Recently the Scottish government published “Scotland’s Climate Change Plan – 2026-2040”. The Ministerial Foreword alone makes one wonder if there’s something in the water at Holyrood.

Context, I would suggest, is important when any country draws up a “Climate Change Plan”. Regrettably, the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) doesn’t include details of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, it does tell us that in 2024 the UK was responsible for 0.73% of the global total. As the UK’s emissions have fallen since then, while the global total has increased, it’s distinctly possible that the UK’s proportion is now below 0.7%. Scotland’s population is around 8% of the UK’s population, so my guess is that Scotland’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions should, all things being equal, be around 0.056% of the ongoing total. For what it’s worth, AI tells me that “Scotland is responsible for a very small fraction, approximately 0.07%, of total global territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.” While I don’t necessarily trust AI, on this occasion, given that the figure seems to be broadly realistic, let’s work with that. Let’s also note that if my maths are correct, and if AI is correct, then Scotland is responsible on a per capita basis for around 25% more greenhouse gas emissions than is the UK as a whole. Yet still the Scottish government persists with a 2045 date for achieving net zero.

Given the above, the opening words to the Ministerial Foreword might strike one as hubristic, to say the least (“Tackling climate change is now more important than ever”), since the implication must be that Scotland can play some sort of role in tackling climate change. The reason why tackling climate change is so important, is then spelled out (the only surprise being the omission of any mention of plagues of locusts):

Here in Scotland, we are already witnessing the devastating consequences of a warming planet, with floods, water shortages, heatwaves and wildfires becoming more common.

Well, it’s true that Scotland does seem to be becoming wetter, as Met Office data indicate. However, while that extra rain might lead to floods (though they may be caused by other factors too), it’s difficult to blame water shortages on more rainfall. The Ministerial Foreword simply makes the claim without any evidence to support it. I believe I successfully debunked it here. It’s also true that temperatures are rising in Scotland, but I very much doubt that many people (if any, outside the climate worrier community) would regard Scottish heatwaves as a problem, let alone a crisis. According to Met Office data the maximum average temperature across Scotland generally in the 30 years from 1991-2020 is 17.29C in July. Even the hot hellscape that is Edinburgh sees a peak average of just 19.29C in July. According to the Met Office, a Scottish heatwave is achieved if the temperature reaches 25C on three successive days, which doesn’t strike me as a very high bar. I love the BBC report (“Temperatures soar as Scottish heatwave begins”) from July this year, which talked of “soaring temperatures” with 27C again expected in the Central Belt and north east Scotland.” Ruefully, however, it had to admit that “Last month Glasgow was just shy of a heatwave with two consecutive days soaring past 25C while the third day lingered at 24.4C – just missing the mark.” And our AI friend tells us that “Scottish mortality rates historically show a peak during the winter months (December to March) and are lowest in the summer.” I think it’s safe to say that heatwaves aren’t really a problem for Scotland. In any event, better some modest warming than the weather of the 1870s and 1880s (which improved dramatically in the 1890s). A study titled “Extreme weather, school logbooks and social vulnerability: The Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” notes:

Dawson has shown that from the 1870s onwards, winters in Scotland ‘were either extremely cold, with snow lying for weeks on the ground, or they were incredibly stormy’, while the summers and autumns tended to be wet. Scotland was hit by a series of dangerous storms – perhaps the most infamous being the 27–28 December 1879 storm that led to the Tay Bridge disaster – while there was extensive sea ice in the North Atlantic. However, the 1890s saw the onset of improved weather with declining rainfall and reduced flooding, a series of warm summers, along with drier and cold winters, which extended into the first decades of the twentieth century.

And if you think that’s bad, you should be grateful it’s not the 1250s and 1260s:

1257 saw ‘the greatest dearth of grain’ throughout the whole of the British Isles with shortages of flour for bread and malt for brewing and severe social dislocation arising from the tensions produced by the famine conditions (Stevenson (ed) 1839: 65l; Luard (ed) 1880: 607, 630; Campbell 2009). For 1260, a thirteenth-century account incorporated into Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon records food shortages and price-inflation stemming from harvest failures; violent storms throughout a dry summer; a wet harvest season (threatening further food-shortages to come); and destructive gales through the late autumn and early winter (Watt et al (ed) 1990: 325). The result in 1261-2 was that ‘all parts of Scotland suffered from a great famine caused by the harvest being ruined’ (Watt et al (ed) 1990: 335). Similar weather continued through 1263, including the gales that battered the Norwegian fleet off Largs (Watt et al (ed) 1990: 341). More came in 1267 when a mild, dry summer raised hopes of an abundant harvest but dashed them first by plant-eating insect infestations and then by violent easterlies in late October that pounded the coast between the Tweed and Tay and caused tidal surges up the river estuaries to flood low-lying agricultural land (Watt et al (ed) 1990: 359, 361). Winter 1267-8 brought severe conditions that continued into a cold, wet and windy spring and summer for 1268, in which it was reported ‘there was a high death-rate amongst animals, that is amongst red deer, fallow deer, forest ponies, but most of all sheep,’ and that ended with a winter so harsh that the ground could not be ploughed between the end of November 1268 and the beginning of February 1269 to prepare for sowing (Watt et al (ed) 1990: 369, 373)

In those days, of course, it was just weather, and nobody thought that reducing Scotland’s minuscule greenhouse gas emissions might change it.

What, then of wild fires? Forestry and Land Scotland recognise the problem, but don’t seem to be anything like so concerned as the Minister:

The vast majority of wildfires in Scotland are caused – usually accidentally – by people who don’t realise just how easy it is for a rogue campfire ember or dropped cigarette to develop into something bigger….

…Fortunately, Scotland’s generally cool and wet climate mean wildfires have been relatively rare in our forests and woodlands, so we’ll never see anything like those experienced in Australia recently. However, at times we do experience prolonged dry conditions and strong winds that allow fires to establish and spread….

Sensible words, with no suggestion of a crisis.

Having dealt with the hype around climate, what else does the Minister say in the Foreword? Well, there’s this:

...the only route to climate stability is reversing biodiversity loss and achieving net zero emissions…

As so often, casually anodyne statements such as this, shibboleths to rally the faithful, are problematic. Firstly, achieving net zero emissions seems to involve industrialising Scotland’s wild places (think wind turbines, solar farms, Battery Energy Storage Systems, pylons, access roads, sub-stations etc.), and this is incompatible with “reversing biodiversity loss”. Secondly, the mere fact of Scotland achieving net zero emissions would make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the climate unless the rest of the world steps up to that plate. And, as is self-evident, not least from the latest COP fiasco in Brazil, the rest of the world has no intention of doing so.

This leads neatly into the next point:

We also know that delays to tackling climate change will only harm more people and places, while being more costly in the long term. A recent OBR report estimates that unchecked climate change could cost up to 8% of UK GDP by 2070 if the world warms by 3 degrees Celsius this century. The cost to all nations of doing nothing will unquestionably be higher than the price of action.

Actually, we “know” nothing of the sort. This is politics masquearding as science. What we do know, is that if only the UK – and certainly if only Scotland, with its insignificant greenhouse gas emissions – takes action, without the rest of the world falling into step, the cost of action to Scotland will unquestionably be higher than the price of inaction, with no “climate” benefits achieved in the process. As the Impact Assessment to the UK Climate Change Act states:

The benefits of UK action will be distributed across the globe. In the case where the UK acts in concert with other countries then the UK will benefit from other nations reduced emissions and would be expected to experience a large net benefit. Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere. The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak.

Given that Scotland’s emissions are only a fraction of those of the UK as a whole, this statement applies all the more forcefully to any suggestion of unilateral net zero action by Scotland.

What’s next? Life in a parallel universe, apparently:

Crucially, we also recognise that in reducing our emissions and mitigating the impacts of climate change we have an unprecedented opportunity to build a more resilient and prosperous economy that is fit for the future. Action to minimise our country’s contribution to global warming also brings with it innovation and systems change that can provide jobs, improve human and environmental health, reduce the cost of living, create energy and food security and position Scotland as an exporter of expertise.

Taking those absurd claims in turn: in reducing its emissions, Scotland does nothing to mitigate the impacts of climate change, because its emissions are too insignificant for their elimination to make a measurable difference to the climate. On the other hand, the vast amounts of money wasted in pursuing this hubristic folly are unavailable to adapt to any problems that climate change may cause, assuming one accepts that proposition in the first place. Scotland’s economy is less resilient, thanks to its pursuit of net zero, and job losses (in productive, unsubsidised, parts of the economy outweigh the heavily subsidised new “green” jobs). Prosperity seems to be in short supply as individuals and businesses struggle with ever-higher energy bills caused by the costs of renewable energy. It’s difficult to see how carpeting farm land in solar panels enhances food security, and given that Scotland’s energy infrastructure is now mostly owned by foreigners and dependent on foreigners for its components, the claim that this makes Scotland “an exporter of expertise” is difficult to fathom.

The next claim falls into the “lies, damned lies and statistics” section of politics:

Scotland is already seeing important economic benefits from our transition. The number of green jobs in our economy continues to grow faster than all other regions of the UK according to PWC’s Green Jobs Barometer. Likewise, between 1990 and 2023 our emissions halved while the economy grew by 67.4%.

First of all, how does one define a “green” job? PWC does so thus:

We define green jobs as roles that seek to either produce or provide environmentally friendly products and services, or adapt work processes to become more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources. This definition acknowledges roles that support the green economy indirectly, such as environmental advisers or experts in environmental education.

That’s a controversial definition, to say the least. Further, one should ask whether such jobs are economically productive. If one adds more non-productive jobs to achieve the same ends, then one is reducing productivity and economic performance rather than enhancing it. As Jit pointed out, for instance:

…jobs in energy are a cost, unless you are exporting energy and getting paid for it. The key metric is productivity. You cannot argue that we need more farmers (I’m sorry, farmers, I love you!) unless the quantity of produced food goes up. You don’t employ more gardeners… if your garden is shrinking…Employment in energy reached a nadir in 2005 and then began to climb.

This climb was not matched by a climb in energy consumption. It occurred as energy consumption was falling.

Now, if you divide one set of numbers by t’other, you get the productivity of employment in energy. Productivity maxed out in 2005, and has been sliding ever since.

Which isn’t a great advert for the supposed growth in “green” jobs. In any event, in Scotland, according to PWC just 28,667 job adverts in 2024 were for “green” (as generously defined) jobs in Scotland, or just 5.6% of the total – not much of a return for vast effort and expenditure.

As for GDP, the important metric is GDP per capita. According to my new friend, AI:

Scotland’s real GDP per capita growth from 1990 to 2025 shows a significant slowdown in the 2020s compared to previous decades, with the 1990s seeing a 1.9% average annual growth, and the 2000s seeing 1.1% and the 2010s seeing 1.3%. The most recent available data for the 2020s shows an average of 0.3% growth for the decade so far, and a 0.4% growth for the 12 months ending in June 2025.

Those are poor trends, and while – admittedly – the response to covid won’t have helped the 2020s data, the situation during this green growth nirvana isn’t what the Scottish government would have you believe. According to Statista Scottish GDP per capita declined by almost 1.32% between 2022 and 2023 (the most recent data on the Statista website), from £34,560 to £34,105. It’s difficult to pin that too heavily on covid. It’s also difficult to pin the decline on net zero and the cost of renewable energy, but it does demonstrate that the green bonanza claimed by the Scottish government is a mirage.

There then follows some spiel about how much easier it would be for Scotland to achieve net zero if it were independent, which is then rather undermined by a following claim that “[f]ighting climate change is a global effort” – a point which also undermines the earlier claims about how Scottish net zero can mitigate against the effects of climate change in Scotland. As though not noticing this incoherence, the Foreword then shifts its stance:

While Scotland’s response is only one small piece of the puzzle, we can demonstrate to a global audience how emissions reduction and environmental benefits can go hand-in-hand with economic opportunities, national resilience, job creation, fairness, and the advancement of fundamental human rights.

They’d better hope that the rest of the world isn’t observing Scotland too closely. Those Scots watching the countryside being trashed against their wishes by workers often shipped in from elsewhere, watching their local tourism industry being wrecked in the process might not be too impressed by claims of environmental benefits, economic opportunities, national resilience, job creation, fairness, and the advancement of fundamental human rights. To many Scots, such claims ring rather hollow….as does the following claim about a “spirit of collaboration”.

Well, now is the chance for Scots to have their say. In a later article, I will take a deeper dive into the consultation on Scotland’s Climate Change Plan. To be continued….