More than twenty years after devolution, inequality still stalks Scotland. The debate over further devolution in the wake of Brexit and an increasingly right-wing Westminster agenda continues to divide the nation. A New Scotland lays out a blueprint for radical reform by embedding values of democracy, social justice and more into a coherent set of policy. Read an extract below.

A New Scotland
By Gregor Gall
Published by Pluto Press

Scottish waters hold the majority of UK oil and gas reserves, themselves the second largest reserves in Europe. Scotland also has significant renewable energy resources in onshore and offshore wind, hydro, wave, tidal and solar – with the potential to de-carbonise the economy and become a net exporter of green electricity (FoES et al. 2010, Platform et al. 2019). Despite significant growth in renewable energy generation, associated manufacturing jobs have not materialised. Within the oil and gas sector, a high proportion of workers are worried about job security. According to Platform et al. (2020), many would consider moving into new industries, particularly renewables, but face barriers in ‘boom and bust’ cycles, agency work, and inaccessible retraining. The opportunity for transition is available. How that transition plays out and whether it addresses a holistic view of economic, social and environmental justice within planetary limits is up for question.

While the mainstream independence movement and the SNP Scottish Government have successfully articulated climate change as a priority, they continue to – increasingly uneasily – combine this with staunch support for domestic oil and gas production. It is important to recognise that transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is likely to become tightly bound up in nationalist and unionist electoral aspirations. Within this lies the risk of co-option. The coming work of the green-left is to ensure that Scotland, regardless of constitutional outcome, becomes committed to climate and environmental justice through a just transition, and to mobilising against the root causes of climate change.

Currently, however, the Scottish Government’s modus operandi, along with those of many of the signatories to the Paris Agreement, is that the market will deliver carbon reductions and social justice. This involves nudges and leverage from governments to encourage private capital to be invested in the right direction, and for businesses to acknowledge their social responsibility, all too often contradicted by significant nudges in the opposite direction, not least via vast subsidies to fossil fuel companies (Platform et al. 2019). The few achievements of this approach – the Fair Work agenda, community carbon reduction plans, some voluntary divestments from fossil fuel companies – have largely occurred not because of government leadership or corporate compliance, but because of significant mobilisation from unions, community organisers and environmental campaigners. This limited progress has been undermined by failing to take on Jim Ratcliffe of INEOS at Grangemouth, lost opportunity with BiFab, blind faith in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the growth of incinerators, and unrealistic plans to meet legally binding carbon emissions reduction targets.

Scotland’s Climate Change Plan Update (Scottish Government 2020) relies far too heavily upon unproven negative emissions technologies, with CCS, bio-energy coupled with CCS, and direct air capture and storage together expected to achieve almost a fifth of the 2030 target, increasing to a quarter of emissions reductions by 2032. This is not just about hard-to-treat industrial emissions, but is explicitly envisaged to support de-carbonisation of electricity, heat and transport as well. Furthermore, the prospect of the North Sea as a global dumping ground for carbon is gaining momentum, with an estimated 46 gigaton storage potential in Scottish waters. Scottish Government and sectoral support for this will have an impact well beyond our borders, giving false hope about the delivery of other national and corporate ‘net zero’ targets. These targets provide a smokescreen for actual emissions reductions. ‘Net zero’ leaves the door open to continue emitting greenhouse gases in the short term on the basis that one day they will be sequestered or stored. Furthermore, the targets involve overshooting the global carbon budget for 1.5°C warming (in some cases very significantly) before bringing them back down, by which time the damage of such warming will likely be irreversible (FoEI 2021).

ON THE GROUND

Social justice environmentalism in Scotland ranges from community group initiatives like allotments and bicycle repairs to direct action groups disrupting fossil fuel sites, and campaigns pushing for policy change and making spaces for movement-building in housing and fuel poverty campaigns, unions, health and safety, and anti-toxics activists, and for movements of international solidarity. Green-leftists must work together to keep market-driven, false solutions out and to focus on environmental and climate justice as well as just transitions.

Meeting with likeminded people to envision new futures can be affirming for activists. However, we must recognise how the driving forces of climate change – colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism – show up in our relationships. Our visions of justice must be integrated into our organisational practices in order to retain the energy and voices of those most marginalised and adversely affected by climate change. The criticisms of classism, racism, sexism and ableism in the environmental movement that arose throughout 2019 should be seriously grappled with if we are to hope for a functioning and successful movement.

That said, nearly all environmental progress in Scotland has been pushed from the ground up. A Scotland-wide campaign drove the eight-year fight to ban fracking to victory in the highest-profile environmental win for grassroots activists since devolution. The union movement’s demands for a Just Transition found new voice in Scotland with the formation in 2018 of the Just Transition Partnership (led jointly by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and Friends of the Earth Scotland), which in turn led to the Scottish Government’s Just Transition Commission (2019–2021, 2021–). Similarly, under immense pressure, Scotland became the first country in the world to announce a climate emergency in 2019, and later that year the Scottish Parliament passed legislation increasing the ambition of domestic climate targets to 75% by 2030 and a net zero target by 2045.¹ The climate justice movement in Scotland is growing and maturing, in part invigorated by the hosting of COP26 in Glasgow. Our strengths lie in our diversity of tactics and our ability to demand rapid and radical change while we begin to build new futures, from our community gardens to our energy sector.

DISCUSSION

Whilst it is possible to mitigate climate change without changing capitalist relations of production and consumption, with investors finding new ways to make profit, this will only ever be of temporary and limited effect, and will still reproduce inequalities. The rich can find ways to protect themselves from climate change for a while whilst the poor continue to suffer the consequences. Climate justice cannot be achieved without finding a way for value to be detached from profit. To begin, we must reassess our values and collectively begin practising the future we want. This means looking at the impacts of Scotland’s de-carbonisation plans on countries and peoples of the Global South – in terms of pace and ambition, and plans to deliver. It means climate reparations – linked to colonial and slavery reparations – on both international and interpersonal levels. It means not simply substituting fossil fuels with renewables without considering the impact of the continued extraction of resources from the Global South. Corporate profiteering from large-scale renewable operations dependent upon land dispossession, extraction of ‘transition minerals’ (like cobalt, lithium and nickel) or bio-fuels, and any related job creation, do not constitute a just transition. Further, a Just Transition requires us to expand our concept of what green jobs are into the care, cultural, creative and learning sectors. Britain’s furlough scheme showed the possibilities of decoupling work from income, even while governments missed opportunities to use the scheme to operate a just transition away from the climate crisis. We must look towards an economy for social and environmental benefit, for this and future generations. Some of us call this eco-socialism.

There will be no simple manifesto of policies that would implement eco-socialism overnight, but we can build the alliances to undermine capitalism and create the conditions in which a post-capitalist society can emerge. Union collective bargaining can transcend the immediacy of members’ interests to imagine a socialised economy, and pre-figurative political action can move beyond utopian experiments to be part of these counter-hegemonic movements. The necessary pressure for this will come from lobbying, demonstrations, direct action, strikes and climate camps, from frontline communities affected by fossil fuel industrial capitalism, the union movement’s demands for a just transition, and connections with global movements of Indigenous people, peasants and anti-colonial movements. We can learn lessons – positive and negative – from Scotland’s recent history of social movement-building around climate justice, including the achievements of the anti-fracking movement, the failure of corporate takeover of the community waste movement (Mackay 2019), the Just Transition Partnership urging the baby steps of the Commission, the mobilisations around the G8 in 2005 and COP26 in 2020–2021, and the success in forcing Glasgow University to divest from fossil fuels and the Royal Bank of Scotland to stop financing them. By shifting discourse and moving the goalposts towards actual system change, these actions make it increasingly difficult for capital to profit from climate damage and shift costs onto the environment of the poorest.

Whether devolved or independent, what options are there for a way forward for the Scottish Government? The 2021 Scottish Parliament elections showed some steps in the right direction, with the appointment of a Minister for Just Transition, Employment and Fair Work, whilst others, such as the change of title in the climate change portfolio to a Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport, show the emphasis moving in the wrong direction. We urgently need a gear change, with major investment of public resources to transform the economy. At the same time, we must be willing to take democratic control of public goods, many of which are currently in private hands, ensuring the foundations of a sustainable and socially just future. A significant expansion of welfare, health and social care, education, and housing and infrastructure will move the economy away from the corporate domination that is failing to de-carbonise and is incapable of delivering the public goods and wider social benefits required. With social and material needs increasingly met through public provision (via state and other public and community-owned bodies), it will be possible to wean ourselves away from fossil-fuelled consumerism. Combined with a citizens’ income of sufficient value, Scotland could actually start moving towards genuine solutions to the crisis of climate injustice.

This is not instant eco-socialism, for we would likely retain a significant private profit-motivated sector, albeit constrained in areas where it is causing the most harm. But it is a realistic direction of travel and provides the opportunity for hope out of crisis. The post-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, democratic and socially just economy is a journey of discovery, not a party manifesto, but for the sake of life on Earth we need to move in that direction, and do so quickly.

¹ While these targets fall considerably short of Scotland’s fair share of climate action, they are an important step in that direction.

A New Scotland: Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society by Gregor Gall is published by Pluto Press, priced £14.99.