The Secret Civil Servant: on net zero and climate protestors

Coinciding nicely with the appearance of Insidious: The Red Door in Scottish cinemas (the story of a haunted middle-aged man out of his depth and beset on all sides by vengeful ghouls), this slapdash paint-job was the response of climate protest group This is Rigged to the news that hundreds of North Sea oil and gas licences are to be granted by the UK Government.  

Those campaigners would probably tell you that a return to ‘business as usual’ – in a summer marked by droughts, wildfires, and the UN’s confirmation that July was the hottest month in human history – is what they were mostly protesting about. Thank God Scotland’s own net zero policies are painting the town red, eh?  

Read more: Escalation of green protest is both inevitable and understandable

Not quite. This is Rigged spaffed its rage over the threshold of Holyrood – which doesn’t have the mandate to legislate on matters relating to the licensing of off-shore oil and gas – also because Scottish Government’s silence over the matter was, according to them, "deafening".  

While that’s maybe a bit harsh given the FM’s response last week that ‘our future is not in unlimited extraction of oil and gas’, they are probably on to something given Mr Humza’s has, according to Richard Dixon in the Scotsman, already begun to soft-pedal on his own net zero policies, for example on the deposit return scheme and on plans for highly protected marine areas. 

More recently, the FM also followed a line of logic not dissimilar to that trod by Rishi Sunak and his ministerial fluffers in recent weeks, when he pointed to the cost of living crisis as cover for backsliding on previous commitments to penalise owners of fossil fuel boilers, and at a time when Scottish summers - despite heatwaves elsewhere in Europe - are yet cool enough to prompt householders to think already about switching their heating back on. 

Look, civil servants are rightly proud that the Scottish Government – starting with Nicola Sturgeon declaring the climate emergency back in the hallowed antiquity of 2019 – has said all the right things about reaching net zero. Even the Skidmore review of the UK government’s approach to net zero agrees that in some respects, Scotland is outperforming England. Which is a bit like passing a ‘less bonkers than Fergus Ewing’ test: nothing to be particularly proud of.  

Most civil servants I know – including some who, along with other UK civil service staff, had an actual front-row seat at COP26 - would agree that despite enviable progress on renewables, our track record on net zero is not, to use an inappropriate metaphor, setting the world on fire. In fact, some commentators are suggesting that Scottish ministers have lost the guts to make difficult choices on net zero. 

How so? Because, beyond the political stooshies that we’ve seen over the last week or so, civil servants have seen a tsunami of evidence supporting that claim. In fact, we have helped create it.  

That evidence includes a December 2022 report from independent statutory body the Climate Change Committee , which concluded that ‘Scotland’s climate targets are in danger of becoming meaningless’. A few months later, a report from the Fraser of Allander Institute described a ‘hugely concerning’ gap between Scottish climate policy intentions and actual implementation, noting that civil servants were 'unable to point us towards who is responsible for questioning the social and environmental impacts of policies’. Then in April, Audit Scotland urged Scottish Ministers to up their game on tracking progress against their climate commitments. 

Read more: Brexit: CE mark climbdown good for business: Ian McConnell

I can’t tell you to what extent that’s the fault of our Ministers, civil servants or a wider policy clusterbourach created by a hellacious alliance of long-term objectives, short political cycles, a devastating cost of living crisis, and the lingering effects of a long COVID-induced institutional brain fog. 

I can tell you that as a mid-career civil servant with experience in various parts of the Scottish Government, reaching net zero isn’t at the heart of how most decisions are made. It’s not even close to the heart; more like the appendix, if not a bit of our institutional anatomy that’s even further south.  

To govern is to choose, right? My experience is that choosing between difficult options is typically driven by what will support more jobs and economic growth in places. Or by what will support the public services people care about most. Or by what our Ministers or Mr Yousaf have already been manoeuvred into agreeing to. Most likely, all of the above. Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, maybe I’m exaggerating...but not by much.  

Maybe that’s the world we live in. Still, the risk for civil servants, Ministers and the public is that dragging our feet on implementing Scotland’s world-class climate action goals doesn’t just help threaten the viability of that world. It’s also that, despite a noble commitment to a ‘just transition’, it puts us at increasing distance from what the Scottish public want. Which, recent polling suggests, is to be able to afford to eat, heat and travel in a way that doesn’t lead to most of Scotland ending up looking like fire-ravaged Cannich, near Inverness. 

Sadly, that just transition is, according to the Guardian, looking increasingly out of reach. 

This much is clear: we need a make-over of Scotland’s red-lining net zero ambitions. But yet another coat of paint simply won’t do. We must do better. Fast. 

The Secret Civil Servant (@secretcivilscot) works for the Scottish Government. All fees from this series are donated to The Trussell Trust.