You know Nicola Sturgeon is taking a bold moral stand when she gets out the letter-headed paper.
The First Minister's missive to Boris Johnson, urging him to 'reassess' a drilling licence issued for exploration of the Cambo oil field, is a classic of the Sturgeon genre. She has jumped into the middle of a knife fight and called for further study of kitchen-utensil based combat.
The present political circumstances, not least her negotiations for a governing pact with Patrick Harvie's Greens, require Sturgeon to be a climate progressive, and so that is what she is this week. Oddly for a politician seldom asked to venture beyond rhetoric, Sturgeon is receiving pushback from the left, with Anas Sarwar accusing her of 'hiding behind Boris Johnson' and climate activist Jennifer Kowalski telling her to 'stop hiding behind the Conservatives'.
The Conservatives, for their part, are having rare fun with a cheeky campaign appropriating the old ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ slogan. They want to remind the SNP of a time when it was not only proud of the nation’s fossil fuel industry but made revenues from it the lynchpin of the party’s economic case for independence. Sturgeon could push back, pointing out that ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ originated before she joined the SNP — in fact, before she was even in primary school — but the shadow cast by Seventies-style petronationalism is long enough to envelop her all the same.
Scotland’s Future, the independence white paper on which she campaigned in 2014, reads today like a sunny sales pitch from Big Oil Inc. It boasted that Scotland produced ‘six times our current demand for oil and three times our demand for gas’. Oil and gas investment was ‘at the record level of £13.5 billion this year, and planned future investment is estimated at £100 billion’. Industry projections were said to ‘point to an increase in output in the first years of independence’, with production ‘expected to extend beyond the middle of the century’ and an estimate that 24 billion barrels ‘can still be recovered’.
North Sea reserves were predicted to be worth £1.5 trillion and, since ‘the vast bulk of the reserves are beneath Scottish waters’, represented ‘one of the best financial safety nets of any country in the world’. The case for independence which Sturgeon sold to Scottish voters, a case of which she was co-architect, declared that ‘everyone now acknowledges that Scotland’s oil and gas wealth is an extremely valuable resource and will last for a long time to come’. Renewables were mentioned but they were spoken of as a ‘bonus’ and for their ‘potential’. Nicola Sturgeon was hugging hydrocarbons long before she was hugging trees.
Politicians change their minds, and the political contexts in which they operate change too, but Sturgeon was not retailing these arguments back in the distant mists of time. This was just seven years ago, in the final months of the Salmond era, and despite the First Minister’s well-documented struggles with recalling events during this period, she offered no public dissent from the Salmond line on energy.
There is nothing wrong with changing your mind. We all do it. Some of us, for example, once insisted any repeal of Section 28 ‘provide people with the necessary reassurance, by providing a statutory underpinning to the guidelines’ in which ‘the value of marriage should be clearly referred to’. Of course, that was back when some of us were SNP education spokeswoman and before we became First Minister and reinvented ourselves as a pioneering advocate of gay rights.
The likelihood is that Sturgeon did have misgivings about an over-reliance on oil in the white paper, just as she likely considered the SNP’s cautious position on Section 28 outdated and out-of-step with her own liberal views, but she did what most politicians do: she read the room. Causing a fuss on a point of principle would have cost her politically, so she kept her head down until she was in a position to change things without damaging her career. If this is a sin, it is one that almost all politicians indulge in. However, not all politicians are pitched by their spin doctors — on and off the payroll — as refreshingly virtuous, idealistic, brave and different.
There is a gap in the market for leadership on the climate. Scottish Labour should be able to fill it, as should the Scottish Tories, but neither is in government at Holyrood or is likely to be in the next five years. Labour brings particular understanding of the human and societal cost of industrial decline, as witnessed from the mid-to-late 20th century with coal-mining, steel production and other heavy-industry manufacturing. Across these changes, Labour was traditionally the champion of workers and communities.
The Conservatives bring an appreciation of market forces, commercial innovation and the role played by research and development in forging new markets, something Tory governments dealt with in the shift to light industry, the rise of the service sector and the growth of small businesses. Typically, the Tories have backed industry and development. These two parties, which are largely on the same page about the need to address climate change, could do so from their differing political perspectives.
Except, as well as being out of power, hell would freeze over — though, given rising temperatures, not for very long — before the two of them would agree to work together. That is what puts the SNP in such a strong position on the climate: it has an opposition minded towards change but able to help the government craft manageable changes that minimise harm to workers while maximising economic benefits. You couldn’t ask for better opponents on this issue.
Yet, instead of making the most of this situation, Nicola Sturgeon’s government is buddying up to the Scottish Greens, a crank-ridden cult that would happily put the entire North East on the dole to satisfy its reactionary and class-inflected aversion to human progress and economic growth. The only policy portfolios the Greens should be kept further away from than climate change are all the others ones.
Just because the Greens are fanatics does not mean the challenge of reconciling civilisational development with a sustainably liveable planet isn't one of the great moral causes of our age. Contrary to what you might have read on Facebook, anthropogenic climate change is not a myth, or a conspiracy, or the work of scientific alarmists (though, as in all fields, some scientists stray into advocacy at the expense of analytical rigour). It’s got nothing to do with George Soros or the Trilateral Commission or any of the other favourite bogeymen of the tinfoil-hatted reaches of the Internet. Human-driven global heating is real, the evidence overwhelming, and the impact, much like James Dornan’s continuing electoral success, mind-boggling and terrifying in equal parts.
The 2021 working report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that global surface temperatures are rising at the fastest rate in 2,000 years while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher today than at any time in the last two million years. The IPCC concludes that increases in greenhouse gas concentrations are ‘unequivocally caused by human activities’ and is ‘virtually certain’ that ‘hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s’ and assesses ‘with high confidence’ that ‘human-induced climate change is the main driver of these changes’. Human activity is ‘very likely’ to be the primary cause of ‘the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s’ and ‘extremely likely’ to be behind the warming of the ocean since the 1970s.
Scotland, as elsewhere, needs political leadership that recognises both the scale of the threat and the importance of practicality and proportionality. Slowing — and, eventually, reversing — the effects of global heating cannot continue being put off simply because it is too hard, or forces us to confront unpalatable choices, but nor is it any solution to hollow out communities for generations as happened in earlier energy transitions. The choice is not between people and the planet but between sensible policies that serve the interests of both and fringe ideologies that pretends this is a one-sided equation.
Nicola Sturgeon should be stepping up to lead on the climate but it is proving to be yet another issue on which her better angels are throttled by her worst political instincts. The First Minister appears to view the climate, as everything else, through the lens of the constitution. She wants Greens on board and so she shifts in their direction rhetorically, but there are still too many voters with jobs connected to the North Sea industry, and so in policy terms she isn't really moving at all.
In the past, I have compared the Sturgeon-era SNP to New Labour for its triangulations, but there is an important difference. New Labour triangulated on policy. Sturgeon's SNP triangulates on positioning and never gets to the policy.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on August 16, 2021.