Home owners will have to be confronted with major challenges if Scotland is to meet its commitments on tackling climate change, the head of Scottish Power has warned.
Speaking to the World Forum on Climate Justice at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), Keith Anderson, the firm’s Chief Executive Officer, said there was general public support for greater measures to ensure targets on reducing CO2 emissions are achieved, but that may diminish when people understand the reality of the situation, he said.
“Try and convince someone just now to rip their gas boiler off the wall and install a more expensive system and tell them they have to pay for it and it’s for the greater good,” he said. “That’s a difficult sell - but that’s what we have to do.”
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, addressing the same event on Wednesday said decarbonisation would have an impact on every aspect of people’s daily lives. Launching a public conversation on climate justice, she said she wanted to understand what changes people were willing to make and what they would need to be persuaded to do.
Mr Anderson said that in terms of how we transport ourselves and heat our homes and businesses, that might mean costly adaptations, but suggested tax might be used to subsidise changes. “The full cost of energy bills is currently paid by the consumer. If all the costs go on customers bills that is effectively a very regressive tax system. Do you strip part of that cost out and share it through the tax system in a less regressive way? We can’t leave part of the country behind.”
However he also said there was a real prospect of a jobs dividend from efforts to tackle climate change. “There are phenomenal, fantastic opportunities for investors and the renewables sector in Scotland is going to create some world-class high-skilled engineering roles,” he said.
The conference, which is hosted by Elsevier and the GCU Centre for Climate Justice, is examining the need for fairness in tackling climate change, in recognition of the fact that many of the most harmful effects of global warming will be felt by countries and populations which have contributed least to the problem.
Benjamin K. Sovacool, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Sussex, said efforts to fix the problem would be counterproductive if wind farms providing ‘clean’ energy in rich countries were masking environmental damage caused by the production of steel or concrete for their manufacture in poorer countries. “We can’t treat transitions to a low carbon economy as if they are just happening in Scotland or London,” he said adding that technologies such as batteries electric cars might rely on extracting cobalt from the Congo, or illicit waste disposal in Ghana.
Mr Anderson said he believed in the power of markets and competition but they needed to be regulated to ensure climate goals were not undermined.
Tessa Ferry, of the Scottish Government’s Directorate for Energy and Climate Change said it was possible to achieve economic growth while transitioning to a low carbon economy. “It is possible to transition win a way which is just and fair. Scotland has already decarbonised by close to 50 per cent but grown the economy at the same time,” she said.
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