Slater: Climate goals were fiction so ministers could pat themselves on the back

Scotland’s dropped climate targets were a “fiction” designed for the Government to “pat itself on the back”, a former minister has said.

Lorna Slater was one of two ministers – along with fellow co-leader Patrick Harvie – from the Scottish Greens appointed after the signing of the Bute House Agreement in 2021.

But after the Scottish Government’s pledges to reduce emissions by 75% by 2030 and to achieve net zero by 2050 were scrapped, it set off a chain of events which led to the coalition deal’s collapse and the resignation of then first minister Humza Yousaf.

Speaking to the Institute for Government (IfG) as part of a series of retrospective interviews with ministers, Ms Slater said the Greens “knew that those weren’t achievable targets” before they were passed.

The party abstained in the final vote on the proposals in 2019, but MSP Mark Ruskell tabled an amendment to increase the 2030 target to an 80% reduction in emissions.

Mr Ruskell said during the debate almost five years ago: “We will not stand in the way of the small steps of progress that have been made through the Bill, but we will not endorse a Bill that is preoccupied with distant targets but does nothing to deliver transformative action and does not go far enough for the critical period of the next 10 years.

“Time is running out and, although the targets in the Bill are eye-catching, they are not backed by anything that suggests that the status quo is being challenged.”

Speaking to the IfG in October in an interview released on Friday, Ms Slater said: “Maintaining targets that we knew we couldn’t hit and that everybody’s known for years that we weren’t going to hit was a fiction that allowed the Scottish Government to pat itself on the back and go, ‘Oh, we’ve got these fantastic targets’, while doing nothing.