20130129_ND

Source: BBC Radio Scotland: Newsdrive

URL: N/A

Date: 29/01/2013

Event: Andrew Montford: Wind power is costly "and doesn't generate a lot of electricity"

People:

Patrick Harvie: Co-convener, Scottish Green Party
Andrew Montford: Blogger (Bishop Hill) and author, The Hockey Stick Illusion
Mhairi Stuart: Presenter, BBC Radio Scotland
Bill Whiteford: Presenter, BBC Radio Scotland

Mhairi Stuart: Now, more on the news that the Scottish government has published its latest climate change plans, designed to ensure Scotland achieves its legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. Well, Patrick Harvie's the co-convener of the Scottish Greens. Good evening.

Patrick Harvie: Good evening. How are you?

Mhairi Stuart: What do you make of these plans?

Patrick Harvie: Well, I'm very disappointed. Last year we saw the first annual target that the government had to reach to start reducing emissions in Scotland. And it was a very, very limp target - it was just a fraction of a percentage, 0.06% they were supposed to reach. And they couldn't even manage that incredibly unambitious target. They've overshot it by more than a million tons of carbon dioxide. And yet in compensation, which the climate change legislation requires them to announce new policies to compensate for that shortfall, what we see is they're going to compensate for that with unspecified policies at some unspecified time between now and 2027. It's really not good enough, for ministers to think that they can fail to meet such an unambitious target and then just offload the responsibility for that into future decades. If we're serious about meeting the long-term targets and about realising the economic opportunities from climate change as a source of low-carbon jobs in Scotland, we really need to take much more urgent action.

Mhairi Stuart: The Scottish government, though, has blamed a particularly harsh winter in 2010, and also the fact they don't actually have the powers to enforce too much.

Patrick Harvie [laughing]: Yes, I've even heard Scottish government ministers say that they can't invest in sustainable low-carbon transport, because of Westminster actions, and that's simply not the case. On transport, on housing, on a whole host of devolved responsibilities, there's a great deal to do. And in fact transport's one of the areas where there's most disappointing figures in the new report. If you compare the aspiration that was set out in last year's documents by the Scottish government - just about a year ago - if you compare that with the documents published today, it's clear that the level of aspiration of what they think they can achieve on transport has been dramatically reduced. It's hugely unimpressive and, you know, unless we really do put our money where our mouth is and start investing in the opportunities to make Scotland a better, fairer, more equal society, at the same time as a low-carbon society, we're going to miss out, we're going to lose out on the opportunities that we could gain, you know, trying to create economic recovery at the same time as a low-carbon Scotland. It is a short window of opportunity and if we miss it, you know, future generations will really be cursing our name, the generation of politicians sat in Holyrood at the moment, if we pass up on the opportunities that are staring us in the face right now.

Mhairi Stuart: Surely, though, an 80% reduction in the electricity industry's an extremely ambitious target.

Patrick Harvie: Yeah, the decarbonisation of electricity and the long-term signals about renewable energy - I don't criticise the current Scottish government for that. They've set out those long-term signals. But if you compare it with what they're saying on climate change itself, you know, renewable energy doesn't reduce carbon emissions unless it replaces fossil fuels. And actually the Scottish government's energy policy seems to be for more renewables and more fossil fuels - they're even talking about using unconventional gas, new coalbed methane, that kind of gas extraction, using that and then carbon capture and storage instead of capturing carbon and putting it under the ground, using it to extract even more oil through enhanced oil recovery techniques. So, you know, on pretty much every area of energy policy it's a "more of everything" approach. I don't criticise what they're doing on renewables, but we need to be seeing disinvestment in high-carbon energy sources at the same time. Now, you know, things like transport, like electric cars and so on, we can do that in a good few years' time, once there's a much higher proportion of renewable energy on the grid, but unless you've got that renewable energy in there first, electric cars actually will increase emissions, because you'll be increasing energy production from coal-fired power stations in the short term. So we need to reverse those transport policies if we're going to make progress in the next couple of years.

Mhairi Stuart: Patrick Harvie, thank you.

Bill Whiteford: Well, those are ambitious emissions targets, which haven't been reached, were the strictest in the world at the time. They were set by the Parliament in 2009. They've been exceeded, so is it time to abandon, perhaps, targets altogether? One person who thinks so is climate author Andrew Montford, who blogs as Bishop Hill, joins us now. Why do you think we should get rid of them?

Andrew Montford: Since the Scottish government put its policy in place, the science has actually moved on quite a lot. We've had now no change in global temperatures for something like 15 years. The Met Office is saying that temperatures are unlikely to rise for at least another five years. And there is an increasing amount of scientific evidence coming in that in fact carbon dioxide doesn't cause the kind of warmings that were thought a few years back.

Bill Whiteford: So you're essentially a climate change denier, are you?

Andrew Montford: It depends what you think I'm denying. What do you think I'm denying?

Bill Whiteford: Well, human use of carbon dioxide - emission of carbon dioxide warms the planet. You're saying that doesn't happen.

Andrew Montford: No, I'm saying it doesn't warm it as much as we thought previously. Let me give you a quote here -

Bill Whiteford [interrupting]: So we shouldn't bother cutting down on CO2, should we?

Andrew Montford: - I had quite a prominent climate scientist, who said, the other day - and this was a quote that I published at my blog - "I agree", he said "that evidence is pointing towards low climate sensitivity and that this is good news". Okay, and there were similar remarks reported in New Scientist just a few weeks back. There is a lot of evidence now that the story is not as bad as we thought it was. I'm not saying that carbon dioxide doesn't warm the Earth, but we have a lot longer to sort things out than we previously thought.

Bill Whiteford: There's still a consensus among scientists that it's human activity that is causing global warming and that we should cut back on emissions, I mean that's certainly the consensus, certainly amongst politicians - not just a consensus, absolute unanimity in the Scottish Parliament.

Andrew Montford: I agree that humans are affecting the climate - this is not in dispute. What we should do about it is not a scientific question, it's a question of economics. Now, if we've got a hundred years, say, to sort this problem out, which is kind of what we might be looking at now, then we have time to look at technological fixes rather than these panic measures of putting in these hundreds of wind turbines that don't, frankly, work very well. I thought the interview with Patrick Harvie was quite interesting - Patrick's, kind of, scratching his head, wondering why carbon emissions have been going up since these new policies were put in place. There isn't, actually, a lot of mystery about this. As wind power gets put onto the electricity grid, it destabilises the whole thing, and all your other generation kit on the grid becomes less efficient, because it's -

Bill Whiteford: He blames that on a government's approach of being "more of everything", that they want more sustainable and renewable energy but they also want more fossil fuel energy.

Andrew Montford: Well, of course, if you have wind power, then you've got to have something else for when the wind doesn't blow. And frankly, there is only fossil fuels for that. We haven't got any alternatives, unless you want to flood every valley in Scotland to put in hydro power, of which - I mean, hydro power is great with wind but we don't have enough space for it, so you've got to have fossil fuels. I mean, the thing about wind power is that it locks fossil fuels into the system. There's no two ways about it. So when Alex Salmond says he wants more wind power, and he wants more offshore wind power, he's signing us up to a lot of very big bills and he's locking in fossil fuels.

Bill Whiteford: But he also says that they'll create an immense number of jobs, and as Patrick Harvie says, it's a window now - we have a window to achieve a sort of low-carbon sustainable economy which provides jobs and will keep going for a long time as we're not dependent on fossil fuels.

Andrew Montford: Okay, the reason these technologies are so expensive is because they need - you know, because they create jobs they cost money, don't they. The fact is, in fact wind power doesn't generate a lot of jobs. It has a lot of capital costs and doesn't generate a lot of electricity - that's why it's so expensive. The jobs are mainly created in China, where they manufacture the turbines. And there's a few jobs will be created here in maintenance and that kind of thing, but you're not going to see a lot of jobs. But you are going to see a huge amount of costs. It was reported in the Sunday Times just last weekend, I think, that Scotland now has the highest domestic energy prices in Europe. I mean, is that the way we want to continue? Alex Salmond is now saying that we should invest in offshore wind, which is twice the price of onshore wind.

Bill Whiteford: Okay -

Andrew Montford: Is that the way we really want to go?

Bill Whiteford: Okay, we'll put that to the minister, who is due to appear on this programme just after 5 o'clock. Thanks very much for joining us, Andrew Montford, who blogs as Bishop Hill.