Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Official Report 490KB pdf

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“Scotland’s path to a low-carbon economy”

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 11th meeting this year of the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee. I remind everyone present that all mobile devices should be switched off. I record apologies from Marlyn Glen, Alex Johnstone and Charlie Gordon.

There are three items on the agenda, the first of which is a session in which we will take evidence from David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, and Laura McNaught, analyst for devolved Administrations at the CCC, following the recent publication of its report “Scotland’s path to a low-carbon economy”. I thank you for joining us to answer our questions. I remind members and witnesses that some of today’s witnesses are on quite a tight time schedule, so we want to spend about an hour with each panel. It will be helpful if we can stay within that timeframe.

I will begin by asking about the process for developing the CCC’s most recent report. First, how much time was the CCC able to give to this report, both in formal meetings of the committee and in respect of staff time and resources in preparing it?

Can you give us a flavour of how different forms of data have been incorporated? I am sure that some of the data will be specifically Scottish data about the reality on the ground in Scotland and some of them may be UK data that have been disaggregated. What is the balance between those two different approaches in the data that have gone into the report?

We could also explore that with the Government.

The Committee on Climate Change was asked for its views on specific issues. Obviously, we are at the beginning of a process, and no one has all the answers to the questions yet. Almost every aspect of government, the economy and society will have to be brought into that process. Are there more areas about which you expect to be asked for evidence in the near future, or that seem to be relevant priorities to move on to, to build on the report that you have produced?

A comprehensive set of requests formed the basis of the report. We were asked what we thought could be achieved in different sectors of the economy, aviation and shipping and so on. There is an ambitious and challenging target. We said in the report that we think that that target is achievable, but a step change in the pace of emissions reductions and new policies will be needed. The focus now is on ensuring that policies and strategies are in place to deliver the targets that have been set. We can offer advice on that if you request it. We can come back to you and help you on that.

Secondly, we have a good picture up to 2020. There is the 2050 target and a high-level story of how to get from 2020 to 2050, but I know that you want a cumulative emissions budget, and you have requested that from us. We did not come back on that in the initial piece of advice because we are working on the path through the 2020s and beyond to 2050 in our work under the UK Climate Change Act 2008, and we thought that it would be premature to talk about the Scotland cumulative emissions budget before doing the bigger piece of analysis on the 2020s. We will come back to the committee on the cumulative budget.

Thirdly, there is enough emissions reduction potential there—or thereabouts—to hit the 42 per cent target, in a world in which the European Union moves to a 30 per cent greenhouse gas emissions reduction target in 2020, although there is not a lot of headroom. We have suggested areas in which Scotland might look for more potential, such as agriculture and land use. We are willing to explore the issue with the committee.

We have given our initial advice. We responded to the request. It is not our way of working to have on-going, back-and-forth contact; we do not do that at UK level or at a Scotland level. We are prepared to give advice when it is requested, but we would need a discrete request for advice on a particular issue.

So the Committee on Climate Change has not taken a view on the Scottish Government’s discussion paper.

We are well versed in that story. In the advice that you give, are you taking into account Scotland’s socioeconomic and meteorological factors that are slightly different from those in the rest of the UK? I am thinking about the fact that we have a more scattered population and colder winters—although we all shared the most recent cold winter.

We have taken account of those factors in numerous ways. For example, the emissions projections for Scotland allow for Scotland’s specific factors. There is another side to the story that is not just about the starting point from which you are trying to get away, but identifying your abatement options. We have said that, given Scotland’s dispersed population, there might be more of an opportunity for renewable heat in homes that are off the gas grid. There might be less of an opportunity for electric cars in certain areas of Scotland, as people have to drive beyond the range of an electric car. We can explore that in more detail but, in the first instance, we have factored it into our high-level thinking.

Work is being done on developing the batteries of electric cars.

We have heard proposals for a hydrogen superhighway between Aberdeen and Inverness that would power vehicles by hydrogen. Do you see that kind of thing as a good way to decarbonise transport?

The planning issue is obviously tricky. In our 2008 report and in other reports, we identified that as a major barrier—if not the major barrier—to onshore wind development. We have not taken a detailed view on whether the arrangements that were established under the Planning etc (Scotland) Act 2006 will be enough or whether something else is needed. We took a wait-and-see attitude to whether the proposed arrangements in the renewable energy strategies with the local consultation panels would deliver. The issue becomes a bit political in the sense that there are different perspectives on it. I probably would not take it any further on two counts: first, because we have not gone into it; and secondly, because, as a public servant—and this being purdah—I am not really allowed to talk about political issues or anything that could be interpreted in a political manner.

We are not in purdah in the Scottish Parliament.

There have been problems in local authorities in different parts of Scotland in relation to their interpretation of the planning guidelines. If there were some means to help people standardise those, would you consider that?

You or the Scottish Government could ask us to consider and make recommendations on standardisation. If you wanted to do that and there was a process for it, we would be happy to give you advice on it. It is more difficult for me to give you advice when we have not considered the issue and we do not have a position on it. We would be happy to take part in that discussion.

Yes. There were a couple of aspects to our advice. First, we noted that at UK level there are due to be 3 million new households by 2020 and significantly more by 2030, so a lot of new house building will be needed. If you build the houses in the wrong places, you will create transport emissions because you will create extra demand for car travel, which we know is a big proportion of transport emissions and total emissions.

Another aspect was out-of-town developments. We noted that there has been a lot of such development, which also causes extra travel.

There was a general feeling that we should not make planning decisions on new developments, whether they are residential or commercial—and within that, whether they are retail premises or offices—in isolation from an understanding of their impact on transport emissions.

The numbers that we presented in our October 2009 report, “Meeting Carbon Budgets—the need for a step change”, were from a comparison between building new developments away from existing urban centres, where people would commute by car, and having people live in existing urban centres, where they would perhaps use public transport rather than commute by car. Obviously, if people live in urban areas, there is a greater opportunity to get them on to public transport.

There is a big opportunity to design new developments right and keep transport emissions down. To turn that around, if you do not think about the transport aspects of new developments, there is a big risk. In order to take that opportunity, you need land-use development policy that accounts for transport emissions and integrated thinking about the transport infrastructure around new developments in urban areas. If you are going to get people to travel by public transport, you have to ensure that you have the infrastructure there.

Our recommendation was that we need a joined-up approach going forward. We need strategic thinking that addresses all those issues: the new developments, their location and the public transport infrastructure to serve them. That way, we will keep the emissions down.

I suppose that that applies in both urban settings and our more dispersed settlement pattern. A third of Scots live in small towns or remote and rural areas. I do not know whether the problem can easily be solved in those cases.

A basic argument is being made that we should subsidise car travel, in some form, if it is impossible for people to get even community bus services because of the dispersed nature of settlement. There are conflicts between people being socially interactive and their being environmentally friendly.

14:30

Given the fixed nature of the traded sector, it is clear that the ambitious Scottish emissions reduction targets will require much more effort in the non-traded sector, if we are to be successful. You have told us that at the moment the Committee on Climate Change is doing work on UK carbon budgets. Can you offer any insight into the key policy actions that need to be taken in the non-traded sector in Scotland over the next three years?

That was part of your request to us, so we gave that advice in the report. First, the competitiveness story is very important, so it should not be dismissed. Secondly, the evidence says that competitiveness relates only to the energy-intensive industries, so it is not a major issue across all industries and service provision. It is not an issue for everything within the energy-intensive industries, but it could affect certain industries—for example, iron and steel, and cement in certain circumstances, depending on geographical location. Competitiveness is an issue for a small number of industries within the energy-intensive sector, but it has been addressed through the design of the European Union emission trading system. Those industries will be allocated free allowances, the effect of which will be to mitigate any risks relating to competitiveness and leakage. The design of the European framework fully addresses the issue.

Just for the record, I clarify that requests to the Committee on Climate Change for information or advice have come from the Scottish Government rather than the Parliament.

I told the negative story but, in practice, that is not a risk, and there is a positive story. If we did not highlight that in the report, we have highlighted the opportunities for Scotland in, for example, the marine sector, where it can build up a competitive advantage, and the renewables sector more generally. There is scope for jobs in Scotland in high-value, low-carbon industries. The challenge now is to unlock those opportunities.

How would you determine Government’s role in helping to unlock the opportunities?

It is urgent work. We have looked at the Tyndall centre analysis, which is an outlier in the various analyses that have been done of the trajectories in the period to 2015. That came up in evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee at Westminster. As I said, we will take that research into account. I am confident that we will not say that, in light of the path through the 2020s, you should move to a target of more than 42 per cent. I think that the story that we will tell you is that, with your 42 per cent target, and with a set of actions through the 2020s and beyond, you can deliver what is required within what is left of the cumulative budget over the period 2020 to 2050.

Does that mean that we do our analysis on the basis of the outliers? No. We take them into account alongside all the other studies and we make our judgment on the basis of the science. We are in a good position to do that. We have scientific experts on our committee. There will be a full review of the science of climate change in our report this year, in which we will take into account all the things that have happened in the period since we produced our first analysis of the science in December 2008, including, for example, what the Tyndall centre and others have said about the modelling of global scenarios. We will take account of that alongside all the other evidence and make our judgments on that basis.

Before I move on to questions about the annual targets, I take you back to something that you said about the potential for renewable heat. Your report states:

“Scotland has a particular advantage in access to local forestry for biomass”.

Biomass has a lot of potential both here and in the rest of the UK, but is any work going on to ensure that it is indeed sustainable and produced locally? For example, there is such a scheme in Edinburgh. Final conclusions have not been drawn on where the wood is to be sourced from, but it is suggested that it would come from Scandinavia, Canada or elsewhere in North America. That does not fit with your idea of using local forestry for biomass. Is work being done to ensure that we achieve the potential of biomass in the more sustainable manner that your report mentions, which does not appear to be happening in reality?

Work is being done in the UK Government and at the European level, but there is a lot more to do. The Committee on Climate Change has been cautious not only on biomass, but on all bioenergy issues. For example, in our aviation review, we said that we cannot plan to have more than 10 per cent of aviation fuels coming from biofuels in 2050, given the concerns about sustainability. The issue is a major one, and we have taken a cautious approach. A future challenge is how we translate that cautious approach into detailed guidance. We will address that through a specific review of the whole bioenergy area. It is becoming increasingly apparent to us that bioenergy is a major part of the story, but that there is a major risk associated with it. We will do that work in the coming months.

The Scottish Government proposes annual emissions reductions targets of 0.5 per cent for 2011 and 2012, with a further cut of 10 per cent between 2012 and 2013. Does the committee have a view on those proposed targets?

I will go back to our advice—which was to have no cuts, rather than 0.5 per cent cuts—and explain that. Emissions in the traded sector will be flat in the next three years, because that is the way in which the ETS cap is designed. That sector accounts for 40 per cent of emissions in Scotland. Also, aviation and shipping emissions will increase in the next two or three years as we come out of the recession. Emissions will be flat in a big part of the economy and rising in another part.

Our approach to the non-traded sector in Scotland was to start by considering what has happened in the past. Average emissions reductions in the sector have been about 1.5 per cent a year for the past 20 years. We then looked forward and projected emissions for the non-traded sector. One important factor is the previous low tree planting rate, which is now coming home. That means that the sequestration rate in forests will fall in the next two or three years. Therefore, emissions will be going up in the non-traded sector. Also, we will return to economic growth after the recession. Just as emissions have come down during the recession, they will go up again as we come out of it. That applies to buildings and transport emissions.

Against that backdrop of the pressure of rising emissions in the non-traded sector, we considered what we could expect to be achieved through energy efficiency improvement, more efficient vehicles, increased use of public transport and lower agriculture emissions. Just picking the big ones, we saw an opportunity for a 1 to 2 per cent cut in buildings and industry emissions and in transport emissions in the next two years. However, that is enough only to offset the impacts of the reduced sequestration and the economic growth.

That is why we said that a flat emissions trajectory is appropriate for those two years, based on firm and funded existing policies. However, we said that opportunities should be sought in energy efficiency improvement, faster turnover of boilers through the boiler scrappage scheme and possibly the smarter choices programme or other measures to enhance public transport usage. That is what the Scottish Government has done. It has considered those and believes that, rather than the flat emissions trajectory, it can make savings that will bring us up to a 0.5 per cent emissions reduction in each year. We have not considered in detail the Scottish Government’s analysis that shows that a target of 0.5 per cent, rather than 0 per cent, can be set. However, it seems plausible that that can be achieved through the measures that I mentioned.

It is legitimate to ask why, if we are to go beyond that to 3 per cent reductions every year, the Government should not just accelerate all the measures that will give that 3 per cent reduction. However, we then think about what they are. One is renewable heat and another is the widespread insulation of homes, including more difficult measures such as solid wall insulation. Another measure is the introduction of more efficient cars, including electric cars. There is also the issue of more efficient vans, but we only now have a draft framework for that at European level, so we do not have a framework to drive that.

I have already said that we need to shift the culture in agriculture to drive the emissions reductions. Those things take time. They need new policies with long lead times and cannot kick in this year or next. The focus for us should not be on ramping up the effort over the next year or two years but on delivering the significant emissions reductions that underpin trajectories that appear not to be very ambitious but are in fact quite challenging and, at the same time, developing policies and ensuring that they are in place, so that you can be confident that you will get on to the 3 per cent reductions path in a short space of time—two or three years. You need to transform the responses of people and businesses, for which you need new policies.

Absolutely. Take vans for example. How can you drive—excuse the pun—emissions reductions in vans without the European framework, which will give the signal to the industry to bring more efficient vans to the market? There is a limit to what you can do in Scotland before you have that development. If you set a more ambitious annual emissions reductions target over the next year or two years based on your ability to insulate 100,000 solid walls every year, are you confident that you could do that without a policy to deliver it? You need policies that make your ambitions credible, which will take time.

Our advice was to not plan to use carbon units, but to deliver the emissions reductions through domestic action. We were drawing attention to the lack of flexibility in the Scottish framework. Purchase of credits would be one way in which to address that. If you cannot buy credits or borrow from future periods—for example, emissions will be up for 2010 after the cold winter—what would you do in that situation? You would be off-track under the Scottish framework and it is not clear how you would get back on track by simply saying, “Well—we’ve missed the target. Let’s draw a line under it and move on.” The focus should be on domestic emissions reductions and not on planning to purchase credits, which is not the right way forward.

I have a couple of follow-up questions to Shirley-Anne Somerville’s earlier questions about the targets. There seem to be some assumptions that have yet to be tested—and which might prove to be shaky—about the relationship between the emissions that we have not yet counted, but which have happened during the recession, and what might happen during the recovery. You mentioned our cold winter, but we have also had a recession that has lasted much longer than the winter and which might have caused reduced emissions. Is it possible that we are not even looking at a flat trajectory? We might be looking at an increase in emissions based on the emissions that might have reduced during the recession, and the targets might be higher than the emissions that we will count as having taken place during the recession. It is not just that cuts in emissions have been flat or even that they have halted—we do not know what will happen with recovery.

The projections must contain assumptions about the relationship between future economic growth and emissions, although we do not yet know where that growth will come from, and ministers from both levels of Government have spent the past few years telling us that the link between economic growth and carbon emissions has been broken. Surely there is a great big question in the middle of the whole topic.

There is some uncertainty, but we have factored it into our advice. The Scottish situation is very different to that in the UK. We advised the UK Government before the recession: we were not able to allow for the recession because of the timing, and now we have had the first UK budget. We have now said to the UK Government that it could address the situation through limited emissions reductions. We have almost moved the target and said, “Try to outperform that budget and don’t bank the outperformance because a lot of it is down to the recession.”

In Scotland’s case, because of the timing of the advice, we were able to allow for the recession. Our emissions projections built in the lower gross domestic product in 2008-09 and what we expect to happen to GDP in 2010-11. I agree that there is uncertainty. Have we modelled 2009 correctly, considering the impact of the recession? We are examining that in the context of our report to the UK Parliament in June, in which we will try to understand the proper impact of the recession.

However, despite that uncertainty, the initial analysis is that we more or less got the impact of the recession right in terms of the order of magnitude. We are reasonably confident about our projections, although there could be some tweaking.

Establishing the impact of the recession in Scottish terms is difficult because there is a significant lag in the emissions data—at the moment, we do not have 2009 data. The projection is based on the best information that we have about emissions in 2009, so there might be a need for some updating.

I am grateful for those points, which we will no doubt have the opportunity to raise in debate with ministers.

We all understand the practical reality of lead-in times, and how many years it takes for policies that we put in place to deliver cuts. However, there has already been lead-in time. Before the legislation was even introduced to Parliament, the current Administration had a 3 per cent annual target as part of its policy. It has had years in which to start getting policies in place that would achieve anything even approaching that level of cuts, but that lead-in time has not been used. My concern is that this committee will end up passing a set of targets that will, essentially, be for the next Administration to deliver, and that the next Administration—whether it is from a different party, from the same party, and whether it is a coalition Government or whatever—will come in and say, “Well, this leap to 9 per cent is very difficult; we’d better have another look at it,” and will come up with another set of unexpected circumstances that will enable it to defer action again, until it again becomes the next Administration’s job. The point of annual targets was to tie each minister to responsibility for their actions while they were in office.

Do you agree that there is a huge risk that the approach that is proposed will allow that kind of trajectory on the part of Government?

We said in our report that the only practical thing that we have to go with is the bunker fuel methodology for measuring shipping emissions, which is then allocated, at Scotland level, on the basis of port activity. We suspect, however, that bunker fuels are not by any means a perfect measure of underlying shipping emissions. An activity-based measure would be better, but we do not have such a measure. We can only do what is practical and acknowledge that it is an area that we need to keep under scrutiny. It is an area in which we are moving forward; the Department for Transport is considering alternative measurements. You have to prepare to bring a new measurement into the thinking in Scotland.

The direction in which that will move will probably suggest that you need to look for even more emissions reductions in other sectors of the economy. However, let us be open minded—I do not know that it will take five or 10 years to develop the thinking on the methodology for shipping emissions. As I said, work on that is on-going at UK, Europe and international levels. We are very close to that work, and next year we will review international shipping emissions, and will tackle the issues head on. We will draw out the implications for Scotland, as appropriate.

Does that kind of work rely on international agreement? Could we move forward with it here in Scotland or within the UK and Europe?

I have a final quick question on something that I was surprised to find was not included in the report. It seems to me that there is very little in the report on the wider social and cultural aspects of the transformation that is required in the short and long terms. I refer to people’s expectations about how we should live our lives. The recent volcanic ash cloud incident provided good examples. I lost track of the number of people who told stories about how they were “trapped” in London. They were not trapped in London—one can get a train from London very easily, so nobody had to accept being trapped there. The issue is about the kind of cultural leadership that is required to get in among expectations about consuming and travelling ever more. There seems to be very little in the report about what we can easily do collectively at community level to reduce transport demand, such as car sharing and food collectives. There seems to be very little about cultural and community action in the report.

We look forward to hearing about that in written form and—I hope—in future oral evidence to the committee. I thank you both for your time in answering questions. We will suspend briefly to allow the changeover of witnesses.

15:22 Meeting suspended.

15:24 On resuming—

We have had an on-going discussion about the amount of time and staff resources that are available to the CCC to look at specifically Scottish issues. How has the scrutiny that CCC members brought to the matter played out? How well informed are CCC members of the Scottish perspective as they perform their role in looking at, guiding and ultimately signing off a report on the Scottish picture?

The starting point for a realistic trajectory for emissions is the evidence base, which comprises two parts. An emissions projection, baseline or reference case will come from the Department of Energy and Climate Change energy model for CO2 or another source for agricultural and non-CO2 emissions, for example. The other part of the evidence base is an assessment of the potential across each of the sectors that emit carbon or greenhouse gases. We have a buildings model, a transport model and an agriculture model. We drew on those models, which incorporate Scottish components, and disaggregated them to the Scottish level from the United Kingdom level in different ways, depending on the model—it could have been done on the basis of population or economic activity, depending on the measure. We then brought in various specialists through various consultancy assignments to help us to ensure that the disaggregation adequately reflected the Scottish situation.

We approached the matter in two ways. We divided up the building of the evidence base between the secretariat at the Committee on Climate Change and officials who work for the Scottish Administration, who developed certain things that fed back into the evidence base. The work on assessing abatement potential was led by Scottish Government officials. There was a reaching-out process and discussion with the various people who are active in the area.

We have been up to Scotland regularly, and I have talked to various groups, such as the 2020 delivery group, which is led by Ian Marchant. We have talked about ideas at that level.

So there have been two different kinds of input. There has been direct input through, for example, my conversations, and input via the work that the Scottish Government delivered to us, which was incorporated into our thinking.

No.

On the previous occasion when I answered questions from the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee, it was pretty apparent that we had not explored in detail how we would work with the Scottish Government. After that, we went away and had detailed discussions about how we could leverage the limited resources on both sides, bring in other experts and come up with advice. We have been successful, in that our report represents a major piece of work that we were able to produce using our resourcing, extra money for consultancy, which was given to us by the Scottish Government, and input from the Scottish Government side and consultancy projects in that context.

There is a lot to do in Scotland, and there is potentially an important role for us. The fact that we have managed to deliver our report gives me confidence that we can continue to play a role. For example, I am confident that we can give you advice on the cumulative budget, either at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year, and I am confident that we will be able to give you reports on progress on reducing emissions under the 2009 act. Subject to discussions on resourcing, there is scope for us to take on additional specific requests, for example on additional emissions reduction potential or policies and the risks that are associated with them.

In the Scottish context, what factors are key to reducing emissions in the traded sector?

There are two aspects to what can be done now in the traded sector. Let us differentiate between power generation in the traded sector and the other energy-intensive industries. There are important opportunities in both areas, at UK and at Scotland level. We said in the report that it is important that, as part of Scotland’s path towards the 2050 emissions reduction target of 80 per cent, there is early decarbonisation of the power sector and then extension of low-carbon power generation to other sectors, notably transport and heat.

There is a good opportunity to reduce emissions in the Scottish power sector through investment in renewables. The immediate and larger-scale opportunities are in onshore and offshore wind, but there is an opportunity in marine, which we are exploring. As part of our advice on the fourth carbon budget and our review of low-carbon research and development, we are considering marine in more detail. We can carry out additional work to draw out the implications for Scotland.

14:15

Another important opportunity to reduce emissions is through carbon capture and storage in power generation. That is for coal—for example, the Longannet project has good potential—but there will be an increasing focus on gas CCS. That has not been talked about so much, but there is an opportunity through Scottish and Southern Energy’s gas CCS demonstration project. That has good potential. I envisage Scottish applications for the second phase of the competition for demonstration funding, under the recently passed Energy Act 2010.

Scotland can do a lot on renewables, both in facilitating planning applications and in de-bottlenecking the transmission network, whether onshore or offshore.

The main opportunity in the energy intensive industries is energy efficiency improvement. There is a question about how much of that has already been unlocked, given that the European Union emission trading scheme provides an incentive. However, more can probably be done, so we would expect emissions reductions in that sector. Once we have the renewable heat incentive, there will be scope for the deployment of renewable heat, such as biomass boilers, in the energy intensive sectors that are in the traded sector in Scotland.

To sum up, there is a great opportunity to reduce emissions from power generation through renewables and CCS. In other energy intensive industries, the opportunities arise through energy efficiency improvement and renewable heat measures.

That is an underexplored issue in the UK and beyond. We certainly know that we need to do something, because we cannot continue with the current level of emissions from energy intensive industries such as the oil refining, cement, iron and steel—there is not a big iron and steel industry here, but there is elsewhere—and chemical industries. We need to address that. We cannot achieve our aims for 2050 with the current level of emissions in those industries. What is the answer? As I have said, there is scope for the use of renewable heat in some of those industries. CCS will be a big part of the solution. We need to explore seriously the use of CCS in cement and iron and steel works. There are other solutions that do not involve CCS.

To be totally frank about our evidence-base at the Committee on Climate Change, we have not investigated those radical shifts in technology such as CCS in the energy intensive industries. However, we are doing that in the context of the fourth carbon budget advice to the UK Government. That advice is more about the vision for the whole of the 2020s rather than the specific period of the fourth budget, which is for 2023 to 2027. By the end of this year, which is when we have to publish the fourth budget advice, we will come back with a view on energy intensive industries and the more radical technology shifts, including CCS and other technologies. Again, once we have that evidence base at the UK level, we can draw out the implications for Scotland.

That is the direction in which things are moving, but I cannot say where the policy will end up. There was an amendment to the UK Energy Bill as it went through Parliament that allowed the financing mechanism—the levy on consumers—to fund not only coal CCS but gas CCS. It is an open question at the moment, but there is an important role for gas CCS because it is a low-capital cost plant among the low-carbon generation mix so it is an attractive, flexible option. We will need that flexibility. Gas CCS will be demonstrated sooner or later in the UK and elsewhere and it will be part of the balanced low-carbon generation story that we need in the 2020s.

People from CIFAL Findhorn have made presentations to us about a hydrogen superhighway that would involve organisations such as the Royal Mail, which is working up vehicles that can be powered by hydrogen, although starting with smaller vehicles, of course. It is most useful to hear such things.

You mentioned earlier that planning is a potential hazard for renewable energy developers. We know that much of that hazard relates to onshore wind developments. Would you recommend a UK-wide guide for local authorities or that there should be a power to override local decisions on the development of wind power?

Obviously, action to reduce emissions can affect competitiveness. How would you advise the Scottish Government to assess and address the effects on competitiveness in the non-traded sector?

Early certainty and determining policy changes would be helpful.

The general approach of the Committee on Climate Change is not to try to tell Governments what to do, which is why we set out a number of options rather than saying, “This is the way forward, according to the Committee on Climate Change.” There is a range of things that can be done in order to meet the targets, and we advised that the targets could be adjusted, that credits could be bought and so on.

The committee’s position is that the target is achievable if the European Union moves from the 20 per cent target to the 30 per cent target, as that tightens the situation with regard to the traded sector and requires it to make a bigger contribution while requiring the non-traded sector to make a smaller contribution. We did not say that the target was not achievable if there were no European tightening; we said that more work had to be done to identify potential. We suggested that one area in which there might be potential—perhaps there is more than we hinted at—is peatland restoration.

The target is achievable, particularly if the EU moves. However, the focus must be on putting in place the policies that will drive the emissions reductions that will make these targets realistic in practice. At the moment, they are ambitious, and the strategies that are in place are not fully credible. We need new policies that give us more confidence.

First, how to get from 2020 to 2050, which is the missing part of the equation, is not a no-brainer. We have a path to 2020, but we do not know the shape of the path that will take us to where we want to get to by 2050. Will it be a straight line? Will it be a curve, based on equal annual percentage emissions reductions? If it is the latter, you are looking at emissions reductions of the order of 3 per cent every year from 2020 to 2050, which is not that different from the path going to 2020, beyond 2012. Is that a radical departure? No, although staying with that 3 per cent reduction every year until 2050 is challenging.

It might be that it is not appropriate to be on that path from 2020 to 2050. I am not in a position to say what the appropriate path might be. As I say, the question involves a major piece of work, which we are fully engaged in. We will not be in a position to report back on it until the end of this year. It was not practical for us to advise you on that major piece of work within the timeframe of this report.

14:45

Has it not been a trend over the past decade or two that the outliers become the principal source of wisdom on the subject? Come to it, has that not been a trend over the past 20, 30 or 40 years?

What needs to happen to meet the targets beyond what is recommended in the advice that your committee has given the Scottish Government?

We have touched on that. There has to be a national energy efficiency programme that covers a range of measures—not just the simple measures of cavity wall and loft insulation but solid wall insulation, thermostatic valves on radiators, smart meters and so on. There has to be a renewable heat policy, which we do not have at the moment, although we are moving towards it.

There will be a lag before people are confident at scale to say that they will have an air-source or ground-source heat pump in their home, or a biomass boiler, rather than an oil boiler. That is a key, challenging area. We are moving forward, but there is more to do.

On efficient vehicles, the evidence suggests that people are buying more efficient new cars in the recession, but there is a lot to do before we can be confident that we are on the right trajectory there. That involves fiscal levers on one hand and developing the electric car store on the other. It requires funding for the purchase of the electric cars and the battery charging network, which it will take time to put in place. I do not think that anyone will buy an electric car before they are confident that they can charge it if the battery runs out when they go on the shopping run.

In agriculture, there is the softly, softly approach of providing information, advice and encouragement. There is a question about whether that will be enough to trigger the significant changes that we need in that area. We need new policies across the piece.

In the power sector, going beyond the non-traded sector, we have been clear that the electricity market arrangements need to be changed if they are going to drive massive low-carbon investment through the 2020s. That is relevant to you because it will impact on Scotland, particularly on investments in renewables and CCS.

15:00  

So, it might be better in some instances to miss the target than to purchase carbon credits because the money could then be used in a different and more sustainable way in the longer term. That might be politically difficult, but it would be more sustainable.

We are getting into political judgments that go beyond our remit. Whether it is a good use of Scottish taxpayers’ money to buy credits in the global carbon market is not for me to answer, but the Scottish Government’s entering the carbon market and buying large amounts of credits is not really what we had in mind. Given that the 80 per cent target will have to be achieved largely through domestic emissions reductions, and because you now have opportunities to make such reductions at low cost in Scotland, the focus should be on that and not on the purchase of credits.

That means that we cannot be sure that the 2.5 per cent cut is a cut at all.

We do not know the figures for 2009 emissions—those data are unavailable—so we have to accept that there is uncertainty. However, as I said, we are reasonably confident that we have modelled the 2009 emissions correctly. We have also modelled economic growth coming out of 2009 and going forward to trend growth in 2011 or 2012. That is why we have not suggested that there will be significant cuts in the next two or three years. The evidence suggests that no one—in Scotland or elsewhere—has broken the link between economic activity, economic growth and emissions growth. That is evident in what has happened in the recession. At UK level, there has been a massive reduction in emissions as a result of the recession, but we expect emissions to pick up again after the recession. That is why Government has to have policies that will offset the impact of economic growth over the next two or three years.

I take the point. I am aware that we are running over time and that there are a few more questions to come. I will leave the matter with a final comment for you to think about.

This is a hugely important period in the development of the Committee on Climate Change’s stance. How bullish and critical is it willing to be, not only of the issues that are within its formal remit but of other areas? How ready is it to stray beyond its remit and to tell all levels of government what they need to hear?

With that, we will move on.

We all hope that.

Do you have any insight into how well advanced the methodology is for measuring emissions from shipping?

What alternative methodologies are being looked at? Clearly, it will be essential to discuss those.

There is a risk that bunker fuel estimates do not capture all the shipping emissions for the UK. Many ships travel to the UK with fuel on board and leave with fuel, so they do not bunker here. How can we get around that problem? Without going into detail, if we understood how many miles a ship had travelled in coming to the UK and what proportion of the ship’s cargo was accounted for by the UK, we could calculate what the UK emissions would be, then allocate those to the Scottish level using the methodology that we used in our report to allocate the bunker fuel emissions. That is a high-level way forward. Detailed and complex technical work is going on in that area.

There are certainly some lifestyle things in our scenarios. For example, we have the smarter choices initiatives, which are about car sharing and moving on to public transport. The recommendation that people turn down their thermostats by one degree is also in the scenarios. People need to start doing that kind of thing if the 42 per cent target is to be met. There are big questions about lifestyle for the next 10 years and beyond. We said in our aviation review that we cannot plan to fly more as we get richer over the next four decades. We can possible fly a bit more, but no more than that. So, we have tackled the lifestyle aspect.

There is a question about what happens in the food sector. It is a difficult area in which we get into questions about diet and the very high emissions that are associated with red meat. We are thinking about that in the context of the fourth budget advice.

There is a range of issues in the report. It is true that we did not get into what community-level levers might trigger behavioural responses and lifestyle changes. That area is interesting to us, but it is very difficult. There is no silver bullet that will get people to act differently. That area pushes up against the boundary of analysis and gets into the policy space. We are finding out where we want to be—this kind of answers the previous question—in that policy space. We must draw the line somewhere, because we do not exist to develop detailed policies. However, we need to take a view on what incentives will drive the step change that we need, so we must talk about policies. There is therefore stuff in the report about which we will say more in our reports this year and beyond.

Good afternoon, everybody. The committee had three or four discussions about the report over a number of months. We discussed the scoping of the work and how we would approach it. Then, there was a discussion on progress and on developing the work, one on starting to bring together what we wanted to say, and one to sign off on the report.

A full-time analyst seconded from Scotland worked on developing the analysis and drafting the report, and they were able to draw on a whole range of resources from across our team. I have not accounted for that, but there was a significant input in various areas, be it energy and buildings, transport, the power sector, agriculture or whatever. It was a team effort that was co-ordinated by the seconded Scottish person. A senior person worked with the secondee—they worked as a team—and that was the core team that drafted the report. They also worked closely with me. A great deal of my time was taken up with putting the report together.

The job was easier because, although the report is specific to Scotland, in the United Kingdom context we have developed a way of thinking about these issues in respect of, for example, identifying emissions reduction potential, framing climate change objectives and working down to the national level in respect of what an appropriate contribution is. We have an analytical framework, which we were able to apply to the situation in Scotland. Obviously, CCC members are up to speed on the analytical framework, because they have been part of the process of developing it.

The CCC’s discussions were on the specifics of the situation in Scotland. The three or four discussions that we had on the Scottish report were about how we apply the framework to the Scottish situation. The specific issues that we were thinking about in the case of Scotland include the fact that you have your 42 per cent target to start with; it is not the same as the UK, where we currently have a 34 per cent target. There was an issue about how you treat the traded sector when there is not an emission trading scheme cap explicitly for Scotland. There was also an issue about understanding the implications of including aviation and shipping. We had to consider a range of issues in a bit more detail in the Scottish context than we had in the UK context.

Obviously, there would have been a reasonable amount of dialogue with the Scottish Government in the process, but how much dialogue was there with other organisations or contacts? I presume that there was contact with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, academics, non-governmental organisations and perhaps with others to inform the process of developing the report.

Have you used any other contacts or organisations—particularly Scottish organisations—as resources to inform the development of the work?

Not directly, but we could give you a list of the organisations that the Scottish Government has talked to, which would be indirect resources for us. We would have to come back to you on that.

The Scottish Government recently published a discussion paper, “Towards a Low Carbon Economy for Scotland”, and work is going on to produce not just ministerial orders and documents that are signed off by the Parliament, but a host of policy measures throughout Government. How is the UK Committee on Climate Change feeding into that work? What goes on between the committee and the Scottish Government to inform the development of work in the area?

You said that the CCC had had about four meetings on the report and that you had had a secondee from the Scottish Government. Will you be able to cope with matters that the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 covers? The 2009 act is new legislation and we are not even a year down the line, but during the passage of the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill concern was expressed in this committee and in the Parliament that your capacity to deal with the Scottish legislation might be quite limited. That is not a criticism of you, but it might reflect the reality. Will you explore that issue with us? Might a time come when you would go back to the Scottish Government and ask for another secondee? Do you need more resources, so that you can meet the demands of the 2009 act?

I will try to pick my way through some of those points. I am interested in how we handle places such as oil refineries and cement works, which are common to the industrialised economies of many countries. Our oil refineries and the cement works near Dunbar are some of the biggest emitters in the sector. Is there evidence from other parts of the UK or Europe on how we are moving towards making them emit less and be more sustainable?

That would be helpful. Like Longannet, the Peterhead gas-fired plant is well placed to take part in carbon capture and storage, but it lost out on funding at an earlier stage that would have allowed it to be involved straight away. Will your evidence allow us to make a stronger case for getting the funding to trial CCS, both from a coal plant and a gas plant?

As I said, there are things that we have not looked at in enough detail to take a committed position on; CCS in energy-intensive industry is one and hydrogen is another. In our 2008 report advising on the 80 per cent target for the UK, we said that, at a minimum, hydrogen would have niche applications. For example, you can imagine heavy goods vehicles or buses running on hydrogen, although it might have wider uses. At the moment, electric cars and vans are more promising because of the practicalities and economics.

We are thinking about such matters in developing our vision for the 2020s. We are focused on that and will take a more detailed view on hydrogen. Currently, hydrogen is not plan A and I do not think that it will be deployed widely across the transport sector, but I would not rule it out and it is certainly good to have it as a plan B. It might become plan A in the future as we learn more about it. Watch this space: there will be a discussion of hydrogen use in transport in the report that we will publish later this year.

That is helpful, given your position at the moment.

We are undertaking an inquiry into the integration of land use planning and transport policy, which you recommend in your report as a measure that might contribute to a reduction in emissions. Will you explain your thinking on that?

Absolutely. There are broader issues. Our legal mandate is to focus on carbon budgets and carbon emissions. We can say unequivocally that there are ways of designing new developments that keep emissions down, but those may conflict with broader political objectives. It is not our mandate to consider such objectives, but a Government will want to consider them. At the end of the day, you may make a political judgment to increase emissions because you have a different objective that you do not want to trade off. We have simply set out the emissions story. Before a political judgment is made on that, there should be debate and discussion that takes full account of all of the transport emissions aspects of new development.

I have a final question about emissions. On page 40 of the report “Scotland’s path to a low-carbon economy”, which was published in February, you suggest:

“There may also be some areas, for example peat restoration, that are relevant at the Scottish level, even though the emissions savings are relatively small at the UK level, and which therefore do not feature in our scenarios.”

Are you aware of the developing arguments about investment to sequester peat, which looms quite large in terms of emissions if it releases CO2? Scotland, with about 80 per cent of the peat in the UK, could benefit far more than you say, because a large proportion of transport emissions could be matched by the retention of CO2 in peat, so it would be helpful for us to focus on that.

That is consistent with what we have said, although there may be a bigger opportunity than we think. We are following discussions as they unfold here. We can get involved in the area, if we are asked to do so. We have said that peat restoration is an opportunity to close any gap in efforts to meet the 42 per cent target—for example, if the EU does not move from 20 to 30 per cent. It is an important area that should be seriously considered.

The approach in the UK has been to say that we have policies in place that will deliver something. As you know, carbon emissions reduction targets are the policy that delivers energy efficiency improvements, cavity wall insulation, loft insulation and so on. At European level, there are voluntary agreements on new car emissions, which will deliver something over the next two or three years. However, we can get only so far under the current policies; that is the reason for the step change. In the years for which we have final data—2003 to 2007—we did not achieve massive emissions reductions. Under current policies, we would not expect to achieve the step change—the 3 per cent annual emissions reductions—that we need.

We have identified several key policies that need to be introduced. The first is a national programme for energy efficiency improvement, which would be underpinned by some key principles. Those include a whole-house approach, an energy audit for all houses to identify the opportunities that exist and a one-stop shop that brings householders into contact with people who will provide finance and people who will renovate their property. That work is to be done on a neighbourhood basis and a financing mechanism—pay as you save, the current mechanism or a hybrid of the two—is to be put in place.

Secondly, we say that there should be crunchy levers, which might include differentiated vehicle excise duty, to drive down new car emissions. The electric car story is really important for us. Electric cars are the most promising option at the moment for decarbonising transport emissions in the 2020s. We can start to roll out that option over the next three years. There is funding in place to cover the extra cost of electric cars, but the key barrier to their introduction is that we need a charging network. We think that addressing that is a job for Government.



There is little renewable heat in any sector in the United Kingdom, whether residential, commercial or industrial. New policies are required in that area. We have the draft renewable heat incentive, together with complementary levers. When that is in place, it will drive significant improvement. We have picked agriculture as well. We did not talk about that in our 2009 report, but we will come back to it in our June report to the UK Parliament. There is a great opportunity in agriculture, but it will not unlock itself. The agriculture industry will need incentives to take up its significant emissions reduction opportunities. There is a whole new set of policies.

Alison McInnes referred to the policies that we can have in place over the next three years. We can develop those policies. However, given the lead time for what are pretty fundamental changes that often require legislation, they will not kick in and drive the step change and the big emissions reductions until the period beyond 2013. We can expect to see some delivery under current policies. We factored that into our emissions projections and the annual targets on which we advised you. The focus now should be on developing the new policies that will drive the big cuts, but they will take time to develop and implement.

There is of course an amazing opportunity for industry to make headway, if it grasps it.

What is the role for Government?

Yes.

Our view is that, in all the different areas, the low-carbon economy will not create itself; it cannot be a bottom-up process. Industry and business are ready to go. For example, I talk to the 2020 delivery group in Scotland, which is very keen to do things, but it needs the signals and the rules of the game to be set out clearly by Government. The job for Government is to provide confidence in the direction of travel for the economy, and then industry and business can respond. We are not quite there in terms of the rules of the game being clearly set out and the direction of travel being clear to investors so that they feel confident about putting potentially large amounts of money into some parts of the economy.

It is all about certainty, although it is not about providing business with so much certainty that there is no risk at all. You have to find the right balance between certainty and risk, but that balance could be changed from the current situation, and I think that we could do with less uncertainty.

Chapter 5 of your report sets out a range of options for meeting the emissions targets. One of those involves adjusting the emissions reduction target. Could you outline the three alternatives that you suggest, and reflect on whether some adjustment of that sort will be needed?

On cumulative emissions, you said earlier that it would be premature to consider a cumulative budget. I am bewildered by that. The provisions of the act have not been met—no one has done what the act requires be done, which has left the Government in a difficult position. The act states:

“Scottish Ministers must, when setting annual targets, also have regard to ... the objective of not exceeding the fair and safe Scottish emissions budget ... the ‘fair and safe Scottish emissions budget’ is the aggregate amount of net Scottish emissions for the period 2010–2050 recommended by the relevant body as being consistent with Scotland contributing appropriately to stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

Forgive me for reading all that out, but it is important to state what the act says.

Is it fair to say that the situation is the wrong way round? Is there not a danger that your assessment of what is a fair and safe cumulative budget will come out much smaller than what is implied by your current approach, which would mean that much more radical action is required in order to meet the act’s requirements from 2020 onwards?

It is entirely possible that your straight-line trajectory will be calculated to be acceptable under the terms of whatever cumulative budget you come up with but, until the budget has been calculated, we will not know the merits of that. You have failed to provide advice on the matter to us as MSPs, never mind to the Government, so it is difficult for us to judge whether the Government is in the right ball park and is complying with the act. I am concerned about that. Why will it take you until the end of the year? What advice will you give the Government if the budget is smaller at the end of the process than you anticipated?

If your question is whether 42 per cent is ambitious enough and whether it leaves you enough headroom beyond 2020, let me turn that round. It is hard to see how you could do more than what you are aiming to achieve at the moment, so I do not believe that there is any mileage in raising the target from a 42 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 to something more ambitious, because I do not believe that you will have the opportunity to deliver that. You will have the opportunity to make deep emissions cuts in the 2020s because, during that time, you can decarbonise the power sector, take a lot of the emissions out of transport, make a lot of headway with renewable heat, and start to transform the agriculture sector.

It seems plausible that you can reach 42 per cent and then have the radical decarbonisation throughout the 2020s and beyond that will deliver on the cumulative budgets. I would not imagine that we will advise you towards the end of this year or early next year that 42 per cent is not high enough and that it does not leave enough headroom for activity after that. However, as I have said, developing a vision for the 2020s is a big piece of work and not something that we could do within the tight timeframe of the advice that we are giving you.

We spent a lot of time during our consideration of the bill saying that we must be led by the science, but we are not being given the science that would help us to determine whether we are on the right path. I am grateful to Friends of the Earth for its work on what a fair and safe budget would entail. It has drawn on research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. That work is alarming because it suggests that, if we look at what might be our share of a safe budget and make a conservative estimate of what is remaining, a 3 per cent trajectory year on year ends up with our emitting twice as much as would be left for us under a fair and safe budget.

It is urgent work that we need to do. That is the key point that I want to make.

On the timescales, one of the key challenges that we face is the lead-in time that you are talking about. Is that taken account of in the work that you have done on your targets? On the Scottish Government’s targets, the main challenge that we face in not being able to bring them forward is the lead-in time for policy and consultation that would be required to ensure that we engage the public and that we have something workable.

You might have touched on this earlier, but you will have seen the Scottish Government’s assessment that the advice from your committee does not fully take into account the effects of some of the policies that have been introduced. Is that what you were referring to in an earlier answer when you said that the Government thinks that it can go further than the committee has suggested?

Yes. That is consistent with our advice. We said what we thought was achievable, which we were confident about. We know that there are other areas. Take for example the Scottish home energy assistance package. On the energy efficiency front, there was possibly scope to add something to what you get from CERT and the community energy saving programme. We had not looked in detail at the boiler scrappage policy, which now appears to be a good opportunity in Scotland.

The other area that I mentioned was transport. We identified that there was scope, in a reasonably short time, to get some people travelling on public transport rather than in their cars.

We hinted that there was an opportunity in those areas. That is the basis for what the Scottish Government said underpinned its 0.5 per cent annual emissions reductions. I am confident that you could more or less deliver that 0.5 per cent, although I have not looked at the analysis of those specific policies. Could you go beyond it? Could you do the things for which you need new policy levers, which you do not have at the moment? I would not be confident about that.

Let us move on to access to carbon units. The Government has, against the Committee on Climate Change’s advice, ruled out the use of carbon units from 2010-12. What is your opinion on that?

We have not tried to assess the historical performance of the Scottish Government. We took the situation as we found it, and decided that there should be new policies to drive the big emissions reductions.

If you focus only on targets for emissions reductions, you could end up with every Government passing the buck to the next Government because there is a lead-in time and a lag before the emissions reductions happen, or do not happen. The way around that, which we have done at UK level, is to say that emissions reductions will be only part of the framework for assessing progress on reducing emissions against carbon budgets, and that we will put a lot more effort into consideration of leading indicators and into asking what we have to do now to drive emissions reductions in the future. Our progress report last year was not about emissions reductions in 2009 and 2008—it was about what we have to do in the next five years to be confident that we are on track. If we do not do those things, we will end up reporting that we are not on track to meet the carbon budgets and that the Government is failing in its duties under the Climate Change Act 2008.

The focus of the report to the UK Parliament that we will publish in June 2010 will be partly on emissions and the impact on them of the recession, but it will be mostly about the implementation of measures and the progress that is being made in development of a policy framework that we can be confident will drive the emissions reductions that we need in two or three years. That holistic way of judging the process holds the Government to account not just for emissions this year but for policies that will drive emissions in the future. We think that that is the appropriate way to address the problem.

I would like to hear the answer to those questions, but I will turn to aviation and shipping, which might be even more difficult.

The Scottish Government has opted to follow the advice of the Committee on Climate Change and to use a multiplier of 1 for emissions from aviation. Although it is clear that the science in this area is still subject to development, how do you feel about recommending a multiplier of 1, knowing that the effects are likely to be more significant? Can you offer us any assurances that more accurate estimates of an appropriate multiplier are likely to be available soon? If so, can you say how soon?

Several issues are important when we are discussing the non-CO2 effects of aviation and shipping. We should be clear that both areas will probably need to be approached in different ways—you might have a multiplier of more than 1 for aviation and less than 1 for shipping, given the sulphates aspect, for example.

On aviation, the science is uncertain. We are confident that the effects that we are concerned about exist and that they are warming effects on top of the CO2 effects. However, we do not really understand them—that is truer of condensation trails and cirrus clouds than it is for NOx aspects, although there is more that we can learn about them, too.

There are lots of ways of measuring non-CO2 effects. There is the global warming potential convention that is used for other CO2 gases, but it is not clear that that is the right thing for the non-CO2 effects such as contrails and cirrus clouds, because the impact of contrails lasts for only a short time. Even if we were comfortable with the science around that—which we are not, because it is uncertain—there is no consensus around what metric should be used to include those effects in a framework. As we get a sense of what metric to use, we will need an international framework. We want to mitigate the impacts; for example, NOx emissions can be reduced through aircraft design. However, an international framework is needed in order that we can pull through aircraft that strike the right balance between CO2 emissions and NOx emissions. That is not something that can be addressed at Scotland level. An international air-traffic management regime could mitigate impacts in respect of contrails and cirrus clouds. You have limited opportunities to reduce emissions in relation to those non-CO2 effects, which could be mitigated through international agreements.

Use of a multiplier other than 1 would mean raising the level of Scotland’s ambition beyond the 42 per cent target, which is at the boundary of what we think is achievable. That could undermine the credibility of Scotland’s framework. That framework is really good: there is an opportunity for Scotland to demonstrate that it is possible to build a low-carbon economy and to prosper. However, the higher your ambition, the greater the risk that you will shoot yourself in the foot and lose the opportunity to develop a credible approach.

On how quickly the science will develop, I think that we are looking at five-year and 10-year timeframes for the science to develop and for it to come into the international thinking on the issue. We have been pushing for that. In our advice to the UK Government on the international context, we have said that we need to move forward. International discussions must acknowledge the non-CO2 effects, which they have not done so far. There has been a bit of discussion of the issue at Europe level, but not at a global level. We will push the UK Government to get those matters on the international agenda, but that will take some time. I would not expect anything in the next year or two. I hope that the timescales will be five and 10 years and not 20 and 30 years, which would be too late.



15:15

There are two answers to that question. If there is a better way of measuring shipping emissions, it can be reflected in the Scottish framework. However, mitigating shipping emissions must ideally have a global framework in order to provide incentives for ship producers to make more efficient ships for the shipping operators to run efficiently. If that cannot happen at global level, we would have to consider a European solution. I know that there is work being done in Brussels on looking at including shipping in the EU ETS, for example. A better way of measuring shipping emissions could be reflected early in the Scottish framework, but emissions reductions in shipping will need broader agreement.