Net zero target blowing in the wind
Six years ago, the SNP set a target of 2045 to reduce carbon emissions to net zero, accompanied with rhetoric of achieving a “just transition” to renewable energy.
It was an unachievable goal, set only to undercut the UK target of 2050 so the Nationalists could talk up their claims to be more ambitious and more concerned about the planet than the evil Conservative government.
They bowed to the inevitable only last year when Energy Secretary Mairi McAllan admitted the interim target of a 75 per cent reduction by 2030 would be missed. But she stuck with 2024, so the plan now appears to be to find someone who can do the actual work, when it might have been presumed that the thousands of civil servants her department employs would already have been hard at work.
Yet the Scottish Government has just started to advertise for a £140,000-a-year “Director-General Net Zero” who will be expected to “forge and deliver a coherent, joined-up strategy and subsequent outcomes which bring a just transition of the economy whilst delivering transformational change across the whole of government.”
That sounds like a very big job, but isn’t that what they’ve supposed to have been doing for the last six years? Transformational change across the whole government? Phew! Has anyone told the rest of the government? Transforming the economy for £140,000 a year sounds like a bargain, except the SNP has been blowing billions for years and the only thing that’s been transformed is thousands of lives for the worse.
Sue Webber is a Scottish Conservative MSP for Lothian