‘Late and lightweight’ Green Industrial Strategy panned

Climate campaigners have panned the Scottish Government’s new Green Industrial Strategy as ‘late and lightweight.’  

There should have been a coherent plan to secure the benefits of the energy transition delivered years ago, with this document lacking in the policy so desperately needed. 

Campaigners have also raised serious concerns that the plans to ramp up carbon capture and import CO2 pollution from other nations risk turning the seas of Scotland into Europe’s carbon dumping ground. 

Friends of the Earth Scotland just transition campaigner Rosie Hampton commented,  

“The green industrial strategy is late and lightweight. It’s lacking the ideas, policy, concrete timelines, or the investment needed.  Whilst it recognises the enormous opportunity of the energy transition it is still resolutely backing climate losers in carbon capture and hydrogen from fossil fuels.  

“This strategy should have detailed plans for substantial investment in domestic renewables manufacturing and skills, expansion of publicly owned energy, and spell out how and where jobs would be created.  

“Instead the strategy’s “commercial first” approach to investment is a plea to big business to keep dictating the pace of the transition and extracting the lion’s share of the benefits.” 

“The big idea is to turn the sea off Scotland into Europe’s carbon pollution dumping ground. Carbon capture is a smokescreen pushed by the oil industry to try and hide the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels.  The Scottish Government are staking its economic future on the carbon capture technology that has failed around the world for 50 years.”