SNP's ambitions will always be focussed on independence, not issues like climate change – Scotsman comment

Although the natural El Nino effect has boosted the figures, this is further confirmation of what we already know: our climate is changing rapidly in response to the rising levels of carbon dioxide – established as an important greenhouse gas some two centuries ago – in the atmosphere. So rapidly, in fact, that humanity appears to be struggling to respond quickly enough, as demonstrated recently by the Scottish Government's humiliating decision to scrap its 2030 emission-reduction target after it became clear it would not be met.

Now Professor Piers Forster, the interim chair of the Climate Change Committee, which provides independent advice to Holyrood and Westminster, has urged Scottish ministers to “act quickly” to set up a new legal framework, “bringing its approach in line” with the other UK nations. He added: “This is crucial to restore confidence and avoid a vacuum of ambition around net zero.”

Forster also said that, among other steps, Scotland needed to “treble the pace of roll-out of public electric vehicle charge points, reduce car traffic by 20 per cent, increase heat pump installation rates by a factor of at least 13, and double onshore wind capacity” by 2030 – within just six years. The scale of the task ahead is daunting but, with physical, real signs of climate change all around us and a new industrial age dawning, it cannot be shirked.

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Unfortunately, Scotland’s hopes that we can complete the historic transition to a net-zero economy rest, at present, with a government that subordinates all issues to its abiding obsession: independence. Its vaulting ambition will always be to appear to o’erleap Westminster, to paraphrase Shakespeare. The vacuum around everything else – from climate change and the economy to the NHS and education – is why Scotland’s fortunes will continue to fall.