 Good morning and welcome both here in the room and following the event online via the Scottish Parliament's Facebook page to our event, Climate Change in Scotland 2050 Visions. It's great to be able to use technology to be able to bring this debate on climate change to a wider audience than that able to attend in person. This event is to mark climate week, a week for Scottish organisations to raise awareness of and inspire action on climate change. We're delighted to be joined by three Scottish creative thinkers who will take us through their visions of Scotland in 2050 from a climate change perspective, providing a different take on the debate compared to the usual voices. Once the three speakers are finished, we'll have a short time for questions from the audience, so please store up your questions for that point. We'll also take questions via the Twitter feed. Please tweet us at scottparall using the hashtag scottclimateqs. So, let me introduce our panel firstly, Mandy Haggath, who lives in a coastal wooded croft in Ascent in the north-west Highlands and works as a freelance writer and researcher. She's been awarded two Scottish Art Council Writers Bursaries and a Creative Scotland Artist Award, and it has won and been shorted for several poetry competitions. In the summer of 2013, she was the poet in residence in the Royal Botanic Gardens and I hope she's going to bring together her creative work, writing skills and her vision for 2050. Our second speaker resides a little closer to here. He currently works at Edinburgh University teaching and carrying out research in the areas of Christian ethics, ecology and religious ethics and economy and ethics. He's published 12 books and over 70 academic papers and has a keen interest in the ethics of climate justice, Professor Michael Northcord. Our final speaker will be from Scotland's 2050 climate group, Scotland's Youth Climate Group, which is a collection of young professionals across the country who all share a commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation and accelerating Scotland's transition to a low-carbon economy. Sarah Knight has recently graduated with an MSc in ecological economics from the University of Edinburgh. She's currently working as a research analyst for an environmental consultancy, working on a project to raise environmental awareness within the oil and gas sector. Welcome to you all. Can I ask you, Mandy, to begin? Thank you very much, Graham. Thank you all very much for coming so early in the morning. I'm going to read you a few poems, starting with the very big and moving to the very small of climate change. I want to begin by reflecting on the fact that the climate has been changing since the earth was created and is in flux, but that, of course, the impacts of humans are changing the nature of that change. I'm going to begin by asking you to imagine the end of the last ice age. For me, an interesting thought is the fact that when the climate does change as we can look at the patterns from geology, sometimes it changes very rapidly indeed, and perhaps the impacts of our unprecedented change in CO2 levels might also trigger very, very rapid changes of this sort. Imagine the land covered in ice almost to the top of the mountains. Imagine the peaks of Cunyag, islands of rock in a sea of ice. Imagine it sparkling under stars, freezing in the night cold, crackling into crispness. Imagine the moon in a blue sky looking down on all that white. Imagine it thawing by morning, south faces softening. Imagine the sun burning through fog, melting its edges, weakening its hold on the land. Imagine warm wind gnawing at westerly slopes, corroding crystals. Imagine trickles of melting, a gurgle of bubbles in cracks, an insistent rub of fluid, widening slivers of sliding, slumping, slush. Imagine the collapse, an afternoon thunder of mountainside ice slides, a roar as trickles merge into torrents. Imagine the ice in motion, seething down to the coast, dragged west by gravity to the Atlantic ocean. Imagine how it would ground and scour, groan and crack. Imagine stones grabbed from crags and grasped from corners, loosened, freed, tumbling, snatched back by earth in erratic ways and places. Imagine water working its way under, lubricating the lower surface, loosening its grip, sending it, slipping along. Imagine it carving, icebergs teetering off into ocean journeys, glacial offspring doomed to a life of sea melt. Imagine great chunks of chill swept into the heaving sea. Imagine it wasting away, watering down, sweating and winnowing, drifting into wet breath. Imagine the smell of drying ground. Imagine the first signs of life, green moulds, algal scum, filaments of moss, a frond of lichen. Imagine the first windblown grass seed germinating in that spring of springs. Imagine the first bird. What I hope doesn't happen as a result of climate change is that we lose these guys. Polar bear. Low angled sun gleams through claret leaves and caribou lichens pale green in the first skiff of snow. A frozen hare watches the flight of a falcon and spruce fingers point where the winds will blow. Tamarack needles flutter and flurries of snowbuntings dart over flaming jade, bronze and copperleaved willow. Photographers get set to lie, to freeze frame your world, starched ice-bleached arctic, whitewashing your rainbow. Here you lie in the forest, a snoozing sumo wrestler under trees barely able to hold up the sky so heavy with snow. That was the polar bear I saw in the woods and I'm kind of worried that there might be less and less of the ice for the polar bears to live on. I'm very motivated by forests. I work a lot on forests and I think one of the issues that we really need to not forget about in the climate change debate is the massive importance of forests as carbon sinks globally and the ability that we have and the responsibility we have in this country to restore forests as much as possible to sequester carbon. But it's actually we need to remember that about 90% of all the forest products that we use in this country are coming from other people's forests, a rustle of leaves, good books and toilet rolls, felling ancient trees. I'll read another forest poem just a reminder of that. Some are dark hearts full of secrets of enslavement. Some dry and dangerous. Some alternately fly infested and freezing. Some damp and frail. But all spirit rich. Homes to folk with leaves in their eyes and mushrooms in their pockets. Who dream of chasing animals among branching shadows. For whom the future is a tree root that presses open rocks of the past. With whom all stems intertwine. In whom all saps and bloods and rivers mingle. Under whose power a single bud becomes an eye, a wing, a soul. Becomes the whole breathing planet. And I'll finish with one thought which is probably no matter what happens will still have these guys. Midges. A column of dancing midges winds like a single mosquito. Looking up each swarm member is bodyless movement etch a sketching on the sky. Two land stand. One little 12-legged trestle table. We know so little of the world. It's grey smudges. It's inscrutable stillness. Thank you, Mandy. Can I now invite Professor Michael Nautacott to make a contribution? Thanks very much again. It's great to have so many people here this area in the morning on such an inspiring topic because thinking about the future in hopeful ways I think is potentially very inspiring and I think one of the things we need in the climate change debate is visions of how doing the right thing by Mother Earth will also be good for us as a species and the species we share our country with. So my first sense when I think about Scotland 2050 is a hopeful one. Scotland committed itself to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in this Parliament in the 2010 Climate Change Act. We are on target to deliver the intended emissions reductions by 2020, not least because of Scotland's success in capturing wind into the national grid. I use on my little phone here an app from Noah, not so I'm Noah in the Bible, I'm Professor of Religion and Ethics but Noah is the North American Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they're a particularly wonderful app which can show you wind, rain, storms, hurricanes, whatever's coming at you and if you look at it every day it's quite evident that Scotland is one of the windiest places on earth and this particular capital is the windiest capital on earth of any nation. So it's a huge resource for us, we have great potential as a nation in renewable power and it's one of my great regrets that the English Government under David Cameron made the really extraordinary decision to limit the capacity of Scotland to add further onshore wind power to the national grid and to the UK's targets on greenhouse gas emissions because of course wind is our most valuable and economically viable form of indigenous power. There may be a bit of gas we can frack from under the ground though I'm opposed to fracking myself but we're an incredibly crowded island 65 million people, most of them crammed into the space below the tweed and the Solway Firth and if we start fracking in areas where people live so intensely the dangers of and risk to water pollution are extremely significant. So my feeling is that wind is very much part of the future and I feel very hopeful whenever I see a wind turbine and I was very I'm very pleased to see I'm starting to see letters in the daily telegraph from the times from engineers and others saying the same sorts of things. David Cameron said in the British Parliament that people don't like wind but something like 70-80% of people are now saying when they see a wind turbine they feel hopeful. Wind turbines are about doing the right thing by mother earth and by one another because wind is now the cheapest form of power from scratch, from commissioning to delivery in the United Kingdom, not the most expensive. If we consider also the climate effects of burning other sorts of fuel so I'm very hopeful that we will have a country which will be not 80% of fossil fuels by 2050 but 100%. I hope that we'll be contributing to the net global greenhouse gas emission reductions by producing not 100% of our energy but 120% or 150% and exporting it down to possibly by that stage another nation. I hope that we'll all be in the European Union again by then as well as perhaps separate members. So that's a little bit of my hope but alongside energy we also need to look at land. Huge areas of Scotland are owned by a very small number of people. We've never had a revolution in this country and so we've never had land reform as almost all of our European neighbours have. I used to live in Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia. All of these countries had land reform after the Second World War and as a result they became some of the most successful economies on earth because land reform redistributes the assets to the ordinary people and makes the wealth of the nation. We're sitting here in Adam Smith's room, makes the wealth of the nation available to the people. Alongside wind, land is a signal and underutilised asset of this nation of ours and to address our climate responsibilities one of the things we have to do is to get an active economy going again which is sustainable, which creates jobs locally, doesn't rely on huge amounts of shipping and by plane and so on bringing for example 90% of timber products in from around the world. So another of my hopes for the future is that we start to build buildings in this country in Scotland made of Scottish materials for example engineered wood grown in Scottish forests. That would of course mean that we would need to break up the biggest states. We would need mainly to end and I would love to see it the use of large areas of upland for sport by very rich people and to vote that land again to forests as most upland is devoted in mainland Europe. I've just come back from Vermont. Many Scots went to Vermont and cut the trees down and put sheep on the land. They then went west and the trees have grown back. There is now a huge forest industry in Vermont and it's a very important part of the economy of Vermont. So I'm also hopeful about the possibility that we will really genuinely reforest Scotland in the next 40 years, but we will also need land reform much more radical than we've had thus far in order to do that. Now the third area I think that we really need to think about in terms of climate change is our diet. We know that more than a third of greenhouse gas emissions comes from the food economy. We also know that Scotland imports a huge amount of food and not only from south of the border, but from other parts of the world. I travel perhaps more than it's good for the climate, but I do a lot of research in other countries and I was recently in South Korea. They've got all kinds of problems, as you know right now, in terms of security, but because of the situation that I've been in between Japan and China and now Japan and China are North Korea, they are incredibly resilient and self-reliant people and they grow all their own food. A lot of it is grown under tunnels. Now in South Korea the tunnels are to protect the food from the heat. As a grower myself here in Scotland I have an acre of vegetable land garden in the middle of the Baklua estate over in Dumfriesshire. Obviously the issues here are protecting food from cold rabbits pigeons and various other things that we gardeners have to face up to in the countryside, but it can be done. I therefore also expect that by 2050 we will look at the environment around our cities, competing differently to how we do now, rather more like Ebenezer Howard, imagine the garden city. I would love to see the whole of the central belt covered in vegetables, vegetable growing and vegetable gardens in cycle paths between the vegetable gardens and the city so people at weekends instead of feeling the need to fly to Prague or something would get on their bicycles with their children safely not encountering vehicles on their way and go out into the gardens where the city is producing its own food and teach their children about caring for the earth. It's completely possible that vision. It's not at all a pipe dream but it could only happen if we reform our land and tax system and in particular bring back land value tax into this country. We hugely under use the greatest resource other than wind that I've just already spoken of in this country in Scotland and that is land. The Dutch have a great deal less land than we do in Scotland and far less per person. They're the second largest agricultural exporters in the world. It's absolutely amazing what they do with the land they have and Scotland could be the largest agricultural exporter in the world. We have five million people on a land area the size of England and most of it is not used for growing food. Now you might say to me oh but it's it's difficult land to use. Well they're polytunals they're not terribly beautiful but they can be made to look better but if we really devoted ourselves as a nation to becoming self-sufficient in food, in fuel and in fibre which and here that the trees are so important fibre being for clothing and construction we would I think not just have got to zero net emissions we would have created a much more just and sustainable nation filled with jobs for migrants who will need to move to Scotland by 2050 because other parts of the world by then will be uninhabitable and Scotland's climate actually is going to get better because of climate change. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. Last but not least, Sarah Knight. So hello. When I was preparing for this session, I was sitting in my favourite cafe in Stockbridge having coffee and I thought about the title of 2050 vision and I thought it's really hard to imagine day in my life in 2050 so that's 33 years time, I'll be 59 years old, I'm sprouting several grey hairs and probably really worrying about the prospect of working for an extra 30 years because my pension has been ruined and I was flicking through the news app on my phone trying to think of ideas and I thought well what might this day exactly as I'm doing look in 2050? Well first of all my coffee would be a luxury good because coffee production is going to go down by 88% due to climate change by 2050 and then I thought about this potential headlines that would be coming up on my phone and I've picked out certain headlines which are based on certain projections that are happening just now. So there's been another extreme case of flooding as headline one. This doesn't come as a shock to me as this is quite a norm around the world just now. Areas which would have before had a 1% chance of having flooding every 100 years are now having extreme floods every 10 years or so. Headline two, fisheries lose another 10 billion dollars this year. Again this doesn't come as a shock as this has been happening every year. This is affecting livelihoods especially in developing countries and threatening food security. Headline three, the global economy loses more than 3.5% of its GDP. Again I'm not shocked by this, this has been happening every year for the last 20 years leading up to 2050 and with some countries losing as much as 11% of their GDP. And the last headline which is one I'm really really optimistic about is that Scotland finally wins a sick nation's rugby. So I'm sure I don't have to sit and tell everyone here the potential bad things that are going to be happening in the situation where we don't have any behavioural change and we work as business as usual. On a more civic level which might affect Scotland quite badly, there might be a certain level of a fractured society with a lot of blame being put on those who are currently in power in 2050 which is going to be my generation. Although this seems like a very pessimistic vision, it is a potential vision that I have if we don't change the way we live just now. And it's action now that we at the 2050 climate group whom I'm talking on behalf of today are working towards achieving. We are a youth-run charity with the aim of engaging, educating and empowering the future leaders in order to develop their skills and take action on climate change now. And one of the key ways we do this is through our young leaders development programme. So this falls in really well with the theme of today as it's trying to basically carve your way through into making your own 2050 visions become a reality. And through our programme we're trying to make a social movement. So through a series of modules and engagement events, we give our young leaders the skills and knowledge in order to lead their own movements. And this could be just personal changes to their habits or going to their local supermarket to ask for them to change a certain behaviour, approaching a policymaker to ask them to make more ambitious climate change policies or in starting up your own business. And the list goes on, but it's essentially about giving them the confidence to do something they may have otherwise felt unable to do, thinking of somebody further up and workable to do or I'm too young to make a big difference. So eventually our vision is that instead of ambitious climate change action being seen as a bit radical, it's going to be seen as a new norm. And this new normal means something different to everyone, but I see it as Scotland being a fair and very forward thinking and hopefully zero carbon country. And in order to get to these future visions you have to talk more about the plans and the process of getting there. So if you look up the definition of a vision that's not being able to tell the future, it's more about being able to have the foresight in order to plan for making your own future. So a few weeks ago, before getting told about this talk, I was chatting to my dad and he's quite old. He's born in 1937 in Edinburgh during World War II and I was asking him to describe just everyday habits of everyone. And he was essentially saying that every single person's behaviour and habits completely changed because of the war effort. So whether you were directly involved in the war, say volunteering or in the local armed forces, or whether you're completely disengaged and not interested at all, your habits had to change in order to survive. And this ranged from trying to grow your own food and being really, really careful with the amount of resources you had, which has also helped through the dig for victory movement. And this made me realise that this is probably the level of mobilisation we need in order to fight against climate change. So whether you're interested in the topic or you work in the topic or you don't really care at all, your habits and your actions do need to change and they need to change now. So it does seem quite like a hefty and sometimes quite daunting thought, the level of behavioural change that we need today. But it has happened and it has happened quite recently, quite successfully in Scotland. And one example is the 5p plastic charge for plastic bags. This is very simple and very effective, with bag usage going down by 95 per cent. And maybe this might suggest that Scottish people are a little bit stingy, but it also created a very rapid change in the way people saw a consequence of their actions. So whether or not you cared about the amount of plastic in the world, you were forced to change your habits. So climate change-related behaviour, behavioural change, I believe, is very achievable. People in my generation are going to be in positions of power by 2050, so running governments and heads of businesses and things. So in order to run a low carbon and sustainable economy in country, we need to have the skills and knowledge now in order to shape that future. So I don't really have much of a vision exactly how Scotland's going to look, but more about how it's going to be run. That every decision made, whether it's governmental, personal or business, will have climate change at the forefront of the decision making. So hopefully when I'm 59 and reflecting back on my old favourite cafe in Stockbridge about this talk, I'll be reading through my news headlines and seeing more positive headlines, or at least one's not quite so dramatic as I've read it before. Although I do hope that the one about the drug be does eventually come true. Thank you. Can I thank all of our speakers, as well as making thought-provoking contributions? All of these were succinct. MSPs in the room, please note. We now move to questions. The questions can be directed at all of the panellists or individual panellists, as you wish. I'm going to take questions from the floor in a moment, but we're going to start with one of the questions that's been received via Twitter. Yeah, so this question has come in from Twitter from Thomas McEwen. What should young people's priorities be if they want to positively affect climate change in the future? Sarah, do you wish to kick off? I suppose just trying to get, I mean, it depends what they mean by priorities on this line of work, but I suppose trying to get as much opportunities potentially within this work to try and get on, you know, to have more of a decision-based role. So that can be, you know, we encourage people to ask their employers to ask if they can be on the board, for example, or to be included in decision making things. In terms of priorities, I suppose being, well, you can get in touch with our charity and we can tell them all about it. And just, you know, there's loads and loads of opportunities out there and it's very, I say it, is like for youth to be engaged in stuff, it's very important to have a really fun and quite social kind of network as well with it. So it's probably about seeking out a good support network in order to take actions as well. Professor Northcott, how important are young people in driving a response to climate change? I think they're very important. I think this is why Michael Gove tried to stop them learning about climate change in school. He, of course, has been working for Roof and Murdoch for many years and Roof and Murdoch's papers have been spreading the message around the world, especially in the English-speaking world, and they wish to spread it through Sky Television as well quite soon when I gather, that climate science is a load of rubbish. And so he tried to get it off the curriculum in England and Wales. Why? And the same is happening in the United States. They're privatising schools in the United States in order to stop children being taught to care for the environment, in order to stop children being taught about climate science. So some people have got it, that if you teach children what adults are doing to the earth, it will change things eventually. It's hugely important to teach the next generation, but we have to teach them hopefully. For example, engage them in the way we run our primary and secondary schools in environmental change in the very buildings in which they're working and living. So if you just teach them bad news and don't give them ways to engage, as Sarah has also been saying, then you don't spread hope, you spread fear, and that's the last thing we want to do. We need to say, as I was trying to say in my little talk, that there is an upside to this. We can't live better with each other and the earth. We can join them up. I completely agree with what Michael Scott said. The first priority is to keep talking about it. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, discuss with everybody as much as possible. But absolutely, love the earth, find ways in which you can get that sense of pleasure from doing the right thing. I acknowledge all those little things that you do every day when you turn down the paper cup and feel good about it. We do have a roving mic, so if anyone at the back of the room wishes to ask a question, just indicate, but can I invite the first question from the audience? Gentleman at the back of the room. Hello, Michael. I'm from Creative Commons Scotland. I guess that it's been acknowledged by this event, but how important do you think that creative thinkers are in terms of bringing climate change to the fore and inspiring people to take action for a sustainable future? Mindy? I've moved through my life from my... I've got a PhD in artificial intelligence, and I used to think that there were technological answers to the problems that we face, and I reached a conclusion that although there may be technological aspects to the solutions that we need, we ultimately need to engage our hearts and our souls as well as our minds in tackling these problems. I think that it's only through having the full spectrum of society, including the creative end of the spectrum, engaged in these issues that we can really make progress. There's a wonderful book by a man called Amitav Ghosh called The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, and he is a novelist, first and foremost, a brilliant novelist, but he wrote this book, and it's a passionate, beautifully written book, because he felt that it was very important for creative people to think about this problem and why we're not... we're doing, as he feels, so little about it. So I think it's great when we have an immaculomate of a novel called Sola a few years ago. I think it's terribly important that all aspects of the culture, and that includes religious thinkers as well, are engaged on this issue because, of course, quite all the difficulty with climate change and with accepting it is cultural. We've been trained for two, three hundred years, not least by Adam Smith, to think of the earth as a stable background for making money for wealth, for jobs, for growth, and what climate science is teaching us is it's not a stable background. It's actually in the mix with us. We are constantly interacting with this planet, and what we do is changing the planet, but this is very counterintuitive because, for hundreds of years, the culture has taught us something else, so we do need cultural change and new creative thinking across all disciplines, not only in the natural sciences and the economics and renewable energy, to think through the implications. A lot of the resistance, I think, is in the realm of culture. People feel it can't be true because the story of most people's lives has been about progress, it's been about fossil fuels, it's been about energy, it's been about economic growth, and it's brought wonderful things to most people on this planet to this point in time. As people think, well, it can't be true that things are going to get worse, surely they're just going to carry on getting better. We have to reimagine the way we think about the human project to really cope with climate change science. John Scott, MSP, has a question for us. John. Thank you, Graham. I'm interested in Professor Northcott's vision of central Scotland being covered in vegetable plots and cycle paths, and I have to declare an interest as a farmer. Given that central Scotland is 85 per cent less favoured areas, which he will know is a European designation regarding its ability to produce food in other words, a less favoured area, what does he see as the practical and cost-efficient route to achieving this, as he assumes that the generation of farmers before, of which I am one, knew absolutely nothing? Well, as you will know, farmers have been promised European Union subsidies at the present level until just 2022, both here and in England. I was speaking at an event down in England with a number of farmers on Sunday, including the NFU representatives. Of course, farmers are all extremely concerned about what's going to happen in 2022. From my perspective, I have to admit that as an economic student, as a teenager, I thought that joining Europe was a mistake because of the common agricultural policy. I was opposed to joining Europe. I'm certainly opposed to leaving it now. We've completely integrated our economy with Europe for the last 40 years, including our food economy. The fact of the matter is that, reacquiring, as we will do, either in London or Scotland—and I'm hopeful that it will be in Scotland—the power to shape food growing and the landscape more significantly in the future than we can at present, without the mediation of Brussels and the CAP, we will be able to direct subsidies far more effectively, it seems to me, to achieve both food self-sufficiency, or as I like to talk about it, food sovereignty here in Scotland, and reforesting of much more of our upland area, and conservation and preservation of sites of very special interest, including aesthetic and landscape values. I see no real conflict there. Quite a lot of the land in Scotland right now, in terms of arable land, is devoted to animal feed and to raising animals. I think another part of the issue that we may have to face up to is a huge amount of current public subsidies, as I understand it. You may probably know more about this than I do, but as I understand it, if you look at the direction of subsidies right now, quite a lot of them go towards animal feed production and animal production, rather less of them go to horticulture. It seems to me that, since we now know that the consumption of vegetables and fruit is hugely beneficial to the human population relative to the consumption of meat and dairy products, we could both reduce our health bill, increase biodiversity and increase our self-sufficiency in horticulture by redirecting the subsidy from animal production towards vegetable and fruit production. Emma Harper Thank you. I have a quick question. Sarah Boyle mentioned the 5p bag charge reduced bags by 95 per cent. What would you consider to be the next 5p bag charge equivalent that should be introduced as a deposit return? Is it paying for your to-go coffee cup? What would you suggest? Yes, tax paper cups. Disposable cups get rid of them. We don't need them. Take any measure that you can possibly make to get rid of disposable cups, please. Whether they are paper or plastic or any other material, we should be re-using. There are wonderful schemes, for example, in Germany, where whole cities are coming together to create municipal cup libraries—for want of a better word—that people can get a reusable cup on the go and then take it back to somewhere else. They are just city-wide pools of cups circulating. It particularly cups because of the paper cups and the coatings, which make them completely unrecyclable. They are a nightmare. I think that people genuinely don't really like them either. They don't like creating all of that waste. It's clear that there are some chains that don't get me started on this. I've made the point. There's probably greater resistance being expressed currently to DRS than there perhaps was to the plastic bag charge. How do we overcome that? I'm not entirely sure in terms of an answer, because in some way I don't think it should be enforced. The FIPI bag is absolutely enforced. There are reusable coffee cups, and it's become a habit of people of my age to use them all the time, but that's not enforced. It is more of a habit change rather than spreading the word and spreading the importance of it. If you enforce it, people will become a little bit resistant to it. The plastic bag thing is supposed to have a reusable coffee cup, so you have to then go and spend £10 on it. To some people, that's just a little bit—at the time—seems a bit more expensive. So if there's some way of giving one Tupperware and one free fork and one free cup to every household, then instead of plastic bins as well. We're not made of plastic. I support this Scottish Government's stated intention to put a deposit on every bottle sold in this country. I think this is absolutely essential. I often visit beaches, I love the coast, and very often when I do that I pick up a plastic bag, and I fill the plastic bag with plastic items, and you can fill dozens of them on many of our beaches. It's a tragedy. We're filling the ocean with plastic, and we've got to stop. The best way to do this is to create value in the product that's being currently thrown away. You put five or ten p on every bottle blasts, plastic and tin, and you create a resource that is then reused. Everybody's invested in it. It's not a fine. In the same way as a plastic bag is a fine, but it will encourage recycling of that product much more than we are seeing at the moment. Another question from Twitter. Yeah, it's actually from Facebook, from somebody called Jeff W Justice, and he's asking Maggie Haggith, Mandy Haggith. As a writer, how do you feel that climate change will change language itself and the art of language? Wow, what an interesting question. That's a really difficult question. Well, at the moment, I think one of the things that is quite frightening about the whole climate change debate is the ugliness of a lot of the language that is used. There's an awful lot of nasty, long-word jargon terms like mitigation and stuff that are kind of off-putting. I would hope that we'll move through that to a phase where we start inventing new and more fun language to get at the feel-good side of making the changes that are making the world better. That's one thing. I guess that we're going to need all sorts of new terms for the kind of landscapes that used to be inhabited and become flooded and so forth. I'm not sure that that's a very good answer to the question, but it's an interesting question. Thank you. Thank you. I'll ponder it. Can I turn this to the audience? Richard Dixon at the back. Thanks very much. I'm from Friends of the Earth Scotland. We had some very interesting announcements in the programme for government two weeks ago, so some big policies, which will make a difference on climate emissions. That's great. A consultation finishes this week on what new climate targets we should set, and that's not so promising, so they're not as ambitious as they should be in terms of the Paris agreement. Graham Day's committee will have quite a job in strengthening those, but I wanted to ask the panel from your 2050 seat. What do you want to look back on and remember Scotland for? What was Scotland's contribution to global efforts on climate change? I think that we're going that way anyway, but for Scotland to be the very first country to make a really vast movement in terms of climate change, we are leading the way in certain policies and the way we live in things. It's maybe to potentially be the first country to get a certain carbon reduction. As you were saying, the new climate change bill isn't necessarily as ambitious as it should be, but that doesn't mean that we're not necessarily going to achieve more ambitious targets. I see that Scotland being one of the first countries to do something fun and really forward thinking. The UK climate change committee has indicated that it would be happy with the target that the Scottish Government is setting. What makes you say that we need to go further? Is it realistic to go further, Professor? I think that it is realistic, but the trouble is that, when you say the word realistic, it means money. If you look at the principal areas where emissions are emanating from in the Scottish economy, it's still the housing stock and offices, mainly heating. We don't need so much cooling here. It's a vehicular transportation, livestock. It does seem to me that we could set ourselves a target of 100 per cent zero emissions by 2050. We might be one of the first nations, I think, globally to achieve that. We're only going to do that with more ambition than perhaps we have shown thus far. Having said that, I think that the 2010 act was hugely ambitious. It was achieved that target in part because so many people from across Scotland came to this Parliament and said they wanted a more ambitious act than was originally proposed. I think that one of Scotland's contributions is to show that having a devolved Parliament and devolving energy and climate policy makes possible a more ambitious target. It shows democracy works when we're talking about care for the earth. I think that it's realistic. For me, my great concern about the way we approach this or have tended to approach this in the UK as a whole is that we use energy pricing to discourage the use of energy as a way of reducing emissions alongside putting new kinds of energy into the grid and so on. What this does, of course, is to punish the poorest, most of whom are living in houses that don't belong to them. Private landlords, for example, have very few duties to ensure those houses are well insulated because currently we don't impose those sorts of duties significantly on private landlords. I think that that's my understanding up to now. I think that we need urgently, I think, to address the state of the nation's housing stock more aptly than even we have been doing thus far. That would link what I think is another part of Scotland's contribution to the global ethics of climate change, which is climate justice and reducing emissions. If the way we go about pricing energy forces people in the poorest communities to make choices every day between heating their houses and going out and buying food, then we haven't got climate justice in Scotland. But Sarah referenced earlier the possibility that asking people to purchase a reusable coffee cup might be problematic. If one accepts that, wouldn't there be far greater resistance, if one of the measures required to achieve the ambitions that Friends of the Earth are looking for around emissions, was that everyone had to replace their central heating boilers, for example? It seems to me that most homeowners, given the right kind of access to finance and having equity in their homes, won't find that difficult. Therefore, I don't think that is a huge problem. Low-income people do not buy boilers. They have boilers bought for them, and they are normally extremely inefficient because they are heating inefficient building stock. I don't think that the boiler change issue is really a justice issue. I think that the problem is how we regulate the housing stock, particularly the rental housing stock in Scotland. I agree with a lot of what Michael Scott said about climate justice. We need to look back on a Scotland that treated climate change not just as an environmental issue, but also as a social and economic issue. It has become the first country that demonstrates that climate-friendly energy production is an economic boon to the country and manages it in that way. The social justice issues not only within our own society but globally are taken into account. The people who are adversely affected, whether they are on low-lying islands or in the Sunderbands being flooded or whether they are up in the Arctic, take responsibility for the historical impact of our emissions over the past industrial revolution. It would be great if people could look back and say that there was a generation who understood the concept of resilience and actively tried to manage society to be more resilient in the face of the changes that are inevitable and to help the rest of the world to be resilient in that way. We can do a lot in terms of thinking only about mitigation measures. Ultimately, there are billions of people in the world for whom the historical impact of the emissions that we have already put out is going to cause and are already causing disasters that we need to take responsibility for and help other people to become resilient. We have another question from Twitter from Jerry McGee. Can Scotland operate in the oil and gas sector and still do our bit for climate change? I will be careful about what I say because this is obviously going on Facebook. From the people who I spoke to in the oil and gas industry, they want to. It is a lot of people's jobs and livelihood. It brings a lot of money for Scotland, but I do not think that it is about running the oil companies as they are. It is about making them an oil energy company. Just now, the oil and renewables are separate, whereas they should come together. There is a lot of transferable skills and engineers who go down the rigs and win farms. It is about not going against them, but allowing those companies. There is a lot of money there that we could utilise for our benefit for renewable energy. Do you see a transition period moving away from oil and gas? Yes. Professor. I have to confess that my father worked for Shell for many years and he paid my school fees. I always feel I need to own up to that in public when I am talking about climate change. I know a little bit from the insight about the oil and gas industry. One thing that I do remember clearly from conversations around the family dining table about oil is the price of oil and the close relationship between the price of oil and the viability of any oil fields. The marginal cost, so that is the cost of getting a barrel of oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia, I am told, is about $5. The marginal cost of getting a barrel of oil out of the North Sea, even in terms of the infrastructure needed to achieve that, and the energy as well, the energy cost, is over $50. Currently, as we all know, there isn't a huge case for new exploration in the North Sea. That is a sad thing for the North East of Scotland, because the economy of the North East of Scotland is hugely dependent on my industry, but the North East of Scotland is changing and will continue to change. The other issue, it seems to me, is that there is a problem with economies that become over-dependent on one resource, one primary commodity. There is an argument that Scotland's economy has up to now been rather skewed by being quite dependent upon oil and gas. It is very notable that the famous white paper, which made the case for independence before the Scottish referendum, whose part of the case was based upon the oil and gas industry and that resource. Of course, Alex Salmond is himself a believer and has something of a background in oil economics. I do not think that that is the future of Scotland. As I said to you already, I think that the most valuable assets of Scotland are its people, its land, its wind, its coastline, its beauty. It is brilliant ideas and creativity of this nation and its democracy, and its commitment to social justice. I do not think that oil and gas is the future of Scotland. I think that it is the past. That is a controversial view, but that is my view. If we just take the easy oil that is left on the planet, and much of that is in Saudi Arabia and there is quite a lot still in Iraq, if we just take out the easy oil, we are still looking at two, three degrees of climate change. Why would we want to go after the difficult oil? Saudi Arabia is pumping fast because it knows in the future that oil price will be devalued by the whole issue of the unburnability of oil, which of course Mark Carney here on the United Kingdom has already highlighted as a problem for the UK stock exchange. I am afraid that the oil and gas industry will continue to decline, particularly if the Saudis keep pumping as they are, which they show that they are trying to change that. Mandy? No. Okay, but the chart's chart. Keep it in the ground. Okay, thank you. Put your job and go and work on renewables. Okay, Victoria, many other questions from? Yes, so from Alan Clark. Food buying needs to change. No more strawberries from Argentina in December. Why is this encouraged rather than discouraged? Mandy, do you want to go first? Yes, and I'm looking very guiltily at the piece of water that's melon on my plate. Very good point, I agree.