, writes Harry Cockburn

A Tesla electric car drives through the snowy streets of Edinburgh. The Scottish government is rolling out more charging points but also encouraging fewer car journeys (Getty)

The Climate Change Committee,  which advises the UK government, has said that Scotland’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are “fantastic” but that the country is unlikely to achieve them.

The Scottish government has set out a plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2045, which includes a 2030 target to reach a 75 per cent reduction from 1990s levels of emissions.

The CCC’s chief executive Chris Stark said this interim target would be “very, very difficult to meet,” without a major policy shakeup over the next decade.

While maintaining that Scotland could still hit its overall 2045 target, he said that policy makers must introduce “tough” new legislation in order to see more rapid change, rather than depending on positive incentives designed to encourage people and businesses to change their behaviour and reduce emissions.

Giving evidence to the Scottish government’s Rural Economy Committee, Mr Stark said “the ambition from the Scottish Government is great” but he warned “there are still big gaps in how it would actually be delivered in practice”, The Herald reports.

He said: “The growth over the next 10 years that they are projecting is achievable but is certainly at the upper end of what I think will come through.”

Mr Stark said the current net zero strategy “rests quite largely on electrifying the economy and cleaning up the supply of that electricity over time”.

But he said that “by mid-century across the UK, we’re expecting the demand for electricity will at least double” with growing demand for electricity to heat buildings while electric vehicle infrastructure is also being rolled out, further increasing demand.

Nonetheless, he said rolling out electric car charging points and the aim to reduce distances travelled in cars by 20 per cent over this decade, were “the right kinds of targets to drive progress”.

He said the proposal to reduce car miles by a fifth by 2030 is “the biggest new element of the transport plan”, but suggested that even the CCC's “very ambitious assessment” does not judge that to be achievable.

“That will not happen unless there's a combination of carrots and sticks, and the kind of policies that are being proposed in this pot in this document are mainly carrots,” he said, according to PA.

“The 17 proposed policies that we see at this point we just come up with are almost all carrots, with the exception of that workplace car parking levy and fuel duty considerations from the Chancellor in London.

“That balance out doesn't seem right to me.”

Scotland’s net zero target is set five years earlier than that of the UK as a whole, which has legally-binding targets to reach net zero by 2050, and is also not on track to meet this.

In its latest report for the government, released in December, the CCC has already recommended that the UK should take rapid action across “all sectors of the economy” to have a hope of reaching net zero by 2050.

And this target will require major changes to British life, Mr Stark told The Independent earlier this month. For example, the CCC says meat and dairy consumption will need to fall by 35 per cent by 2050 in its recommended pathway.

“We’re going to have to see a hell of a lot of new policy,” Mr Stark said.

The UK has until June to respond to the recommendations set out by the CCC in its latest report.

It is widely expected the government will announce new green policies in the coming months in a bid to show leadership before it hosts the international climate summit in Glasgow in November.

Additional reporting by PA.