Independence is needed to secure Scotland's green future

The National

30-04-2025

Naturally, since the question of independence is one which is fundamentally about 'who decides?' for Scotland, Unionist and nationalist arguments are still woven right through the tussle over who can and should be doing what when it comes to energy policy, and where those powers to act would best rest.
Effecting a transition which protects jobs and the environment is, however, something which needs to be dealt with immediately and regardless as to Scotland's constitutional status or people's personal preferences on that. When it comes to that transition, the Seventh Carbon Budget prepared by the Committee on Climate Change sets the challenge out starkly.
Some 17% of employment in Aberdeen and 4% of employment in Aberdeenshire is estimated to be from oil and gas, the report says. As of 2021, direct employment in oil and gas in Aberdeen has declined by nearly one-third since 2015, with some estimates showing that around 14,000 people in the region will need to be moved to other roles or sectors between 2022 and 2030.
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Support for the just transition and North Sea workers was the subject of a debate which my colleague Kirsty Blackman secured last week at Westminster. Highlighting the current and very real lack of confidence in the energy sector, she pointed out how issues ranging from the inability to get grid connections, to the UK Government's current tax regime for the North Sea, conspire to stifle the investment activity that we desperately need to be taking place right now.
We are, she warned, at a tipping point. One danger is that the highly mobile, highly paid oil and gas workers that we need in order to effect a transition at scale will go abroad if the opportunities for them to work in Scotland disappear faster than new opportunities are created.
Another is that, unless the Labour Government picks up the pace, private investors will go to our European neighbours like Denmark or Norway where there is no lack of government appetite or pace.
We already know what a failed energy transition looks like from the vandalism wreaked by the Tories on the coal industry in the 1980s. If we don't get this one right, then whole sectors and communities risk being left on the scrapheap as they were during the Thatcher years. And the transition certainly won't be 'got right' if it is left to the market alone to sort those things out.
The jobs transition needn't just be a transition from energy jobs to other jobs in energy. To give one small example, I have recently been in discussions with the plumbing industry. A capacity crisis is coming for that industry in a few years' time because the financial constraints facing the training and education sector mean that the industry cannot possibly meet the demand for skilled labour that the market is going to have in the years ahead.
One thing ministers could do straight away is to incentivise the private sector, using community benefit funds, to invest in apprenticeships in those areas, so that we are preparing alternatives and opportunities for people as the North Sea basin declines.
That's the sort of 'belt and braces' requirement that the just transition Commission, which was set up by the Scottish Government in 2018 to provide scrutiny and advice on delivery, could be helping to push for. Northern Ireland is currently consulting on setting up its own commission; Wales established its own commission in 2023. So where is the UK-wide Just Transition Commission to similarly scrutinise the policy areas which the UK Government has kept reserved to itself?
Even when it comes to jobs that the UK Government is directly in control of, the chairman of GB Energy has let the cat out of the bag about the '1000 new jobs' promised for Aberdeen, describing its work as 'a very long-term project', with the much-promised 1000 new jobs taking perhaps 20 years or more to realise.
The Acorn project at St Fergus, the new power station at Peterhead and the investments in key strategic ports at Peterhead and Fraserburgh are vital and massive components of any just transition.
While the UK Government was able to find almost £22 billion for carbon capture schemes in Merseyside and Teesside last autumn, it has yet to dig deep enough into its pockets for Scotland, despite all that it and its predecessors have taken from Scotland in the past five decades.
Any hope there might be for a positive decision on funding the Acorn project at St Fergus is now in a most uncertain position in the June spending review, where we must imagine that the Chancellor will be more focused on squeezing through her self-imposed 'fiscal rules' than on meeting the far more important requirements of the future.
Meanwhile, households are facing a third rise in energy costs since Labour came to power, partly as a result of a thoroughly dysfunctional energy market where electricity is priced according to the most expensive input needed to produce it. The typical offshore wind turbine contains more than three times as much material from abroad as it does from domestic manufacturers. And ownership of energy assets remains predominantly in overseas hands.
While we miss out on present and future opportunities, the wider context to all of this is an energy market that is, paradoxically, working against both the interests of the consumer and the companies and investors who want to realise the green energy industrial revolution.
So we come back to that fundamental question of 'who decides?'. There can surely be no question that when it comes to energy transition or indeed anything else, the people who care most about Scotland, and who are therefore best placed to take decisions of this magnitude, are those of us who have chosen to make our lives here, and who are therefore most invested in getting good outcomes for here.
To get all of the opportunities for Scotland which should come from having all of the energy that we do, it's clear that Scotland's government needs all of the political power to match.