Scotland’s climate goals are ‘no longer credible’ and there is ‘no comprehensive strategy’ to move away from carbon to Net Zero. That is the noxious assessment issued today by the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the statutory body set up in Scotland to advise national and regional government on emissions policies. Underscoring the gap between rhetoric heard and action seen, the committee delivers an almighty verbal skelping to the SNP and its carefully cultivated image as a green government.

Under the SNP’s Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019, ‘the Scottish ministers must ensure that the net Scottish emissions account for the year 2030 is at least 75 per cent lower than the baseline’. The CCC says that ongoing delays to the Scottish government’s climate change plan and ‘further slippage in promised climate policies’ make it unlikely this statutory target will be met. The updated plan was due to be published in November but Holyrood’s Net Zero Secretary Mairi McAllan said she needed more time.

What’s 15 years in the life of the planet?

As a result, the committee says, there has been ‘a significant period without sufficient actions or policies to reach the target’ but ‘the required acceleration in emissions reduction in Scotland is now beyond what is credible’. Professor Piers Forster, interim chair of the committee, describes the Scottish government’s ambitions as ‘laudable’ but notes that ‘it isn’t enough to set a target, the government must act’. In addition to calling for the climate change plan to be published ‘urgently’, he points out that a number of risk areas identified by his committee are those ‘with significant policy powers devolved to the Scottish government’.

The excuses are being pumped out like carbon into the atmosphere. McAllan said: ‘The Climate Change Committee have always been clear that meeting the legislated 2030 target – agreed by parliament on a cross party basis – will be extremely challenging, and may not be feasible. We remain fully committed to meeting our target of net zero emissions by 2045.’ What’s 15 years in the life of the planet?

With McAllan’s effective admission that Scottish ministers will miss their 2030 target, why should we trust them to reach their 2045 goal? The Scottish government failed to meet its 2021 target, the eighth time in 12 years that it has fallen short. The CCC says ‘most key indicators of delivery progress’ are ‘off track’. This is a thoroughly grim report card for the SNP but not half as grim as it is for the Scottish Greens. The Greens have been in coalition with the Nationalists at Holyrood since 2021, when they struck a governing pact that gave them two ministers in the Scottish government – the first time Greens had held ministerial power anywhere in the UK.

Two and a half years later, the Scottish government’s bottle recycling scheme has collapsed, its marine protection policy lies abandoned, a ban on incinerating plastics was backed away from, 47 million cubic metres of sewage was dumped in Scotland’s waterways in 2022. Now the 2030 emissions targets are almost certainly not going to be met.

The failure of the climate targets can be filed alongside the many other examples of Holyrood’s record of delivery falling far short of its lofty promises. One of the consequences of the political halfway house that is devolution – responsibility for some policies but not overall responsibility – is that it incentivises signalling and gesture politics. There is no reason not to promise the Earth when the failure of the Earth to materialise can always be blamed on someone else. This situation is not going to improve until Scotland begins to expect more of its lawmakers and stops settling for easy excuses and constitutional talking points – which, much like our climate targets, are no longer credible.