 We are ready. Welcome to the 30th meeting of the 2018 Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. We have an updated agenda to include correspondence from the Government on the ivory bill, so that is now on the agenda. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, I remind everyone present to switch off their mobile phones as they may affect the broadcasting system. The first item on the agenda is for the committee to consider whether to take item 5 in private. Are we agreed? We are agreed. The second item in the agenda is for the committee to take evidence on the climate change emissions reductions target Scotland bill. This is the second of the committee's evidence sessions with stakeholders. I am delighted to welcome our two witnesses this morning from Sweden. We have Stefan Neustrom, director of the Department for Climate Change and Air Quality in the Swedish Environment Protection Agency and Anders Weichmann, chair of the Climate KIC. Stefan and Anders are joining us today via video conference from Sweden, and welcome to you both. Good morning. We will start with questions about how the issue of climate change is currently being tackled in Sweden. I guess that Scotland and Sweden have got similar topography and land uses, like densely packed urban centres, but with significant agricultural, forestry and other rural land uses as well. Can I ask both of you, in turning, to indicate who wants to go first? What have been the key challenges in developing and implementing Sweden's environmental objectives and integrated climate and energy policy? Well, that's a big question. I guess there are several, obviously, challenges. One of the main being that we are a small country, we depend for prosperity on internet pay and the issue of competitiveness in relation to how to maintain or increase standards in Sweden while at the same time facing competitors in other countries who may not do the same. Is this going to hurt our country and the competitiveness, or are we going to have an advantage of it hence forward? Is this going to be costly or non-costly? How can we protect ourselves and how can we gain advantages in terms of competitiveness by doing this? So the pace of actually increasing the environmental standards in relation to competitiveness, I think, is one of the main issues. Yeah, I would agree. One advantage we have in terms of climate policy compared to many other countries is that we have a more or less CO2 free electric power system, a combination of hydro and nuclear. Nuclear is now gradually being phased out and replaced by increasing amounts of renewable energy. We plan to have that completed around 2040. So that makes us a bit special in the European context. We had discussions over the years whether we couldn't, in fact, be a much larger net exporter of electricity helping countries like Poland and Germany close down some of their stations. That's an advantage for us. Your question was pretty broad. You asked about environmental objectives in general. There I would say the main challenge, I think, is to move from a situation where we have had or less a silo-based approach, trying to target environment goal, its environment goal, their own rights. And now we realize increasingly that we have to do much more in an independent fashion. And that goes for our environmental objectives. It goes well in the United Nations. I think this vertical approach that so far has dominated with each ministry sort of focusing on their particular concerns is not really going to work. So it had to be a buy-in from all sectors working together in order for you to be achieving what you have. And that's obviously happened. Well, it has happened, yes. And I think the main difficulty, except for more than these things that we've been speaking about, that has been politics, really, to not make this a right or leftist issue since it's not a matter of survival for the planet for obvious reasons. And we can see that technology is there to help us out. It's going to be cheaper and it's going to be competitive to use the better technology in the future. But to manage this political context where short-term squibbling is the main agenda for the day, that was the main challenge. But now we've got 87% of the Swedish parliament standing firmly behind these goals that we have. And at the same time, we have a long-term energy agreement aiming at net zero or actually a carbon dioxide free emission electricity production system by 2040. And we can see that this is going to happen already before. Because wind is increasing so extremely fast in Sweden that doesn't actually need any subsidies any longer. Was the Paris agreement, the catalyst for this wider agreement, or was it already happening? Well, yes and no. I mean, we had this climate task force that was set up by the government in 2015. And our goal was to reach net zero emissions in 2015. But the Paris agreement influenced that task force. So we moved the target date closer. So now we have a goal for 2045 net zero emissions. I would say, if you ask for challenges and difficulties, I would say there are two that I would specifically mention. One is now we have agreed around the targets and the goals. And that's the first step. But when it comes to implementation, I think we will experience a lot of difficulties simply because there is a tendency in our country, but also in other countries, that the finance ministry is most often using a discount rate that has a tendency to delay action because the assumption is that we will be much richer in the future. This is really the old debate between North House and Stern already in 2006. And I think the finance ministry most often is wrong. I think we should do things much quicker. And the most recent IPCC report also speaks in favour of that. I mean, if you read that report carefully, the world large has to reduce emissions by 50% till 2030 to have a chance to meet the Paris agreement. So then we cannot continue to delay action. So that's one difficulty. The other one is to distinguish between incremental change, which we have done so far, cutting a few emissions year by year. And now we really need transformation because we won't reach zero emissions or close to zero with incrementalists. We need really to do transformation in several other major sectors, not only the energy system. Cement, steel, aluminium, plastics, textiles is a horror story, electronics and agriculture. All these sectors, we have to do things in a totally different way. And that transformation, I don't think most people realise what it means. Thank you. I'm going to hand over to John Scott for the next couple of questions. Okay, thank you, convener. Good morning, gentlemen. Well, Gillian has already touched on this. I just want to note that Sweden has a long history of environmental protection with strong public support, public buy-in, as she said. So how have politicians and Governments managed to achieve such a high level of support for decarbonisation and other environmental objects? How did you manage to persuade your public, your electorate, that this was a good idea? Thank you, sir. I think it's a combination of several issues. Lack? Lack? Well, the Paris Agreement obviously offered a window of opportunity for taking long-term action instead of the short-term action, which is often dominating the political agenda for obvious reasons. Then again, we saw that technology was around the corner to help us decrease emissions from large sources in Sweden, which wasn't perhaps there before. You can see that in the mining and minerals industry, for example, they have now put an action plan before us to become fossil fuel by 2035. And that's a large emitter in Sweden. Steel industry alone accounts for 10% of our emissions, more than 5 million ton. Now there's a plan from this industry by itself to become fossil free as soon as possible, but possibly around 2035. And the list is long. So actually, the general understanding of the fact that climate change is going to harm our economy and it's going to hurt us badly all if we don't take action, it's been widespread in the Swedish society, spurred by the climate agreement in Paris, then translated into action both in terms of political goals, but also action plans from the commercial side, and that has helped a lot. And also, for obvious reasons, as you stated yourself before, there's a long term, a long tradition of awareness in Swedish society. So the whole process has been chaired, so to speak, and spurred by the non-governmental organisations wanted us to go further. And that has also helped. So that there has been a movement in general since the win of opportunity opened up by the combination of the Paris agreement and technological change. Where does the facility take the transition? But I interpreted your question maybe a bit wider because you asked about the historic development. And I would say, I mean, we are in a rather special situation, as I said before. We are a small population on a very large land area. We have lots of forests, so we can use biomass cleverly if we need. We have the hydrocapacity. And then, for a number of reasons, not related to climate change mitigation, Sweden took a decision in the 1960s to develop nuclear energy. Hadn't we done that? We would have been 40% to 50% dependent on fossil fuels for electricity production. But that was a decision mostly because of energy security at that time. I mean, you may recall the oil crisis in the beginning of the 1970s. I was at that time a member of the Swedish parliament and that whole issue was very much dominating the energy policy debate. How can we become less dependent on the outside? And the nuclear energy was also seen by industry as a very cheap way to produce electricity. In retrospect, you could say that yes, for a period of time it was, but now when we include the costs for waste disposal and the long-term management of nuclear waste, that's no longer true because the fee that reactor owners have to pay for per kilowatt hour for that disposal is increasing as we speak. So things have changed a lot, but that is an important background. Thank you very much. I hear what you say. My next question is, Sweden's integrated climate change and energy policy has set testing interim and final targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions. What process was followed to pass that legislation and what key factors did you consider when deciding on the targets themselves? You spoke about this earlier, the beginning part of the process to set the targets, but what key factors did you consider when deciding on the targets? Were you asking about both the targets in the energy sector for 2040 and the climate change goals? Both or either, whichever you prefer to talk about. I say thank you because I think they are connected in a way and there's a tremendous amount of academic work being done in close relation to both the government policy side but also to industry. Behind the whole energy, the system with energy goals was a job carried out by the royal Swedish engineering sciences, the academy. They worked for like three years more or less going into various issues, looking upon the possibilities of becoming fossil fuel by 2040 and at the same time we had a group of politicians very closely following this work and it opened up for a common understanding that this is possible, it's not going to be costly, rather it's going to serve our country well since we saw early on that for instance wind power is going to increase tremendously fast in our country. We now have a market based incentive system which is also part of the whole equation. It was launched in 2003, 2006. Generally Sweden produces about 160 terawatt hours a year, consume around 140 to 145 and in 2006 it produced our first perawatt hour of wind energy. Today we think that we're going to produce like 30 terawatt hours in 2021 already with the decisions that have been made. So the transition is very fast and costs has come down to below what it would cost to introduce new coal power, fire station power plants or for that matter new nuclear. So wind power is going to dominate our energy system by 2040. It's going to be the new nuclear so to speak and this was an important part for getting the politicians to agree upon the energy goals for 2040 and of course this was done in a parallel to the process that Anders and I worked with with setting the climate goals because they are very much interconnected. If you can't get a carbon dioxide free energy system or at least electricity production system then it's going to be difficult to reach the goals of the transition in the transport sector which need zero electricity, zero emitting electricity production systems. So so much for the energy system. I will know if you want to continue with the climate process Anders. Well I think the first decision we took we were leading this task force was to make sure that each and every member of the committee representing seven different political parties that they had more or less the same understanding of the challenges. So we spent about half a year to listen to experts to travel around Sweden, talk to people, deep dives in particular sectors to try to understand what are really the challenges and what are also the opportunities in terms of technology, in terms of substitution, etc. And the energy system as Stefan said was of course one critical area and their electricity is now more or less I would say under control and we look forward to a rather rapid electrification at least of the private vehicles. The heavy traffic is something where you still have a big question mark will electricity be the solution or will hydrogen be the solution or synthetic biofuils? We don't really know. We have to have an open mind. So but then we look to other sectors that are of particular importance and I already refer to materials, basic materials. Most people don't talk about it but by and large basic materials make up 20% of global emissions and demand for basic materials, cement, steel, etc. are going up like this in particular in developing countries. So unless we address that issue and look upon it as a responsibility of a country like Sweden to try to provide a world with new technologies, I think the Paris Agreement is never going to be met. So it's not only an energy system issue. It's very much an infrastructure material, basic material issue. And there we are. There we have some policies in place to try to incentivise change. Then of course the agriculture sector is critical and we talk a lot about meat and meat consumption but I would say every time we put the plough in the soil we release a lot of carbon and we have more and more evidence from different parts of the world in particular the US, Australia, but also West Africa that a combination of rotational crops and no till agriculture is to be preferred because you build up fertility in the soil, you hold soil erosion and you start building carbon on the soil so you can absorb carbon from the atmosphere. We have not been able to I would say convince the agriculture sector yet about this, not to speak of the common agriculture policy of being prepared for the next phase. So I would single out that as a very important issue. And if Sweden and Scotland and some other countries, France in particular could operate in Brussels to have a breakthrough to start incentivising farmers to do the right things to start building up carbon, I think that's going to be critical. So those were some of the other areas of importance. Of course then you have also city planning, I mean to move from a situation where we have cars all over the place, where public transport, biking and walking is the primary mode of transportation. That is a major issue over the long term of course. Thank you. I'm just declaring an interest as a farmer myself and I think that you have identified, I'm interested to hear you say, you've identified something similar to what we've identified in Scotland that, while our agriculture industry is probably prepared to shoulder its share of the burden, they have yet to have it demonstrated to them by those who have the technology or the ability to tell them how this should be done. And there's a situation where a lack of knowledge transfer is very much the situation here in Scotland. Would you say the same in Sweden? Yeah, I don't want to sound condescending but I mean the agriculture sector is a bit conservative I guess and I think it's been rather slow uptake of these ideas. I would suggest that you invite Professor David Montgomery from the US. He's recently written a fascinating book called Growing a Revolution where he shows, with a lot of examples from the Midwest in the US, the benefits of what he calls regenerative or conservation agriculture. And I think we need pilot schemes, pilot demonstration projects for farmers to see with their own eyes because it's of course a risk taking to move from what you're doing today to something totally different. But I think the benefits are absolutely crucial. Then of course soils differ in different parts of the world so I mean you have to apply this sort of new approach differently but I think basically this is a very interesting area. Thank you very much. A supplementary question from Mark Ruskell. Yes, morning. Can I just go back to the energy questions again? You have a really ambitious target to effectively remove fossil fuels from your heating systems by 2020. So it's an area that we've particularly struggled with in Scotland and I'm just wondering what you deploy. Is it biomass? Is it electrical heating? Is it district heating? How did you get to that point? A combination of all the issues you mentioned. We have very little fossil fuels left already in that sector. It was decreased tremendously during the oil crisis in the 70s by a very conscious policy to do so and today there's very little left so it is an ambitious target obviously but I think we're going to be able to reach it at least by 2021, not by 2020. Well we have also district heating to a larger extent than most of Europe. I think around 55% of the households are connected to district heating so that has helped because it's an efficient system and in parts of the country we have combined heat and power which means that you use the biomass or whatever energy source you use it much more efficiently. Then we have over the years an increasing number of heat pumps that has taken over and that means also in some parts of Sweden now that district heating is facing some difficulties because the energy demand is being reduced so they have to develop new business models so those are I think the main responses. I just wanted to come back to farming since we'd gone to that subject where farming impacts three of the seven greenhouse gases that are internationally recognised. Carbon dioxide, which we talked about in tilling, methane of course which comes from bovine sources mainly but of course is not particularly persistent but the one I just wanted to ask about if we can get an answer is on nitrous oxide which persists for over 100 years which essentially a large source of nitrous oxide is now from the production of artificial fertilisers. It does come from transport and other things as well but for farming there is a big source through fertilisers and I just wondered if Sweden had done very much work on identifying alternative sources of fertilisers to help farmers and possibly even reduce their dependence on artificial fertilisers and perhaps reduce costs as well as of course providing the climate change benefit whether Sweden has done anything on that particular subject. Well I don't think anyone of us is particularly an expert on this. Incidentally I met with a Swiss expert the other week Hans Harren who is head of the Millennium Institute which is active all over the world advising farmers and he gave a talk at a big conference and basically said that he looks forward to a facing out of traditional conventional fertilisers by changing farming practices. Perhaps not in parts of Africa where you've had tremendous soil erosion and loss of nutrients but I think there are some new developments but I cannot say that we have been champions of it in Sweden. I'm sorry about that. Another thing I ran into the other day was an article and that was very interesting that you can reduce methane from cattle by mixing some seaweed with a father. That's very interesting. So there's obviously a lot of technology development going on. Thank you and now we move on to a question from Angus MacDonald. Okay thanks convener. Good morning gentlemen. You may be aware that in Scotland our climate change plan is published every five years which sets out how emissions will be reduced over the following 15 years in seven key sectors. Perhaps you could tell us how Sweden approaches and reports on sectoral greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Thank you. Under the new Swedish climate law that was launched the first of January which was the result of the work that carried out. The government must produce such plan each fourth year. So the idea is that if you say that year zero is the year of election and in Sweden we have elections where the government has a mandate period for four years then they will receive from all the authorities the relevant statistics in the beginning of the first year of their mandate period in order to have as much time for them to produce an action plan for the coming four years. And it is the Swedish environmental protection agency that gathers all the materials from the various sectors uses that statistical analysis and then hands over to the government. So we produce a lot and we also do that on an annual basis so you can for each year see how the emissions developed within the various sectors but each year an action plan will have to be presented to parliament by the government. And we have like in the UK we have a climate change committee that sort of is an independent voice and that is supposed to comment on the government's bill positively and negatively. And I assume we'll also come up with their own proposals if they think the government is not doing their job. But this is relatively new so we don't really know how it will work yet but we were inspired to a large extent by the British law and we visited London in November 2015 and I think that visit with Lord Devon or John Gummer was very instrumental in convincing some of the members that the idea of a special law or legislation was a good one. Okay thank you. I'd like to go back to talking about some of the areas in which it's been a little bit sticky, the difficult sectors to move. We obviously have a similar situation in Scotland that you've described as well. We've been reducing our emissions but a lot of that has been down to closing a coal-fired power station. I'd like to take you back and Andrew, you've particularly mentioned construction, you've mentioned agriculture. What other sticky difficult to change sectors are there but more importantly what strategies have been put in place in order to facilitate change in those sectors? Let's see if we can share a picture with you. I'll try and do this. See how it doesn't want to help us. We're seeing policy instruments, is that what we should be seeing? No it's supposed to be a picture showing where we have the large emitting sectors in how the Swedish... Don't worry you can send it on and we can put it into our evidence as a supplementary if you want to just talk us through it. Let's start then with steel which is, as Stefan indicated, roughly 10 to 15 percent of our yearly emissions. There the government has offered a special package to the steel industry so they have now a major project ongoing to try to develop, go from today's steel production technology to using hydrogen in the future for the oxygen reduction and they are quite of the mystic that this can happen before 2035. I met with them a couple of weeks ago and I said couldn't we speed it up and they said of course if you provide us with more capital, more financial resources we could probably do it within 10 years. So that's one example. The cement industry is another challenge. There I'm a little bit at a loss because on the one hand I don't know if you saw but Chatham House came out with the report about a month ago basically saying with present knowledge we believe we can cut the missions from cement production by 45 to 50 percent over the next 10 to 15 years. Then when I meet with senior officials in companies like Honsim LaFage they sort of indicate that we already know how to produce cement CO2 free but that technology is too expensive it doesn't fit within our business model. So I think there we have to really try to understand what we could do in the economy to incentivise that. But steel and cement are two very important areas. The third one is called plastics and there I mean I think we would depend a lot on what's going on in the European Union context where the commission has taken on quite a quite an ambitious role in that whole area. I would say also that some consumption sectors like textiles and electronics to me are very problematic. We talk about the circular economy but we should remember that less than one percent of fibers from textiles are being recycled and that sector alone amounts to six to seven percent direct and indirect carbon emissions in the world. So it's a huge huge challenge and the fashion the way fashion is being offered you know where people buy new stuff all the time is definitely not sustainable. So here consumers have to do their part but the industry has to do a lot. Electronics is the same if you look at at my telephone here I cannot even change the battery and the plastics involved are glued together so it's very difficult to recycle high quality plastics. So basically today the only materials that are being recycled and reused are copper and gold the rest is incinerated. So we have a huge problem because this sector is increasing so fast. So I think there are areas where we don't have any policy instruments yet that are effective. Those are obviously very difficult dishes. If I could complement by looking at the territorial emissions can you see the picture and I'll share with you which says transformational change needed? Yes we can. Excellent. The lower part shows industry and then the red one is transport then the green one is agriculture and if you look to 2045 you can see that what's going to be left in relation to our aims and the goals that we've said is going to be emissions from agriculture and from industry. We can see that there is it is going to be difficult primarily within the agriculture sector to come down with the current knowledge. We have around the corner technologies that might be efficient but we don't really know if they can deploy so far. But then again carbon capture and storage unfortunately I'd say would be necessary in order to achieve our goals because as Anders indicated the cement industry with five percent of the Swedish emissions looking at what is being produced within Sweden and the territorial emissions you can't go lower than perhaps a reduction of 50 percent then you need the transformational change and it's just not there except for carbon capture and storage. So we say from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency that it is needed to develop we need to develop the CCS infrastructure not alone for obvious reasons but in a European context and since Norway holds what they claim to be 30 to 40 percent of the total known possibility storage possibilities it's obviously neighboring countries within we cooperate very closely at the moment and also when it comes to the later half what's not shown in the graph here 2050 and beyond we need negative emissions and Sweden is well endowed with forests and we have around 30 million tonnes of biogenic emissions from the forest industry for instance which if we could store them in proper CCS fertility or BEX facilities would produce those negative emissions but we haven't seen them materialized as of yet. They're waiting around the corner and everybody's speaking about them but they're not really there yet and we need them by 2035 in order to materialize the goals for the cement industry but also to achieve the goals which are not yet set but which needs to be negative emissions on the later end of the century. Okay Stuart Stevenson. I've got a couple of relatively technical questions that have come out of what you've been saying. The first in relation to cement and the use of carbon capture and storage in that industry which is something that's being discussed to a limited extent here but of course that requires a post-processing extraction of carbon dioxide from the emissions from the cement industry and largely that is through washing the gases with a nitric acid bath and that takes us straight back to nitrous oxide being a precursor chemical for producing nitric acid and I just wondered if there are other carbon capture and storage technologies that are being looked at because I know of certain different technologies that there are a number of them of course are pre-combustion where you get the right amount of oxygen in etc but cement is unless I misunderstand is a post-processing extraction process which relies on nitric acid Sweden done anything that might help on that? I don't think so. There is a project run by the Norwegians for the cement industry and the Swedish cement industry is somehow partnering with that project but I must say none of us have visited that installation. Now I'm about to go there in December but unfortunately I think we're unable to answer your question. That's fine I recognised it was quite a technical question and the other one is also quite technical in that we touched on the electronic sector where the most recent gas added to the portfolio nitrogen trifluoride is a key part of the process of producing microchips, a key part of the electronics industry and I think that's where most of it comes from and again I just wondered if there is any understanding of how we might eliminate nitrogen trifluoride from the production industry there although of course I make the sort of small caveat as the gap between components on silicon-based chips have now reached the limits of what works. We may well be moving to a different base material which isn't silicon where there may be other things but I don't I know so little about that that I'm going to make very little comment on it. Have Sweden done anything on that as well? I don't think so basically because we don't have an industry in this field so it's not the sort of part of our territorial emissions we import all those stuff so but I think your question is very important and it's something for the Americans, for the Chinese, for the Koreans etc to really to really address but I don't think we have any particular knowledge about it. That's fine we should move on then. Just coming back on some of the information you gave in response to my earlier question about the difficult to reach sectors and the issues that are around there in your in your graphic there of course transport was mentioned and that's obviously a difficult sector and largely will depend on a change in behaviours and behavioural change of of the people of Sweden and Scotland in order for us to reach those goals. What's been done to affect those behavioural changes with particularly you know people's lifestyles? Well that is a tricky issue and then going into behavioural issues from a political point of view extremely tricky since we're living in free world so to speak so politicians are a bit hesitant to really go for that. We'd rather done a lot of incentivising taking incentivising actions in order to to facilitate for people to do the right thing so to speak so for instance on the car issue there is a 60 000 swedish crowns approximately 5 000 new pounds for buying a new car a zero emitting car that's obviously a behavioural issue but through incentives instead of information or punishment so to speak and we have the same for fuels but you know people in general don't really have to to worry about that in a sense because we have then a law demanding through a market incentive based system which is kind of difficult to explain but suppliers of the fuels for private vehicles need to increase the bio part of the fuels that people actually that is set on the markets so it's going to be increased from 20 to 30 to 42 cent over the years to come in order to facilitate a transition and then again we have the electric vehicle issue where we have incentive programmes to facilitate charging all over the country both in terms of public charging but also incentives for providing cheaper private charging facilities in people's homes and also at their work then again going back to your original question the sticky issues also turning to international transport then the most difficult part of all perhaps is the international aviation here in sweden if you look at the public consumption emissions and territorial emissions all together detecting the exports we're at about 11 tonnes per swede as today territorial emissions are around five six tonnes so it's almost a double and a large part of that comes from international aviation and it's increasing tremendously fast and just one travel from Stockholm to Thailand instance which is popular in christmas and new years new year emits two tons of cu2 per person in economy sorry in economy in economy yeah in business it's it's three times more and that's a really good issue which we really need to tackle together and we feel before it is in sweden the answer that's come up so far in this tricky issue by the airlines companies themselves namely Horsia the national system for reducing the increases in emissions from 2027 by offset it only addresses around between 15 and 20 percent of the overall emissions because of all the exemptions and people that there are in the system so we're really worried about this and we haven't brought no real solution to it other than a deepened international cooperation between all countries really but but adding to that i mean behavior is is of course changing from one type of car to another that is that is cleaner that that's that's sort of a positive thing but i would say that what what has happened over the last five to 10 years is that an increasing number of cities are offering much more efficient public transport opportunities smart mobility is catching on i don't think any swedish city is in the lead i think Helsinki and Lyon are the other two cities in europe that that have the most efficient system it and the idea is to make it very easy to go by public transport and to be able to purchase your your ticket through your mobile phone there is an interface with the with the paying with the paying system and i'm also seeing quite a lot of of of new car pooling systems where you can use an app and just order a car you don't need a car if you live in the city so you can have a combination of biking public transport and and the car on demand so these are these are systems that develop quite nicely and i think those will help bring about behavior change but Anders as you mentioned we mentioned very early on in the discussion sweden like scotland has a massive rural population as well i mean you can do these things in the cities but what are you doing rurally to give people access to to the public transport that's going to make it easy for them to change their behaviors with regard to using their car is that a big issue in sweden that is a big issue and we see a very clear division between the rural areas and the cities at least as people living in rural areas for understandable reasons that doesn't only have to do with the possibility of transport for obvious reasons but rather with education and with jobs for the jobs how they move to the cities and to the center parts of countries but then again if you go back to the possibility of transporting yourself in the rural areas our analysis is that the introduction of electric vehicles will actually give rural areas an advantage because today it is an issue in sweden which is very vast obviously it's vastly populated and to the northwest our country is over 2000 kilometers long and 600 kilometers wide at the most and uh you know if the gas station closes down together with the school and together with the store there is no possibility of staying in those rural areas but then again two holes in the wall charging your electric car everybody has it so the infrastructure is already there so in that sense we believe that the rural areas are going to be winners in the transition to electric cars we'll see if that comes around but it will at least take away the discussion on will the gas station close down or will it be there and should it be subsidized by the government yeah we're going to see that discussion coming to an end I think in the coming five years but keep in mind that 80% of travel by car in sweden does take place in in the city environments so so even if this is is a is a political issue and the sort of a divide between rural and areas and cities from a from an emission point to you it's it's a minor minor problem okay claudia be mish thank you convener good morning to you both could i turn our discussion to the emissions trading schemes and for the for the official record you'll of course know that sweden has put targets in place for 2030 of 63 percent 2040 of 75 percent and 2045 for 100 percent I hope I'm correct on that so why do these targets differentiate between EU ETS and non EU ETS sectors could you provide if possible a simple explanation of what sectors are covered under each target and are there any flexibility measures available to achieve these targets thank you well I mean around 40 to 45 percent of our emissions are covered by the ETS so that's that's heavy industry and and one of the suggestions from the task force where we were involved was really to to make the ETS much more ambitious than than what it was at the time of of the report when the report was launched so so I mean we are not leaving the ETS sector on its own but we cannot really influence the ETS apart from being part of the decision-making process in Brussels but all the other emissions we can by and large control by policy measures and the 63 percent happens to be a compromise I think some some wanted 70 percent some wanted 55 and then we ended up at 63 percent so so that's it's not it's not easy to explain why it's just why is that particular percentage but but we we we wanted to move towards zero in 2045 and then we we made the the calculation that that 63 percent for 2030 was was appropriate of that 70 reduction goes for the transportation sector which is made apart now there is a minute to get arithmetic behind those 63 percent which we would go into as you said Anders but the main simple explanation is that we rely on ETS delivering the reduction the reductions that it's set out to do and we don't want any double steering so to speak so we we have confidence in ETS delivering and then if it doesn't we need to work via Brussels or together with like-minded countries to see to it that it will deliver but we should we should add that for instance what I referred to the government scheme to incentivize technology change in the steel sector is of course an example where we don't we don't believe that ETS alone will bring about the necessary technology change basically because the price has been so low so you need complementary measures what we have seen over the last couple of years is of course that ETS seems to work better price has so it should become more and more of an incentive for companies to to look for for for innovation which is what's not when the price was around seven eight euros per ton and to elaborate a little bit on that when it comes to particular the steel industry which extreme is it which has always been very important for for sweden we have around six billion pounds in net exports from the steel industry which is a fair lot to trust as a small country it's not enough for the ETS as it understands we need a complementary innovation policy because even if the price was high in the ETS sector it would only empty the pockets of our large steel producers because it takes such a long time to innovate and to put in place new innovative zero emitting steel production methods and in this sense when it comes to these large transformational changes you need public participation together with industry in order to share risk and for the public to contribute to finance this is also what's happening we have a special company where three companies working together there's a steel company there's an electricity production company there's also a mining company that works together two of them are publicly owned and the other one is private privately owned and this is probably going to be needed in other areas as well which ones we don't know as yet but then again competition is fierce out there on the international market and if change takes more than more than a quarter of a year when when stock markets want return you may need to share risk to contribute to finance from from the public thank you but as a policy maker i would make the point to you that you know it's very interesting if you if you compare the price of a ton steel that is conventional and one that is co2 free the price difference is probably something like 40 to 50 percent when you sell the steel so that's then you are not competitive but if you look at at when you're buying a car if the steel would be co2 free in the car that that car would cost maybe 100 pounds or 200 pounds more not not not not more so the difference at the consumer level is is very very minor um and i would hope that we could somehow um manipulate uh or do something in the economic system so that that differential uh would not play out the way it does today um preliminary research results as i indicated show that the cement will be like 50 percent more expensive and steel as well i think it's 60 and 40 but it's 0.5 percent on ours for instance rail rail construction material or a house by cement steel if you consider for instance an apartment in central stroke home being constructed a price of which would be around 500 000 pounds the extra cost would be the incremental cost would be like a few thousand five hundred pounds which is nothing really so we are asking ourselves also how we can use public procurement in order to incentivize our industries to provide us the net zero cement and zero steel could could you just explain briefly how um public procurement would help with those um those sectors what one of the largest buyers of cement in sweden is the authority responsible for building new highways new bridges and new railroads and the demand for cement and steel from that particular agency is very high and if they introduce gradually or directly or you know in close cooperation with the companies a demand for zero co2 cement incentivizing a large company which has about 96 percent of the swedish market by the way uh to do so this could be an equation that works out 50 percent of new apartment buildings are built by municipalities and one of the one of the proposals from us was to build high-rise buildings in wood we have a lot of wood in sweden and those those buildings or houses are cheaper they are quicker to erect and i would say they are also more beautiful um concrete buildings are not um something i'd like very much so so i mean there there are many many opportunities for public procurement and the public procurement legislation in the european union now allows for these kind of of um um uh demands to be to be brought forward i think the critical issue is the competence among the public procurement recruitment officials because they they do not only have to be conscious about the legislation and the legalistic aspects but they have to be conscious also about technology about carbon emissions about a lot of issues so to to bring them up to speed in terms of of their competence or or enhance the level of competence is in my opinion very very very very crucial issue the subject of steel and steel production companies competitiveness if they start to eliminate greenhouse gases from the process came up and i just wondered to what extent the discussion in sweden has looked at the potential advantage in being an early adopter of new methods of producing steel and this would apply to other industries as well given that whatever the shortcomings there may be of the paris agreement it does create an international market in the longer term for new ways of production and that therefore the early developers and adopters and owners of intellectual property associated with that have a huge commercial opportunity if they choose to take it although arguably it may be one of these cases where those who are first to be second may have the advantage because of the huge startup costs so is that part of the discussion in sweden absolutely definitely no i mean that that's one of the arguments that a small country must must give priority to i mean our our share of global emissions is is very very small wherever you take a difference is to demonstrate good solutions and then also benefit from trade in in the future you know sweden produces roughly five million tons of steel mostly special steel yearly the world production is 1.6 billion tons half of that in china so we have a long way to go until all those old steel producing facilities are closed down and and replaced by by modern technology but we have to start somewhere and i think this the swedish hydrogen project a similar project in austria and one in in germany are all very very promising so so so we hope this this will this will really give us benefits in the future and we also have a history in this sense building upon what others just said that you know in in after the oil crisis and when the shipyard crisis came up in the late 70s we were a large ship producer and we produced lots of steel for the ship industry are also bulk steel we were a large producer at that time china wasn't at all as large as they was today and india neither but that was an enormous cost crisis in the swedish steel industry we had to close down lots of facilities and the ones that are now stealing the market asked themselves at that time what can we do to continue to be in the market in 10 or 20 or 30 years time and they came up with instead of building up using bulk steel they went into using special steel only very hard steel very specialized products for the markets and very light steel for the car industry for the anders iphone's industry and so forth and they managed to stay in the market and they're not so sensitive to price issues any longer now we can see that runners up are following the swedish example we're not alone there any longer in that segment of the market so this is a natural innovative step to take things further in the steel industry and we can't be sure that the first one is the winner you don't know how the portrait hypothesis really works in reality it works differently within different sectors but we know that innovation is the key to our continued well-being and economic prosperity in sweden nobody doubts that any longer so that's why we're going into this project thank you convener and developing this theme of innovation you mentioned a moment ago the hydrogen project in in sweden and and germany and in terms of train particularly the development of fuel source for trains electric versus hydrogen i understand that in germany austam have introduced hydrogen trains do you see that as the future where how do you see hydrogen versus electric developing as a as a source of fuel for large vehicles or even cars well i i would say the best to ask is probably the japanese because they have a huge emphasis given to hydrogen in in parts of the japanese industry and quite obviously they they believe that hydrogen is going to be as good an alternative as electricity both for for private vehicles but in particular for for heavy traffic train i think we will we will rely on on the electric grid there i don't see any reason you know we have we have 60 70 terawatt hours every year from hydrogen and now as stefan said increasingly wind i don't see any reason why we should why we should go for hydrogen there but heavy traffic is is a bit special so so i think there the the the question is still very open it is very open and just to elaborate a little bit on on this industry and especially one of our our largest energy producers or the bifarren bifarren the largest about them file they started to to to discuss in terms of power to x instead of only power to gas as before we can see that hydrogen is somewhat the future because there are so many possible ways to use it in trains we'll see we have some trains that can't be electrified with within the northern parts of sweden in the inland because there's no facilities there and it's going to be much too expensive to to to to construct electricity there so perhaps this could be an opportunity to continue running the trains on diesel up there it's not a very big part but still cause heavy vehicles and we can also see like you can produce methanol for shipping by using hydrogen and there is possibilities also of using the the bio co2 co2 missions that comes from this from the forest industry there's already a project for that between the forest industry and what the fault was methanol for for shipping on swish west coast we'll see how that works out and it's also the fact that as we go into a situation with more weather dependent electricity production we see that when windmills are becoming like 255 they tend to produce much more wind than they electricity than they did before because it's always some kind of wind up there but we're still going into a situation with more weather dependent electricity and then if you produce hydrogen as a backup gas for power stations for instance this could also go in as a balanced power when there is no wind and so the sun is not shining so yes there is an increasing discussion on power tracks also in sweden but we haven't seen too much of it materialized as of yet. Thanks so much. Thank you. Finlay Carson. Just very briefly to take us back to targets and a simple question why was a domestic effort target considered necessary alongside overall target? Please repeat that question. Why is a domestic effort target considered to be necessary along with the overall target? You mean the overall target in Europe or? In Sweden. So you mean the division between the ETS sector and the rest of the economy? Yeah and why you actually had a domestic target included in that? Well I mean ETS covers 45% of emissions but the rest we have to deal with in sweden and we need policies we need a lot of combination of regulation and incentives otherwise we believe emissions would not come down so you need to address both this the sort of ETS sector and the non ETS sector that's a given and I think every every country in the world has to do this. There's no way there's no escape there. Okay Richard Lyle. Good morning gentlemen. Right can we look at your targets? Your targets are of course set in the future so let's look to the future. In relation to the net zero 2045 target do you really expect Sweden to use international carbon trading or other measures to achieve this and if you did what are the consequences of not meeting your net zero 2045 target and using carbon trading to meet your targets? There's been an intense discussion on international training or offset mechanisms in Sweden and there's been a tendency before the agreement that we now have on the table on the 2045 goals between the various blocks within Swedish policymaking but the red greens has not been in favour of using credits whereas the blue parties more or less wanted to to you know use it a bit more but now we have a very clear cut distinction and it said that only 15% could be used in 2045 and it's not the set that is only credits that can be used for achieving those extra 15% that is not necessarily reductions at home. It could also be land use and land use change issues like an increased outtake in a large forest depending on what is decided upon through the mechanisms of the Paris agreement since the Kyoto protocol would run out of definitions for what's going to be accepted as a credit in under a couple of years time and we'll see what happens. The consequences you asked if you don't was that your question what happens if you don't reach? Yeah what what really happens you know at the end of the day we're all setting targets well well in 20 20 odd years time I think I'll be about 93 or something so you know it's great to set targets now as politicians that we won't have to meet because we won't be here possibly so why is it you know that and also is it not really a sorry to use the word a cop out by saying well if we don't meet it we'll just buy credits and offset it is that not debasing your your belief in what you think you're going to be able to do? Well 45 is a long time from now exactly and what's happening now is that this is as far as we came during the investigation that Anders and I led together what's happening at the moment is that the government with the memory of the opposition everybody wants this is that they've launched an investigation on precisely these 15 percent how do we best create a you know a roadmap for how to use them because there is a certain amount that can be used for reaching the target in 2030 as well and we have to elaborate on that we didn't come further than this in our investigation so now it's being done in another investigation and we'll see what they come up with and I would also say that you know we know very little about the next 20 to 25 years so we have to maintain flexibility and five years from now we may have a breakthroughs in certain technical areas which which will make the picture look very very different the challenge look very different I would say though that I do think that offsetting can play a very important role and I know that the German government is going to launch a major initiative in Katowice because I've been involved in discussions about it where they will try to incentivize offsetting in many developing countries helping civil society organizations but also governments to to restore degraded land to grow forests etc build carbon in the soil literally and and and that is something that the potential to do that is enormous it's enormous and and we don't talk much about it because we have been so focused on the energy system but but degraded land there are hundreds of millions of hectares that could be brought into the fertility again and store carbon so I think offsetting is an interesting area can I can I say you both I do remember the the 70s oil crisis I was in Holland at the time can I it would be wrong of me not to ask this question and some people might think I shouldn't be but you spoke about recycling can you tell me if your deposit return scheme contributes or not to your carbon targets recycling yes your deposit return scheme I mean we have one chapter in the climate strategy that we we submitted that focuses on basic materials and there you have a combination of innovation substitution and recycling and I will say reuse recycling is the the least positive alternative reuse of components is of course the the main target the problem today is that most products are designed in a way that recycling and reuse is very difficult I was chairing the Swedish recycling industry association for six years and one of the main problems was really that upstream they put things on the market that downstream is very difficult to do much about so when ministers go to Brussels and enhance recycling rates I very often said that's meaningless as long as you don't address the design issue as well so I think there should be a principle that norm the in the normal case when you put the product on the market it should be relatively easy to reuse and recycle the components in that in that product and we need a revolution uh we I was parted to a study done by a company called material economics we can share it with you recently and they their estimate for the european union was that by by adopting a circular economy approach we could cut away roughly 70 percent of the emissions with regard to basic materials and infrastructure leading up to 2050 compared to a business as usual case so that is huge but it's not happening as long as the european commission doesn't take the the right measures and unfortunately mr Juncker is not the right man for the job because he is he's blocking to use the eco design directive in an effective way thank you I could elaborate on that thank you very much you know why you know why in the brexit campaign nigel farage was traveling around britain with a toaster in his hand and he said these bureaucrats in brushes they even have views on how we should design our toasters such rubbish and that argument obviously was quite effective and when juncker heard that he said okay let's focus on the big things not on the small things but he doesn't understand obviously is that if 500 million europeans use a toaster which demands less electricity that's a big thing that's not the small thing so the eco design directive is very very important and we should broaden it to take into account design of materials thank you very much thank you thank you mark ruskell sorry for being so political no more of it please um do you have one of the world's most ambitious climate targets net zero by 2045 there is some uncertainty there though isn't there in terms of sitting here right now in 2018 exactly how you how you get there there's some uncertainty around the types of technological change that that will be needed how have you kind of dealt with that question um because it is a big question here as we look at our own climate targets about whether we should have a very precise thought out pathway to whatever target we we put into our own bill or whether we to a certain extent take a leap of faith in the technology that might be coming and trying to lean into that and develop that over time how has that debate played out in in sweden well i i i would say that i mean the first step necessary step is to set the targets then the devil is in the implementation and what we have seen over the last couple of years both at the national level and at the city level or municipality level is quite a lot of initiatives to try to to to come closer to the targets so so far so good emissions are unfortunately still as right now increasing as a matter of fact the last year they are increasing so they should start to go down but a lot of measures have been implemented that should bring down emissions but uh we have to do much more and after the IPCC report the other week um i think we should we should increase our ambition level well it's a good question sir um as you can see can you see what i'm sharing with you yes yeah the yellow the yellow curve is actually emissions from these reasons they're not as nicely you know they don't perform as nicely as the trajectories does they go up and down and we have no idea how they're going to go next year from these reasons and we we see that so far we've managed like minus two percent per year it says until 2017 last year we had a very rough winter very cold winter so emissions went up from that sector but also industry is running running very warm very high on a high percentage of its capacity so that's the other explanation and we see that we need to come down by five percent between five and eight percent until 2045 eight percent per year if you want to reach zero emissions and use none of the extra flexibility that we're allowed to otherwise five percent per year and you know if you don't make any calculations or i think we we need to set targets then you need to evaluate and then you need perhaps to put in more measures if you see that that you don't reach the the targets and when you set the targets at least we saw that the technology is around the corner or it's already there perhaps not always on the market but then you need to be a little bit bold to stretch things a little bit but not too much and we can see that minus 85 percent is within reach till to 2045 it's not going to come come around easily we're going to have to make more take more measures to to get there and incentivize sometimes and also we're going to need to have a discussion on how to look upon fossil fuels for instance for the transport sector after like 20 20 30 should we have a very high tax on them in order for them not to return what electricity has become the main fuel or should we simply forbid them on the market we don't know that but you know you know very little about the future set the targets evaluate and take more measures as we have the evaluation at hand that's the way we do it two more additional comments one is that I don't any european country has cut their emissions by more than 1.5 to 2 percent from one year to the next historically so this means that whether we talk about five or eight percent per year that that is a huge difference and and again I want to stress in many sectors it's transformation we are talking about to do things differently secondly we have of course we're going to face stranded assets along the road and we have to put the policy in place not only in sweden but in particular in central europe for regions which are very much stuck in the in the cold-based economy to help them transform and I don't think we have discussed that sufficiently yet neither in at the national level nor at the european level so I think that's that that that has to come I read that you have your your 15 sector action plans and we've heard a bit this morning about cement and steel and other sectors but I mean how focused are these sector action plans on on the gap if you like because there will of course be things that you know and you know we've heard about the the transformation in renewable heating and you know that's obviously an easier target for you and the progress you've made in renewable electricity but in terms of those harder to breach gaps I mean is there innovation coming from these sector action plans that give you confidence and the public confidence that the gap can be closed or are there still many unanswered questions there well let me start and say that one of my tasks is to chair climate kick which is one of the instruments put up by the european commissions some years ago kick stands for knowledge and innovation communities and after seven eight years of experience we have come to the conclusion that in order to bring about transformation we really need what we call systems design not vertical or or silo based design so we are no longer interested primarily in specific technologies we look at the system and to try to understand what is required within the system to really make change happen so I think that that is going to be when we talk about innovation I think of course there are there are areas where a particular technology can make significant change but if we talk about transportation if we talk about infrastructure if we talk about farming you need to look at a number of components to make change happen and here I think we need to be much much more ambitious and and put public funding in support of that I shared with you a couple of the action plans perhaps you have them all otherwise I'd be happy to share them with you ask sir if they were focused on the gap and I'd say that not necessarily it's so per se they they have rather shown initiative to to come up with action plans for their own sector and see how fast can we translate today's emissions into becoming fossil free but as it happens the fossil free coordinator appointed by the Swedish government has worked with those sectors that needs to be focused on to close our gap you can see that for instance mining and minerals industry is there and they'll try to make mining operations for self free by 2035 they are larger minors they also have working machines down the mines that emits lots of co2 which is often a forgotten sector and they're about to become electrified around the corner it will happen well from next year actually and I think that they're going to reach this scope much sooner than 2035 actually steel industry 10% of the Swedish emissions aviation industry and obviously sticky issue to use the word of the convener before and also lots of other sectors that really are in the focus of west Sweden needs to take action to close our gap so yes and no no because they focus on their own sectors but yes it happens to be those sectors chosen by the the coordinator appointed by the government and closely in content with us doing carrying out the analytical work for the government you could just follow up on that so the strategy the government strategy of not including certain sectors when they're measuring or we're producing their targets or measuring their achievements in relation to those targets I mean that's quite different from the Scottish approach where we are setting a target which doesn't exclude any sector can you see a situation for Sweden adopts that is that politically possible is that is that necessary if we're to be bolder could you repeat the question please isn't it quite understand so at the moment your government sets their targets but it doesn't include things like aviation for example it doesn't include certain land use emissions but Scotland's approach is differing in that it isn't excluding any sectors does yeah well can you see if there's been a political change in order to not excluding these sectors and making your targets more kind of you know 100% of sectors well you know I think the the two sectors that are not included is aviation and shipping yeah but push us on the fact that we have to include them sooner or later yeah but they were seen as being part of the international agreement domain but I agree with you we need to tackle them and we need to take initiatives and I think that if every country would wait for for the others to join nothing would happen so some countries would have to stick their neck out and be a bit more ambitious so I very much applaud the Scottish approach we haven't come that far yet but but I think we will come there okay stress team soon just looking at the document that's just disappeared off the screen it said that aviation aims to have domestic flights by 2030 emission free and international flights originating in sweden to be emissions free by 2045 now I read that as being the industry's aims what status does that have and what how do they sanction themselves if they don't do it and does it mean very much if it's not part of the legislative framework well in a in a way first back international aviation you know all aviation within europe is obviously part of the ets system so that part of our flying system it is in the system the domestic system well but then international flights are are outside just to be clear on that and all sectors are part of the Swedish goals I mean set for those ones so I mean the haulage industry the retail sector steel sector mining and minerals they are within the 85 percent so the status of their goals is more or less you know a statement on their behalf to their owners to their consumers to the society in general but but then again they're not connected in a particular way to the goals set out by the government and what the government can do is more to incentivise them than anything else so so that that'd be my answer then then again try to find a picture here you know we don't calculate any any the uptake from our forests in sweden we emit around 55 million tons of CO2 each year and the net uptake from our forest is around 45 to 50 million tons so you know we don't calculate that at at at a wall we could of course do that as well and I wasn't really sure when I read your papers how scotland does with this but we don't at all we might begin to do so in the future but currently we look upon it as a free service to to the world so to speak Claudia Beamish thank you convener um we've developed some of these some issues in our discussions already but i'd just like to highlight that um as you'll know Stefan nice from indicated in his scotsman article that the setting of a net zero target had been a strong driver for business and local government in scotland you will probably know that we have now mandatory duties for public bodies not just local government but all public bodies in in the public sector um but this is a an expectation rather than a support although there are support methods i'm just wondering what support um beyond what we've already discussed you could either of you could highlight that's provided by central government um in sweden for either the public sector or business to achieve climate change targets well i mean we we alluded to the steel sector where the government puts in 30 40 million euros yearly for for that hydrogen project so there are many examples like that yes then of course there are particular incentives in the transportation sector that that Stefan alluded to above to incentivize consumers to do certain things but also to obliging the the petroleum providers to gradually increase the the the mixing of synthetic fuels into conventional fuels etc so there there there is a there's a whole array of different measures we could of course send them over to you but i don't think we could could could give an exhaustive list here no no that would be very helpful thank you and the public sector is obviously very important as well you know the local government um arrangements and and other things such as the health service or the police or how how is is the swedish government able to support those in in effecting change well there is a there is a provision in the law that each and every government sector each ministry has to take into account the climate law in all what they're doing so so climate mitigation and adaptation concerns have to be um taken into account in all policymaking and that's one of the i think strong parts of the legislation and that that makes um this this law much more integrating than what we've had in the past then as i said at the municipality level you have a lot of examples of uh rather ambitious policies engaging the private sector engaging different parts of the municipality services etc uh so so and there is sort of an almost a competition uh both domestically but also internationally you have the c 40 you have the eclay you have a lot of organizations at at the city level who who cooperate and who who who who who share best experiences etc so so that that's going on and and that doesn't mean much nationally as i'd have said there's a lot of support programs we can't go into them all you wouldn't want us to i think but we can send them over to you in text and you can read about them and ask questions later on if you'd like uh also several cities have had you you know introduced their own climate change committees so there's about three Swedish cities who come up with their own climate change commitments so you know things are really developing at very fast pace then again as i understated earlier one of the big challenges is that we traditionally work very much in silos as is the case in all countries i guess both within governments but also within policies and just to take an example to to see the challenge in heaven is that when um introduced or launched we have a we have a infrastructure investment program which is financed by the government but we just know also uh i think there's some sound in the background where you are which makes it difficult for us to hear it's a scraping sound anyway here um you just carry on we can hear you perfectly okay good that was some scraping sound from your side anyway it stopped now thank you but you know when when this program was launched last year it's a 10-year program for how much sweden is supposed to invest in new roads new railroads and surveillance and maintenance and so forth uh this program comprised some 690 billion swedish crowns which is about 75 billion pounds so lots of money but but so far the authorities that responsible for elaborating on where to put the money they didn't even consider the climate so this was just to give evidence that no we have a way to to walk as well and we have to you know find the way to cooperate between the silos and we're not there yet as understand there is an important provision in the law to do so but it remains to materialise to a large extent thank you okay alec rowley i wonder um my experience has been that many more people are aware of climate change but there is a tendency sometimes that they see it as someone else's problem to solve and i wonder your experience of engaging the wider public within this discussion and debate and for them to see that that we all have a responsibility and can you also go back to this question of setting a net zero target there is the debate in scotland about whether it's achievable and whether it's the right thing to do what is the advantage or the main advantage you would see in setting a set zero target given that the technology etc that we would perhaps need to achieve that is not yet invented well i first your first question of course there are groups in this country as well as in other countries who are either climate deniers we have those people or very skeptical to a small country like sweden taking on this ambitious goal um so you have of course to to talk to them and you have to try to make the point that if we do the transition or transformation in an intelligent way these groups and most of them if i may try to categorize them i think they live in the rural areas and they have a tendency also nowadays to vote for the ultra right party that's emerged over the last 10 15 years you have to convince them or show to them that if we do this transformation in an intelligent way they should not become losers rather the opposite because we would we would do a lot of things in the context of a bio-based economy that that would probably be beneficial to them so i think it's very important to establish a dialogue with people and not to to look upon anyone as a hopeless case rather engage everybody otherwise this is not going to succeed um then um you know i think the only way to address this issue which is a existential issue i would say uh if you read the ipassie report that came out on book grade carefully not only the summary for policymakers but some of the the other chapters you you will see that between 1.5 degrees there are possible tipping points that are very very serious so and that that may turn life as we know it into becoming very very difficult and challenging only a few decades so i think we need to put these very ambitious goals um and we have so far a lot of evidence that when we do that we can also achieve it i'm not saying it's going to be easy but i think it's uh and in most areas we have the technologies we have the technologies and then if we add behavioural change i mean it's not that god sent right to travel to thailand every christmas on vacation people could start reconsidering some of their habits and and and i think that would be needed so um that would be my answer yeah no this is just an important one of the most important issues because if the general public is not aware and does not support then it's going to be very difficult for the politicians that measures in place in order to achieve the goals i think there's a very strong consciousness and last summer as i also wrote in the article uh after that discussions have gone very intense i've become very intense you know we haven't had this a dry this hot summer ever before and it's something extraordinary harvest soft you know and in spite of that we had a very cold winter lots of rains and floods and at the same time as we have flooding at five to ten places and at the same time we had severe draft and it served no one and everybody understood that this if this is the beginning uh we're willing to to put an extra effort in now asking your question about net zero and the advantage of a net territorial i'd say is that net zero or for that matter fosr three it's much easier to communicate to anyone and 86% or 93% or whatever percentage because percent what is a percent what is 80 what is 90 what is 93 net zero that's something to stand behind that's an important launch amount of that's something which is needed in this kind of almost transition stand before and we started off philosophy that i think something which is discussed at least in some newspapers today's weakness can't moral imperative you need to do the right things because they are the right things to do thank you final question sorry carry on yeah i i had calculated we would end at 11 30 or 10 30 your time so i i had to gradually start to face out but please one question more okay we have a final question from richard lile yes i'm final question gentlemen i believe we all wish to be green we all wish to secure the future so can we now turn to the implementation costs and society cost in scotland a figure of 13 billion has been given for the cost of implementing our proposed target however there are a number of unknown factors in the methodology and analysis what analysis has been done to the costs and benefits of scott of sweden's net zero target and how robust do you believe it is well i would say the economic models we have are not very good at calculating this in particular not over the long term that was one of the findings when we had the strategy work that that and and most of the economic modeling looks at the costs not at the benefits and they they they do not really have the capacity to anticipate the innovation that will probably take place as a consequence of the measures taken new companies being started new jobs coming into force etc so so i would say that i think you have to to take all such calculations with a grain of salt that's my sort of general answer secondly um of course uh it it it will it will cost some money but i think the benefits are colossal and if you include the health related benefits in most countries for less air pollution it's something that that that will give huge benefits to society so so so those will be my more general comments now i'm with Anders being an economist myself having done lots of modeling it is difficult to get innovation into models in a way which means that they're always overestim cost and it's difficult at all since the whole scheme of becoming fossil free or climate neutral to 2045 depends on innovation and we can't get it almost it's very difficult to calculate any numbers for it rather we can see from the other side what are the benefits and we can see that there are no regrets policies in many instances when it comes to electrification for instance we have 1100 uh deaths in advance you know but pre pre or is that even people die 12 years in advance of what they should do in order to air pollution so we're going to get cleaner cities less noisy cities we're going to be able to to construct building scenarios where the noise is too high now when electric uh electric cars are there instead of the fossil cars and uh make of combustion and is making it more possible to to uh pack up the cities and land is very scarce in the centres of these areas so there's lots of no regrets policies that we can identify here and since since industry itself where it comes to the big polluters or big emitters like industry and cement they see this as as a competitive advantage in the future if we can find proper ways of sharing risk and finance with the public that's what triggered i think the possibility of setting the goals and everybody understood that you can't really calculate either costs or for the measures to be taken or the costs are non-action for that matter either you have to value it in relation to reality as it develops but i would add two things one is that nobody knows the extent of stranded assets out there and i think the financial sector has only recently started to be aware that some of the things that they have invested may lose value because of technology change secondly we didn't have time to dwell into the whole area of exponential technologies um i would submit that one of the most interesting and fascinating opportunities probably would be in trying to align climate policy with some of the exponential technologies that we now see emerging particular digital technologies artificial intelligence etc but most of those technologies are not really aiming at addressing climate mitigation goals they are they they they aim at other objectives and if we could align those i think we we would have some some opportunities that we don't see today um so um i mean as we as we have indicated that there is so much that is unknown and that we have thank you very much i want to thank you both very much we've kept you a lot longer than me we thought but we've been so interesting and you've answered our questions so fully i want to thank the two of you for for staying on and giving us that evidence has been tremendously useful so i just want to again round off our public session by thanking both Stefan Neustrom and Anders Vicman for all their time this morning um our next meeting on the 6th of November the committee will continue its consideration of the climate change emissions reductions target scotland bill and we'll look at the behaviour changes and governance structures required to achieve more challenging climate change targets and the committee will now move into private session and the request that the public gallery be vacated as the public part of the meeting is now closed thank you all