 Ddiwy paru ei ddim yn fwyaf yn oedden nhw'n rhanllun yn cyfleoedd cwrs sydd rydw i rôl yn gweithio'n nhw roedd sydd yn eich cyffredinol Caergiad a Mhwylurion Cymru? Mae gyda'r cyffredinol Ondod, maen nhw gilydd y Adyghach, a ddweud ni'n rhan fwyaf i'n ymddindad Cymru a Gifryd. O'r ymddindol yma cyfleoedd, mae gennych amser oedd yma i ddefnyddio yma i digwydd ym 1 i 4 i oedden nhw'n cyffredinol Cymru. four is consideration of the committee's work programme. Are we all agreed? That is agreed. Thank you very much. Items three and four will be taken in private. Our main business this morning is an evidence session with the UK climate change committee in relation to its annual progress report to the Scottish Parliament, which was published on 7 December. This is the 10th annual progress report to the Scottish Parliament as required by the Climate Change Scotland Act 2009. The report presents 70 key recommendations to support Scotland's transition to net zero and highlights that the focus on Scotland must now be to ensure the rapid emission reduction in order to deliver and to meet Scotland's legislative 2030 targets. To discuss the report, I welcome our panel, Chris Stark, chief executive, climate change committee and Professor Keith Bell, Scottish member climate change committee. Thank you both for accepting the invitation to attend the committee this morning and thank you for your on-going support to the Scottish Parliament. Mr Stark, I understand that you would like to make a short opening statement, so I will pass over to you and you will see that your microphone will be enabled by broadcasting. Thanks so much, convener, and it's very good to see you all this morning. I'm sorry that we have to do it remotely, but we are where we are sadly. This is the 10th assessment that we have offered of the Scottish Government's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Scottish Climate Change Act, and it is very privileged to continue to provide that service for the Scottish Parliament. Keith and I are with you today. A few opening words from us today just to set the scene for the report. Over the years that we have been providing those reports, we have tended to be fairly generous in our assessment of the climate plans from Scottish ministers. Around the table at the CCC, we always have a choice about how we describe the state of play and, crucially, what degree of optimism we should bring to the chances of future success. In general, we want to try and encourage and to highlight the positives. I don't mind saying that it's always been quite useful to be able to point to the Scottish plans as a spur to other parts of the UK to do similar things, but some members might have noticed a change in tone in that assessment. That's deliberate. This year, we have had the Scottish parliamentary election. That's returned a different sort of Government with Greens and SNP together. This is the first time that we have felt that we needed to offer such clear criticism of the state of play of climate policy in Scotland. I want to mention that, because it's not because I or the committee feel that there is any change in the political commitment behind Scotland's climate plans. It's because we're running out of time to turn the great promises that we've seen from ministers into a change in the real world. I'm afraid that that's just the reality of the situation that Scotland now faces under this climate legislation that we have. It's this parliamentary term that will really matter. This is the Parliament that will really have to change the weather, I suppose, when it comes to the state of play on climate. The next Parliament is going to be too late. We make the point in several places in the report that Scotland took 30 years to more or less have its emissions. It's going to have to have them again in less than 10 if we're going to meet that 2030 target that Parliament set for the country. I'm on record in talking about how hard that target is. It wasn't on the path that we advised. It is more ambitious than any scenario that we have yet created. The time for questioning that target from our perspective is now over. It's law. It has to be met. At the moment, we have doubts that it will be met despite the raft of new policies and strategies that have come from the Scottish Government. That's the serious point, I suppose, that I wanted to make to kick us off. All of that is potentially going to place the Scottish climate change target framework in jeopardy if it doesn't change. In our view, most of the levers to change it lie now with Scottish ministers. Even where they don't, there is a need, I think, to find ways to achieve consensus co-operation with UK ministers so that we can address that. We've made that conscious decision convener to be tougher about where we need to see progress in the support, but I want to say at the top of that, because of the numbers, that's what's led us to that change of tone rather than any change in our view about the political commitment. Many thanks, Chris. Those opening remarks set the scene well and I'm sure members will have questions to follow up. Let me start with the first question. As you well know, one of the main responsibilities of this committee is to scrutinise the implementation of Scottish Government policy in this area. It would be helpful if you could elaborate on some of the committee's observations about clarity, transparency and detail on policy that has been lacking and that, as you just said, the credibility of the Scottish climate framework is in jeopardy. There have been a number of headline policy announcements in recent years that might fall into this category, including the announcement of the publicly owned energy company that didn't materialise, the public energy agency that we understand is going to be a virtual only agency. There's concern over a lack of detail in the heat and buildings strategy and the absence of plans surrounding the target to reduce car miles by 20 per cent. Are those the type of policy announcements that you are concerned with in terms of the need for more detail, the need for more specific targets and better implementation, as well as the critical question of how all of that is going to be financed? Yes, I think that they are. Keith might want to come in after I say a few opening comments about that. Broadly, what we see in the various statements from the Scottish Government and by that I mean the climate change plan update, the programme for government and possibly also the most recent draft budget that we've seen from the Scottish Government. What we can see is a collection of policies, proposals and commitments that, if you add them up, do amount to an incredibly ambitious programme. There's no doubt about that. Since the publication particularly of the climate change plan update, we've seen a collection of new policies announced and what we haven't yet been able to do is to match those up with emissions reductions, the numbers. We haven't quite been able to understand how various funding commitments that have been made are tied to those policy commitments. Probably the hardest thing for us, given that we have the statutory role in assessing progress, is that what we have in the climate change plan update is a set of sexual pathways for Scottish emissions across the various sectors of the Scottish economy. You can see the path that is intended by the climate change plan update and it's incredibly ambitious, as it needs to be, to meet the statutory targets that I mentioned in my opening statement, but we can't match that with the policies themselves. We can't quite see how that pathway will be delivered by the announced policies nor whether those policies are fully funded to be delivered. I might add in a further point, which is that we know that a lot of this will have to be delivered by the private sector. We would say that the majority of the progress will need to be made by private investment, by individuals, by corporates, by making decisions and investing. It is not entirely clear how that process of change will take place, either through the policies that I have mentioned. It is not to say that it can't be done, and I genuinely admire the ambition of Scottish ministers in the various publications that we have seen on climate. It is very clear that the theme of climate runs right the way through the recent Scottish budget, but it is not clear how that pathway that will deliver the emissions targets that are now law in Scotland can be delivered through those policies. Keith, I do not know whether you want to add anything. Yeah, thanks and good morning everyone. I think you are right. It is the level of detail now about delivery and in achieving the outcomes that are promised. The outcomes that are intended are fantastic, and that is the level of ambition that we are absolutely welcome. How do you get from here to there is obviously the big question. There has been a raft of consultations, but we still seem to largely be in that consultation space, rather than the testing out of the mechanisms for delivery and then the achievement of outcomes. One of the things that I think is good is the greater detail that is now promised in, for example, the annual monitoring reports. That is going to enable us to achieve some of this oversight that Chris was mentioning, but if you look through a lot of that monitoring report now, a lot of it is saying that data is still to be collected or that a process is still to be put in place to collect the data. Those processes and the collection of data is a very boring activity. If that fits you and has got to do it, you are not going to be very happy about it, but it is absolutely crucial to understand where we are and then, as policies hopefully begin to be rolled out, are they having the impact that we need to get to? It is just another illustration, really, of the kind of challenge of getting into that space of delivery. Thank you very much, Chris, and Keith for those answers. Chris, you mentioned that the vital need to finance all of those policies. If you look at the heat and building strategy, it is clear that the majority of finance will have to come from the private sector. If there is some concern over the credibility of the climate framework in Scotland and the credibility of policy framework, does that lead to a concern that the ability to bring in the necessary huge amounts of private sector finance is also going to be in jeopardy? Yes, I think that that is a legitimate criticism. It is important to say that when we look across the challenge of reaching net zero, let us just talk about net zero and step away from the immediate challenge of the 2030 targets, we in our assessment of Scotland's goal of reaching net zero have said that it is mainly an investment challenge. In effect, we are investing in capital assets across the economy in every sector, not just in new wind farms but in new electric cars or new heat pumps or new plant and machinery and business. Those are the assets that, at present, we use which burn fossil fuels to create the problem of climate change. Our investment is turning over the capital stock of this economy, something that is zero carbon. It is a major challenge. Much of that investment will need to be led by the public sector, but most of it will be investments made by individuals or by corporates, which, over time, lead us to the goal of net zero. We have put a number on that, or the UK of between £50 billion and £60 billion of extra investment each year from about 2030 onwards. For Scotland, we have also put a number on that of between £5 billion and £6 billion. That is the annual investment requirement to get us to net zero over the course of the next 25 years or so. Much of that, as I mentioned, will be led by private investment, but, crucially—this is the really important thing here—the work that we have done and others have said that there is no shortage of capital and finance out there to allow that to take place. What we need is a path for that wall of capital that is out there to reach the real world. That is the policy mechanism. We need policies that allow that finance to flow. Some of it will be directly done by the Government. Think about some of the major infrastructure that we might do, for example, to decarbonise the real system. That is going to be a piece of investment that is done directly by the Government, but much of it will be done by individuals or by individual corporates. Think about the challenge, for example, of decarbonising heat that you mentioned, convener. The Scottish Government has a plan for that. It is talking about installing many hundreds of thousands of heat pumps, which is an electrical technology that allows us to decarbonise the supply of heat. Over the course of the next 10, 15, 20 years, most of that will be done by individuals. However, we have not quite understood yet what combination of regulation, support or even law will allow that finance to flow. I do not doubt that it can be done, but that is the challenge, to turn that into a set of policies that give me confidence that it will happen. The final point that I will make is that this is the importance of the climate change act, from my perspective. It gives confidence to the whole collection of actors in the economy that we are on this journey and that we will deliver it. That is the importance of the statutory targets. They are not a guide, they are law. If everyone has confidence that they will be met and if everyone understands that they have a set of roles to play in that process that will take place over the next 20, 25 years, I am confident that it will be done. I am confident that it will be done in a way that is low cost to the economy and achieves the goals that the climate change act sets out to do. If that framework is loosened, if we start to view those things as more of a signal rather than a law, you get the sense that all the actors in this process that I have just described will start to have doubts. That is when the costs come in, because it is talking in raw finance terms. That is a cost of capital issue. As the risk increases, that is the cost of financing. It is important to say all this at the moment, because this is the decade when we are going to have to make the big progress to achieve all of this. It really does matter that the overall cost of this will be kept low if we keep the risk of failing those targets low as well. Absolutely. The numbers that you mentioned in terms of annual expenditure are massively significant. Before I bring in other members, let me follow up with a brief question in another area. The committee is about to embark on a major inquiry into the role of local government and cross sector partners in delivering net zero. I am sure that you have heard concerns expressed over whether local government has the necessary resources available, the necessary budget and expertise to deliver everything that has been asked of local government, especially in the context of the latest budget, in which we have seen a real-term decline in the local government settlement. Do you share those concerns about the capacity? It is in no way a criticism of local government, because it has done a great job during the pandemic, but its resources are stretched. Do you share those concerns about the capacity of local government to deliver on all the fronts that are being required to? I do share those concerns. I think that you used a good word there, which was capacity. There are two challenges here. There are resources, typically a financial issue, and there is also the capacity issue. Both of those are a challenge here, because what we are asking in this grand design that we are trying to bring together of how to decarbonise a whole economy is a new set of requirements from local government. From my perspective, some of the most interesting challenges lie at that level, and you could think about it in this way. Every town, village, city and in Scotland has to have its own distinctive plan for decarbonising, because every town, city or village is different in Scotland. I am speaking to you today from my kitchen in Glasgow. All around me is Glasgow's very distinctive Glasgow tenements. I am in one of them today. A town or city like Glasgow needs to have a distinctive plan for decarbonising. It has to have its own plan for transport as well. It has to have its own plan for making those buildings more energy efficient. I could go on. The jobs that will be here will be distinctive as well. It is really important that local government has some ownership of those issues and some agency to define that plan. That is primarily a capacity issue, because that is not the typical thing that we might have expected local government to do, say, five or ten years ago, if we were talking about that. For me, that is really exciting, because if local government has that agency and capacity, that is probably the key to unlocking a set of meaningful plans that will stick. However, if we do not have that, if that capacity is not there and the resource question now comes in as well, if the resources are not available, it becomes hard to push that from the centre. The Scottish Government may well have a plan, but you are pushing bits of string unless you have bits of government that are ready for that. We have time to fix that, but it is important to say that local government has a very important role in this, and it needs to be helped and supported to build that capacity. I totally agree with everything that Chris has said, but it is not to say that local government has to do absolutely everything, but they have a really important role in terms of reconciling different dimensions of the challenge and of co-ordinating and of bringing important other actors together. I am very glad that your inquiry is not only about local government, but local government is a crucial glue that takes account of those, as Chris was saying, particular differences in different locations. Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much, Keith. Chris, those are all issues that we will be exploring in that inquiry, which begins early in the new year. I see that Mark Ruskell has a supplemental in this area, and then I will bring in Fiona Hislop. Mark, over to you. Yes, thanks. Good morning to you both. I was going to ask you, in relation to the co-operation agreement between the Government, which areas you think potential progress has been made? That is notwithstanding your comments about now, is it time to build that delivery and to make sure that the budgets and the detail are there for delivery, but are there any themes where you think progress has been made? I am happy to pick that up. Keith will have his own views, I am sure, but the first thing to say is that it is great that we have a Scottish cabinet that has a cabinet secretary for net zero. It is also great that we have ministerial portfolios that are very clearly tied to that climate challenge, the transition to net zero, minister for green, skilled circular economy and biodiversity. That is a very important title, and a minister for zero carbon buildings, active travel and tenants rights, and a minister for the just transition employment and fair work. That is a reflection of the change in priorities. I thought carefully about what to say at the start of this meeting, because I do not want to remove the optimism that I have from this discussion. It is really good that the ministerial portfolios are in place, and it is very clear from my perspective that that is already having some important impact. It is probably most obvious in the housing space and in the transport space, where we have big packages of spending to decarbonise buildings in Scotland, and big packages of spending and priority being given to things such as active travel for the first time. All of that is great. The other thing that I might chuck into the mix here, which I am not sure is a product of the SMP agreement or not, but it is still worth commenting on, is the really commendable focus that has been brought to what is called the just transition or the fair transition and the various aspects of that, particularly workers and skills. Presumably because of the challenge in the online gas sector in Scotland, but I think that there is a wider collection of issues here that Scotland is now leading on, and I would like to see other parts of the UK follow suit. All of that is pointing in a better direction for me, but back to my opening comments that that now needs to be turned into real world change on the ground and the clock is ticking. That is not something that I am afraid that we have another decade to think about. We have a terminus in this year into something that is making real world progress on emissions, and I think that that is the challenge for me. It is great to see that shift in focus and emphasis that has come through those new ministerial positions. I am sure that the arrangement between the Greens and the SMP will bear fruit, but it has got to do so very, very quickly. Thanks very much, Mark. Let me bring in Fiona Hyslop. I am good to see you both. Thank you for joining us. Given the risk to meeting the tough 20 to 30 75 per cent reductions, I get a cross-party collective decision in the Scottish Parliament in which sectors are rapid gains still feasible and what needs to change to deliver tangible reductions in those areas. I know that you set that out in detail in your recent report, but I am keen to hear from both of you what focus and emphasis you want to give this committee. First of all, I will come to Chris Stark and then I will come to Professor Hyslop. Thank you very much. It is a very, very good question. We are already in the decade now that will matter in determining whether we meet the 2030 target or not. The 2030 target is really difficult, as we have talked about many, many times before, but just to make the point again that time for discussing and debating that target has passed, I think, so the challenge is now in meeting it. It is going to be tough to meet, because the flexibility that we have is not great. We already have a plan from the Scottish Government that effectively turns the dial-up to a living in a host of areas, so there is not much scope to go faster on that plan in most areas. For me, the big areas that will matter are whether we can capture some kind of emissions benefit still from whatever remains of the pandemic impact. That probably means looking to post-pandemic, trying to reduce our use of roads travel, and potentially, as much as it is possible to do so, working from home, capturing the benefit in emissions terms from that. The other one, which I am afraid that we have not heard very much at all from the Scottish ministers on, is whether we can suppress future growth in aviation demand. Those are a collection of transport areas where I think that we could probably go further. The other area that we have highlighted, which is a bit of a mystery to me, is that most areas, as you would expect, since the advice that we have given was for a less strenuous target by 2030, you see that the Scottish Government has gone ahead of the CCC's ambition by 2030 in most areas. One area that it does not have is an industry, so industrial emissions. That might be another area where there is some scope to raise ambition still further. A lot of the policy there rests on UK-wide policy making, particularly around some of the energy policies that will matter for industry, but I still think that there is scope to do more there. That might be something that the committee wants to look further at. Thank you. Professor Bell, do you want to comment? It is all a big challenge. As Chris said, he has watched Spinal Tap a few times, so he is turning it up to 11 on everything. Things take time. This is where we are a little bit behind the curve in defining the mechanisms that give confidence to the investment that Chris talked about earlier. For example, in buildings in terms of changing people's heating systems, there is one positive that I think we should hold on to, which is recognition that Chris touched on this, that the housing stock is diverse. Not all of us live in the same kinds of buildings, so just as some of them are going to be very difficult to convert, the kind of terms of the energy efficiency, the insulation, the means of getting heat around the building could be quite expensive to convert, others are going to be easier to convert, and maybe relatively straightforward to improve the insulation so that you can have a low temperature distribution system with bigger radiators, but not so bad in terms of fitting with a heat pump. By recognising the diversity across the housing stock, we can in theory get on with the easiest stuff, but that still depends on enough people and with the right skills to be able to do it. That is another thing that is building things up. It has to come hand in hand. The demand for these kinds of skills, along with the provision of these kinds of skills, no one is going to take on the burden of going and doing an FE college course, taking extra time or perhaps limiting the amount of time they can spend earning money in the short term, unless they are confident that the business is going to be there in the medium to long term. Just as that confidence issue is there for large-scale investors that we might immediately have in mind, we talk about that, it is also there for individuals in terms of their own career development. There is a mixture of positive and negative. The positive is that this is the harder stuff, the easiest stuff that, in theory, we could be getting on with, relatively speaking, but that has still got to be facilitated by various other sorts of measures. Thank you. With the 2030 target, the original plans had an education of carbon capture and storage. You might be aware that the committee took an evidence session just last week. One of the messages is that, if you want to get on with it, you have to get on with it quickly. Clearly, the ACOM project has been put on the reserve list as questions. What does that mean for Scotland's target? Can you maybe express to the committee what means done about carbon capture and storage in Scotland? If we have not got that in the time that is required, is it possible that emissions, removals and reductions that can be achieved through other action on peatland or diet or aviation, for example, can act compensate for that lack of progress if it is delayed beyond a meaningful implementation date? Chris, can I come to you first and then Professor Bell if he wants to come in? Thanks, Mrs Love. It is obviously one of the most difficult areas, most controversial areas, of the present plans from Scotland. The UK Government decided not to award what they call track 1 status to the ACORN carbon capture and storage cluster, which I'm certainly will have taken evidence on already. The Scottish Government's plans by 2030 nevertheless have a lot of what we call engineered greenhouse gas removals in there, so that relies on carbon capture and storage stuff being available in Scotland by 2030. We're in squeaky bum time if I can put it in Lalloc Ferguson language, because the decision on whether the CCS facility will go ahead is going to have a major impact on the achievement of that 2030 target if the plans from present Scottish Government remain the same. So we've talked about that in this report. I think it's important to say that the ACORN project is not dead, not by any stretch. In fact, I think it's a really important project, which I'm sure will have its route to market as soon as possible. But it was up against two very, very good projects in the north of England, and the Prime Minister had promised to support two. So it is honest with our reserve list. I think it is a very, very good project. The question is not whether it should be developed, but whether it will be available on time to make the impact that Scottish ministers would like it to have in the climate change plan update. For me, I think that we need to be pressing all the buttons that we can to try and make that project one that can join the two projects in north of England and find its way to financial close. That would be the best outcome. If that happens, I think that there is still a question of whether the greenhouse gas removals will be available in the times at the quantity that Scottish ministers would like them to be available. Even if they are not, we still need to keep pressing on with it. I think that there is a real risk, however, that Scotland might not be able to rely on those greenhouse gas removals that I talked about with carbon capture and storage. If that's the case, we need a clear decision from ministers, and that's the point that we make in the support. Our recommendation is that we identify a cut-off point for a decision, which we've said should be 2023 at the very latest, beyond which we'll have to look to other areas, and you mentioned the Mrs Love and your question. Those areas tend to be areas in which you can make a more immediate reduction, so people in restoration changes in the nation's behaviour or diet is one of the obvious areas in which you can do something to try and impact on emissions reduction. We talked about some of the other areas already, aviation, and potentially industry. To answer the final part of your question, I think that it is possible to replace the lost greenhouse gas removals that are in the plan at the moment for 2030, but it's really difficult. We've already got a really difficult challenging plan, and it's inertia that Keith talked about in his last question. If you can't just turn those things on and you've got to scale up to delivering those things, it means that we're really up against the clock, hence the decision point in 2023. Professor Bell, if you've got anything to add to that and I've got another very short question to pose my hand. Yeah, I mean, all of that's very sensible, but I think the green, the engineered removals risk is the single kind of most obvious risk. There's a big project, a big investment, there's a kind of key decision making process that does sit in London. It also depends on investment from within Scotland. There's a whole number of pieces that come into play, but it's only the single most obvious one. The broader point is that there are risks across the whole plan, actually, and that's having contingency or ramping up some of the other things that Chris talked about. They are sensible to do anyway and should not be neglected, and this profiling as well, in terms of through time, is ramping up. Similarly, when you get through towards 2030, there's no hard stop, or there shouldn't be, or there needn't be. I think it's a bit of a modelling artifact, but if you look in the profiles that are part of the Climate Change Plan update, some of these sectors like the transport sector reductions or in buildings, the reductions suddenly stop in sort of 2028 or 2029. Well, that shouldn't be happening in reality. You've already built up a sector, and a whole kind of, I think I talked about it earlier, a skills base, and you've also got other room to go in terms of the number of buildings to go through. You would expect that kind of effort to continue, even if, as you get through the whole stock, the rate at which you're doing things gradually slows down. That's all part of a just transition, actually, about enabling people to get into other sectors, but also the graceful exit as the need and the demand slightly settles down, and any more into a turnover and maintenance type of cycle. The risks there across the board need to be carefully managed. Thank you. Finally, I just want to ask about cement. We were told as MSPs recently that if cement was a country that we started after the US in China in terms of its global emissions, and we've also heard in evidence to this committee about the potential role of carbon capture utilisation of storage in relation to cement. Is that something that, in terms of the innovation or different aspects, needs to be given more focus? In terms of that wall of capital, we know that that wall of capital is interested in probably the most obvious and exciting of investments, particularly energy, for example. We should potentially be looking at renewable energy as a generation, but we should potentially be looking at some of the perhaps the unsexy subjects such as cement to try and look at what we can try and do if we agree with the message that we're hearing. We have to do more of everything rather than necessarily just do one thing. Chris, can you come to me and communicate and let us know, time-wise, if we can come to Professor Bell? I find cement tremendously sexy, so I think that there's no issue. We should be talking about that. Those are the kind of topics that really do matter. At that point, you raised your question absolutely right. Cement, perhaps along with steel, is the basis of global infrastructure throughout the world. It's a measure of how developed an economy is, and you need it. There are ways to develop zero-carbon steel and cement. It rests on a combination of things—a switch in the fuels that we use in industry and probably the use of carbon capture. It takes us into a different sort of discussion about how to decarbonise the economy, which is really the grand next stage for me in this plan. We've talked mostly in the past 10 or 15 years about how to decarbonise the power sector. While that's done now in Scotland, we've got a massive task still to grow the size of renewable supply that is going to be generated in Scotland, but the task of decarbonising it is by and large done. We need to move on to the next set of challenges, and looming large among those challenges is what we call industry emissions and cement is in there. I just give you a sense of that. Every five years, we give advice on a new set of climate targets across the whole of the UK, including for Scotland. Last December, a year ago, we looked hard at the industry questions. Five years ago, we advised a 2030 target. Five years later, we dialed up the ambition because we now have a net zero goal, and we've looked again at that 2030 target. 75 per cent of the change in the 2030 target comes from a different outlook from the CCC on how to decarbonise industry. Those heavy industries, as they are sometimes called, including cement, we see much more opportunity to decarbonise them than we did in previous assessments. That's because we can see now a path to fuel switching, as we call it, to using electricity more extensively in those industries and also to using things like hydrogen and carbon capture. I would love to see Scotland take a lead on that, because it's going to help immensely in the achievement of those targets, but, crucially, never mind the targets. This is a future industrial success for a country like Scotland, with economic success and jobs. It's a feature of the fact that Scotland has more ambitious targets in the short term than the rest of the UK, so it can specialise in some of the aspects of the transition. There are places at the moment that pump out lots of carbon dioxide in the production of cement, places that, in Dunbar, I believe, are a cement facility. They can be decarbonised. It's really important that they are. For me, that is exciting stuff, and I would like to see us talk more about that. It's one of the reasons why I've raised, a few times, the lack of ambition in the Scottish Government's industry plans. I'll hand back now to the convener to direct the question. Thank you very much. Fiona, let me bring in Liam Kerr to be followed by Mark Ruskell. Liam, over to you. I'm very grateful, convener. Good morning, gentlemen. Picking up on your progress report, you said that you weren't able to establish how policies and proposals in the climate change plan update add up to the required emissions reductions. Does the Scottish Government now have the right tools and models to quantify how the policies that you've talked about add up to the required emissions reductions? I think that they do have the tools to do that. It was a conscious decision to flag the difficulty that we've had in understanding the gap between the modelled pathways and the policies. What we have in the climate change plan update is a set of modelled sectoral pathways for emissions reduction. We've talked about them a few times already, but I don't mind talking about them again because they are produced by the Scottish Government's TINES model. It looks to us like the TINES model has had steam coming out the side in producing sectoral pathways. It has been unable to produce what looked like smooth pathways to the 2030 target and beyond. Lots of what we call off-model adjustments have been made in a range of sectors. There is an issue with the modelling of those pathways. A collection of quite odd trajectories for those sectoral emissions that Keith has already mentioned, where it appears that the TINES model just hasn't coped, so we see a really sharp decline in the early part of the coming decade and then a strange plateau or a straight line in some of the sectors. Clearly, as the model has decided that it should switch to another sector to find cheaper emissions reductions somewhere else. That's not the way the real world works, so if you work really hard to decarbonise, say, the buildings sector, then you wouldn't stop at some point during this decade, you would carry on, you would have supply chains out there in the real world continuing to do that work. There is a modelling issue there. The other transparency issue, if I can put it that way, is that we haven't been able to tie policies announced by Scottish ministers to the pathways that they have published in the climate change plan update. There is a degree to which that must always be the case. I would always expect a slightly incomplete policy package, because you want a pathway into the future, and the further out into the future that you go, the less sure you are of what policy will deliver. I'm perfectly happy with that, but we've got quite a gap now between the stated ambition for policy, the best we can see it, and those model pathways. That's the gap that I'd like to see closed. I'd like to understand better what the list of announcements that Scottish ministers have made will deliver, or what they expected to deliver in greenhouse gas terms, and crucially how those policies will be funded and delivered on the ground. Then we can start to wed this together a little more, and that's what we flagged. I think that they have the tools to do all that, but they have chosen for whatever reason not to publish it, and we haven't been able to find that information out, I'm afraid. I would just reinforce that. My understanding is that there have been commissioning work over the last year from various consultants or whatever to dig into the extra layer of detail that would sit behind what the climate change plan update was suggesting was possible. I think that word suggesting is really important, because models are a means to an end. They don't tell you the whole answer. This is a classic quote from a statistician from some years ago, George Boxing. I feel almost contractual obliged to throw it in at some point, but all models are wrong, but some are useful. You've got to know how to use them. They help you to understand the potential answer, but they're not the answer. You've got to then flesh it out and understand the limitations of the model and what it's telling you. Then, as I say, commission more work, or do more work in turn. This is where it's a challenge of what is a civil service able to do itself, what expertise does it have in the house, and how does it understand the interaction between different sectors and different kinds of issues, the interaction between finance and the technology, the skills, and so on. What does it need to buy in from outside? Yes, I believe it has been trying to get some of that extra information and buying in the expertise from outside, but that's taking a bit of time. It still needs to be drawn together, so it's a classic thing of another kind of cliché of I wouldn't have started from here, but I think it's just an encouragement really to the Scottish Government to put sufficient resource into it and spend the thinking time of drawing it all together, and then being able to put it out for external scrutiny, because they're not going to be so arrogant to assume everything's got it right. I mean, that's the same for us. The CCC want to get things out. This is our line of thinking. This is where it's come from. Draw together the expertise that's in the wider world. Nobody has all the answers. Very hard to put it all together. We need this sort of discussion to be going on, and that's what we want to get that extra layer of detail in a public sort of forum. I'm very grateful. Drilling into a specific area, the Scottish Government recently published its catch-up report, setting out various proposals and policies to compensate for the excess emissions that come from the missed target in 2019. Now, yesterday, and I appreciate you want to see this, but yesterday I got a letter from the cabinet secretary in which he said, we are also confident that the additional policies included in our catch-up report will more than exceed the 2.7mt from the missed annual target. Do you think that the catch-up report does have the adequate policies to mitigate 2.7 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and even if the policies are there, will they deliver in your view? That 2.7mt, I'm certain, can be recovered, but I think that there's a wider issue about the extent of change necessary to keep meeting these annual targets. We had a big debate around the table in our committee, the Climate Change Committee, about this very issue, and it's very challenging. They are all legal targets. We have a framework in Scotland that has a net zero target, clearly, and a set of interim targets, notably the 2030 target, which we've talked about a lot already. However, it also has these annual targets. I am certain that the 2020 target will be net, but I'm as certain as I can be without having the data, because I'm afraid we won't get that until next year, but we're in the midst of a huge lockdown, global shutdown that I think will have best emissions to quite an extraordinary degree. I'm also certain that the infrastructure that caused those emissions was lying dormant over that period, and we will see that restarted. You can already see on roads in Scotland the number of cars that are making journeys now, you can already see the reluctance of the Scottish public to use public transport, you are in our homes, heating our homes, rather than being in offices that are being heated at the moment. There are going to be all sorts of challenges in an ongoing basis to meet those annual targets. I think that they will be difficult to meet. We've said in the progress support that, after the 2020 target has been met, the next target is almost certainly going to be missed. We have got, I'm afraid, not a great record of meeting those annual targets under the climate change act. More have been missed than have been met. My own view is that we should draw a line under this focus as much as we can on achieving net zero on the 2030 target, because there is enough time to address those inertia issues, to scale up the policies, to scale up the supply chains that will be necessary to reduce the emissions in the real world. That is now the time for us to make that conscious move and to focus on what we can achieve. The requirement under the Scottish climate change act is that we have catch-up plans. I'm sure that we will continue to have these catch-up plans, but let's collectively focus on what really matters, which is cutting those emissions as much as we can and as quickly as we can over the course of the next nine years. I don't know whether you agree, Keith. I agree with what you're saying. It's an ongoing challenge. The more you get behind the curve, the more you're challenging, as we said earlier, the overall credibility of the forward-looking curve that you're trying to achieve. There will have been a reduction in emissions as we have the continued tragedy of the pandemic. The travel rebound in terms of car use is, I think, very worrying, potentially a poor signal for what we can achieve for the future. We can't assume. We hope that we aren't going to be in the position of assuming pandemic-related emissions reductions. There has to be underlying changes in terms of how we're doing things across the whole economy that are building longer-term structural changes to deliver emissions reductions. Thank you. The final question for me, just to drill into the answers. From the 2020 report, you looked at 30 recommendations that were expected to be achieved by 2021, but only nine of them had been achieved. Of those that haven't been achieved, things such as building performance, sustainable diet and agricultural policy, or partly achieved, such as adaptation, training, skills, active travel, where does your greatest concern lie? If there is a particular area such as you mentioned transport, what do we need to do to get that back on track if that is the greatest concern? My greatest concern probably lies in the agricultural question. We have got plans in most areas that, in outline, have the capacity, at least, to deliver the emissions reduction that are required. The ambition, as you could say, is there. The ambition has changed in agriculture, but I don't really have a sense of how that is translated through policy. I'm afraid that agriculture has always been an issue in the 10 reports that we have put to the Scottish Parliament. We have consistently raised that. If you look at the history of agricultural emissions, it looks, in recent terms, like a straight line. There is no reason to think that we would deliver the very sharp reductions that the Scottish Government is aiming for without some sort of policy shift. I know that there is lots happening on that. I know that we have a new ministerial team on agriculture and land use, but that is the area that I want to see more progress on. I don't mind saying that. We need to see progress across the board, but it looks like the area that is least developed when it comes to emissions reduction. Agriculture is important for a host of reasons. It supplies the nation's diet. It has a set of other interactions with the natural world. There are biodiversity issues and natural capital issues. There are all sorts of things going on here. There is a high degree of land use change required, but the policies that we have at the moment, even in outline, processes and consultations that we have in place, do not look to me like they will deliver the emissions reductions that are being projected in the climate change plan update from Scottish ministers. There is a conveilment of magical thinking going on here. There is no reason to think that that line will be achieved without some real focus over the course of the next months and years to deliver that kind of outcome. That, for me, looks like the biggest area of progress needed. Very grateful. Professor Bell, anything to add? Yeah, I think I would agree with Chris in terms of policy terms. I think there is also a big challenge in societal terms, which we have touched on already. A lot of the emissions reductions that we have achieved so far have been really on the kind of supply side, on the production side. For example, through electricity production, managed to more than half the emissions intensity of electricity production, it has cost a bit of money to get the renewable sector going, but that has had the benefit now of massively reducing the cost. The levelized cost of energy from renewables is much lower than it was when we started, and depending on what you are seeing for the price of gas, it is lower than the cost of production from gas, and it is a new production. That has been achieved with a bit of an uplift on our bills, but pretty much without anybody noticing. The supply of electricity has been, okay, storms still happen, and we need to kind of manage those correctly and get the resilience right going forward, but without those noticing. When we come to changing heating systems in buildings or the way we move around or how much we travel, where we are travelling to, our diets, that has got to engage everybody. Now, on the positive side, we saw leading up to the COP a lot of interest in climate change and emissions reduction and what we could do. The Scottish Government, to be very fair to them, has got a good campaign going, lots of publicity around this. The sense that I got from a lot of people seeing the participation in the marches during the COP, for example, is that there is a lot of support for this kind of thing. We see this from the climate assemblies and all of that. That is the positive, that there is a lot of appetite across society as a whole to embrace this, but to get the kind of extensive change is still a challenge. Leaking it back to agriculture. The land is managed by farmers and all of the people that work on the land. The policies have got to be defined with their support and then they depend on them to be delivered. It has got to be a kind of combined effort. Again, there are a lot of positive things coming up from a lot of the farming sector, so it is a bit of a shame that we have not had the policy progress yet that Chris and the rest of it in the CCC are looking for. Liam, thank you very much. Next up, we have Mark Ruskell to be followed by Collette Stevenson. Mark, I will hand over to you. Thank you very much. Can I just go back to some of the comments that you made previously about carbon capture and storage? We had some evidence last week in committee, which raised concern that CCS could be deployed in a way that effectively builds independence on fossil fuels. I am just wondering what your thoughts are on that and whether you see a case for separating out, if you like, the function of something like the Acorn project as a carbon storage system for cement and other hard-to-bate sectors from, say, industry desires to increase market for blue hydrogen. Is that something that you have considered? Are there some risks there in terms of how CCS could be used and deployed and any unintended consequences from that? I am happy to start on that one. I think that there are those risks. It has not been our assessment that you need to separate out and treat it in the way that you have tried. Of course, that is an option to Scottish ministers. You flag the use of fossil fuels and that is clearly a very important issue. We are going to need some fossil fuels over this transition. We want to move away from them as quickly as we can. Key bridging technology is going to be carbon capture. The reason why we like carbon capture is not because we want to use fossil fuels, but it is because using carbon capture gives you options that you would not have otherwise. Amongst them is the production of hydrogen through the use of fossil fuels. That is another one of those bridging technologies, bridging energy technologies that we did not have to use but are being realistic about it. If you want to get to a world by 2045 where we are using hydrogen as a supplement to decarbonise electricity in the economy, we have to build in lock-step the supply of that low-zero carbon hydrogen with the demand. If we only produce hydrogen through what we call green hydrogen, that is, electrolyzing water using renewable electricity, we will not get there, I am afraid, as quickly as we would if we used carbon capture. There is a penalty to the climate to that. We produce more emissions over the transition if we do not use carbon capture than if we do. That is the key point in our assessment. The challenge of blue hydrogen versus green hydrogen is a challenge that faces us in the transition across the piece. We need to think of it not in static terms but as a fluid topic where we use the blue hydrogen as a bridge to the green hydrogen, which is where we want to be once we have built out the very extensive power system and ability to generate electricity that we will need to generate all that extra hydrogen, then we can start to decrease the production of blue hydrogen. That is exactly what you see in the Scottish Government, in the CCC's plans, when we have laid out our assessment of how the UK can reach net zero. We have blue hydrogen growing until the end of the 2030s and then declining again as we have grown out the extent of infrastructure that we need in the power system to generate green hydrogen. That use of carbon capture is very controversial. From our perspective, what we are thinking about is limiting overall the amount of emissions that we produce over this transition, which is what the climate cares about. Using carbon capture in the way that I have described minimises cumulative emissions and gives you options to do lots of things that you could not do like to continue to produce cement, as you mentioned. I think that it has a role, but I suppose that the key point from our perspective is that we have got to think very carefully and in a very clear-sighted way about how we use carbon capture, where we use carbon capture and whether there is a better alternative somewhere else. That story keeps changing each year, of course, with technological development. Can I move on to transport then? Obviously, it is a very challenging trajectory that the Scottish Government has. It is dependent on a lot of things and a lot of behavioural change. I am just thinking about whether the right tools are in the box at the moment. My management, for example, is a tool to nail that 20 per cent reduction in vehicle mileage. Is that something that you have advice on as to how the Government should be approaching that? Again, that is fascinating, because the ambition that is in the Scottish Government plans for transport is wonderful to see. It really is ambitious plans, notably reducing car miles travelled by a fifth by the end of this decade. I would love to see that delivered, but it is way beyond what we have advised in our central pathway, which is much, much less than that, but a third of that. That means that you need to work extra hard on some of those issues. You mentioned it in your question. Demand management is one way into that. I admire the focus on 20-minute neighbourhoods, this idea of working local. Promoting modal shift is clearly going to be a big part of that, and therefore the package that has been announced and confirmed in the recent budget on active travel is going to help with that. Whether it will actually deliver that 20 per cent reduction in car miles travelled, though, is got to be under question, I think. One of the reasons for that is because we are coming out of this pandemic naturally. People with cars are using them more frequently when they want to travel than prior to the pandemic when they might have used public transport. Given that we are still in some form of restriction, especially now, as we are working from home, there is still an opportunity to make that point, to drive home the message that we need to reduce car miles, we need to use active travel, public transport, as much as possible, and we will have to work doubly hard at that coming out of the pandemic when we finally do to avoid the issue of increasing the car miles that have been travelled. There is a set of policies that are before Scottish ministers that would allow that, including things such as congestion charging and excluding cars from city centres. So far, we have not seen a willingness to use those kind of levers, but I think that they have to be in the mix. I really admire the ambition in transport. I think that it would be amazing for Scotland to deliver on that. At the moment, I do not think that we quite have to set policies in place that would give me confidence that it can be delivered. I suppose that one element of this is capital investment infrastructure. We have got STPR, strategic transport projects review coming up in the new year, next year. In the past, Chris, you have been perhaps a little reluctant maybe in the CCC to offer advice to Governments about road building. I am just wondering where you are at now given the state of emergency, given the challenge that you have laid out this morning around 2030. How has your thinking evolved over time around capital road infrastructure, induced demand, where we should be drawing the line now on some of this stuff? You are right. We have been reluctant and that is because every Government has choices. I do not want the CCC to say that there is only one pathway to achieving those targets. We need roads. I know that there has been a lively discussion, not least in the Scottish Parliament, about that very issue with some former ministers of Fergus Ewing making some very strident comments about it. Fergus is right that we need roads, but we do have the issue of induced demand, which runs alongside it. We have good strong evidence that the building of roads itself creates a new demand pressure to use those roads for private transport. Clearly, not building more roads will have an impact on emissions, but it is possible to meet the targets that Scotland has set while building those roads and encouraging people to use alternative forms of transport. It is our job to lay out those choices. We have not moved to a more strident position on the road programme, except to say that it is really important that, if the plan is to build those roads, the Scottish ministers are clear with the public about how emissions targets are being met and, crucially, how targets such as Carmel's travel are being met by 2030. It can be done. You can do all that together, but there is an element of having your cake and eating it on that. If you want to have that road programme, I understand the political priority that is given to road programmes, you have to work doubly hard somewhere else because of the induced demand that you have mentioned in the question. We have not changed our position on it, but I am more and more suspicious about road building programmes if they are not accompanied by a clearer statement about how you managed these major challenges that we have already talked about. I think I would just add there. I think it is back to the demand question again. How is that demand being encouraged or discouraged? Are you providing, in respect of car travel for example, an easy alternative? There is definitely an important role for government there. I think in respect of any infrastructure investment, not just roads, we have talked about this in some of our advice, the need for a net zero test. What extent is this proposed investment compatible overall with that direction towards net zero emissions? We have not taken the step of saying what that test should look like, but that is going to be a job for policy makers, I think. The importance of that cannot be underestimated. I think it is back to another layer of detail really in terms of what should be informing the policy. It is to get a better understanding of, in respect of roads and car miles, what exactly are those car miles being used for? Where are people going? Where are the emissions coming from? What are they being caused by? How much of it is commuting or parent taxi or going off on holiday on a long journey once or twice? How many times Chris goes on a long holiday? He does not have a car anymore. I think he travels by other means. This sort of thing, when you are thinking about an intervention to change the nature of demand and you are thinking about what the alternatives might be, it is not enough to think about just an average car or an average person or an average journey. These different journeys have different purposes. Our last thing I mentioned here in terms of the 20% reduction, the UK Energy Research Centre, which is a consortium of academics across the UK concerned with the energy transition, it published its annual review of energy policy last week, I think it was, or maybe the week before. One thing it said was analysis using the UK Energy Research Centre developed sport energy and air pollution model has shown that a 30% to 50% reduction in car kilometres is needed by 2030 relative to 2020 to meet the sixth carbon budget. So, they are suggesting that it may even go even further on going less far in car miles. My last question is about aviation. We are talking about complementary strategies. The aviation strategy at the moment from government seems to be about increasing aviation, although there was a recent recognition that aviation development needs to draw to meet carbon targets from transport. I suppose what would be your advice around what any new strategy, what kind of approach it needs to give a dot and where we should be focusing really on reducing emissions. I suppose there are all these unicorn fuels as well that we can put into aircraft, but given the severity that you have laid out at the beginning of this session, I am not reconvinced that we are going to get there through that alone. I agree with that. The premise of that question is something that I firmly agree with. It is important to say that we often arrive at discussion of aviation as though it is the answer to tackling climate change. It is not. It is a small proportion of total emissions, but it is a proportion of total emissions that we expect to remain pretty constant over time as everything else falls. Therefore, it is something that we want to focus on. The other aspect of aviation is that it is driven by our use of planes, the fact that we like to fly places. The turnover of the stock of planes, which burns fossil fuels, happens very slowly. You get these outlooks on what to do about aviation that focus a lot on the fact that we cannot change the plane, we cannot change the behaviour of people in the country who want to use those planes, so we better move to having some sort of drop-in replacement. That is some sort of zero-carbon fuel. I definitely think that there is scope for some of that, but it is not going to tackle the issue. Actually, we come back again and again to the issue of aviation demand itself. There is no specific commitment from Scottish ministers on aviation demand that we have seen anyway across the various things that have been published. We think that that is necessary. We have made that point at UK level, and we have made that point in the Scottish Ffair as well. In our assessment, our central assessment, we allow for some growth in aviation, but that growth is suppressed. There are other scenarios—we have some of them—where we look at an absolute reduction in aviation demand, and it could be as we come out of the pandemic that some of those scenarios have become more achievable than they were perhaps prior to the pandemic. However, you have to work at that and you need policies to achieve it. At the moment, what we see is a policy from the Scottish Government when it comes to domestic aviation that we will have fully decarbonised domestic aviation by the time we get to the net zero target. I think that that is just about achievable through things like electric planes, intensively through some of those fuels. However, I do not know how it will be achieved. A much more sensible policy from the office is to say, well look, an element of this is going to be about depressing the demand that we have for aviation in the first place. I think that the best policy of all is to give, therefore, a better alternative to using planes in the first place. That points to having better rail travel, to having decarbonised road transport, as we talked about. However, that is the challenge, I think, given the fact that things move so slowly in the aviation sector when it comes to panora, the stock of planes, we have to give better alternatives to people and cheaper alternatives to people to make those journeys feel alternative means. Again, I am not seeing too much of that, I am afraid, from Scottish ministers. I will reinforce the point again about understanding the nature of demand and the different segments of demand. It is a bit of a different issue from people going, like I said, flying somewhere on the continent once a year for a bit of sunshine with somebody who is flying up and down the London every week or a few times a week compared with, I mean, I do not know all the data on this, but just anecdotally, I mean, there was an article I was reading in the newspaper a few weeks ago talking to people who changed their flying habits since the beginning of the pandemic. Some of these people were doing transatlantic flights a few times a week, I mean, just extraordinary. Have you managed to do your work without them? Apparently, yes, they have managed to do their work without them. Who knew that was possible? It is this sort of thing. Again, a one size fits all is not the right answer. It is understanding the different nature of it. A small aircraft going across to one of the Scottish islands, that seems feasible to do electrically, but bigger aircraft, that is not really feasible. How much is the demand going to be in the first place? OK, right. Thanks. Back to you, convener. Thanks very much, Mark. Let me bring in Collette Stevenson to be followed by Jackie Dunbar. Collette, over to you. Thanks, convener, and good morning. I want to touch—you have touched upon it already in terms of heating buildings, and it was really just to ask about the real world impact of the committee and the Scottish Government's pathways for building decarbonisation. For example, for householders, for the energy industry and the actual site supply chain itself, and also the skills development aspect of that. I wonder if you—and even touching upon public health and the benefits as we move forward—could you touch upon that? Shall I try and kick off here? All those things are really, really important. A good point about the health benefits. Just to be in a warm home that is—you're not suffering with damp or whatever—that is so important. There was some work that one of my PhD students at the University of Strathclyde did a couple of years ago trying to understand—give a better understanding of the whole challenge of decarbonising domestic heating. There was, from the partitioning, breaking down the demand, and different sizes of home and households in different income brackets, and how much energy we think they're using right now, according to the publicly available data. We could see that those in small homes, low income, on direct electric heating now, according to the amount of heat—energy they seemed to be using—seemed to be under-heating their homes. We haven't got evidence of why that wasn't the kind of study we were doing, but one hypothesis is that it's because of the cost. If you can make the heating more efficient, then you can get those sorts of health benefits. People don't need to under-heat their homes anymore, and you have to do the work on the building fabric as well as the heating system. That takes us into another really important part of the just transition or a fair transition. A big part of it is about graceful exit from some industries and getting people into alternative sources of employment and building up the skills that you talked about, but a further part is about a fair share of the costs. Chris talked about it earlier, about the role of the capital stock being replaced and getting a timely replacement, a replacement with low-carbon types of appliance, and that includes in homes. How are those costs going to be met? The cost of electricity in the future should be modest if we're making much greater reliance on low-cost renewables, but it can't be denied that the cost of the transition into a heat pump is significant, very significant cost of upgrading your home. How are those costs going to be fairly shared, such that the benefits of improved health can be gained? We often get lost in how difficult this transition will be to decarbonising heat. I wish that we were more excited about it, because this is the great opportunity, it seems to me, because we can, in the course of the next 10 or 15 years, completely turn around the experience that people have in homes in Scotland, so that we have warmer, less drafty homes heated without the use of fossil fuels, creating the problem of climate change. That is a big shift that we can see and a positive improvement that we can make to people's lives. The supply chain to do it—the jobs that are necessary—is pretty extensive and will be domestic, and it's much better that we think about that now and plan for it. We will have a supply chain in every town and city that is doing that work. It is so exciting to think that way about it, because the ambition that the Scottish Government has laid out in its climate change plan update is absolutely stonking in this area. We are talking about cutting emissions by 72 per cent by the end of this decade. That is double what we have in our most ambitious assessment. If ever there was a clear statement of intent, it is that we have got the heat and building strategy, which lays out how that ambition might be achieved. There is a big spending pledge as well. Let's get on with it now and turn that into the real world change that will drive all that, because it is profoundly positive for the Scottish economy in the end to make this change and profoundly positive for people living in homes in Scotland to make this change if we are at all. Rather than being discussed in the terms that we usually discuss about how difficult it is, I would love to see a more optimistic framing of that. I know that all of that is going to be tricky, but this will be the transition that people notice most. The fact that you can boil your kettle now at any moment that you might have fully decarbonised electricity does not—people do not notice that. That is a great achievement, but it did not involve changing lives. That does, unless we frame it up in a positive way, it is going to be really difficult to achieve it. Okay, thank you. That is really interesting in the comments that you made there. In terms of the Scottish Government's proposed policies and the spend of £336 million this year that correlates with expected emissions reductions, is there an adequate methodology to calculate that? Do you feel that? I do not think that there is, but I do not want to dismiss the fact that that spending company has been made. If that is a big commitment, there is no question that spending that amount of money on this challenge is a really substantial thing to do. That will be a mixture of things. That will be about making homes more energy efficient, improving the installation of those homes and, ultimately, replacing the heat source for those homes. It tends to be an expensive business doing that stuff, so this bit of public spending commitment here is very welcome. What we do not have—again, at the risk of sounding like I am dismissive, I am not—is very impressive that that commitment has been made. What we do not have is a connection to the emissions reduction, so we do not understand what that public spending commitment will achieve in greenhouse gas emissions terms. I would like that, and I think that the tools are there for the Scottish Government to publish that and make that clearer so that we can then do our job of assessing it. Given the size of the spending commitment, I just love to be more positive about those kinds of commitments. I would love to assess progress and say that Scottish Government has got it right. That is a very helpful thing to say to other parts of the UK apart from anything else. This is an area where a translation of that spending and policy commitment into an emissions saving and to put the numbers out there to be clear on how that is going to be done would really help. I will just add. I do not know if you listened to more or less on radio 4 when it is on and the host there, Tim Harford, often when the number comes up—actually, we have gone off Tim Harford since he promoted his own book on one of our CCC webinars—but he asked a very fair question. Any number comes up, you say, is that a big number? In absolute terms, £330 million is a big number relative to the challenge of what it is trying to achieve and what we are trying to get to over the next 10 years especially. Is it still a big number? Another point I would make is something I try and reinforce with my PhD students or when I was talking to colleagues when I was in industry is a bit of time and effort, spending a bit of more thinking time, working out the potential solutions to a challenge or how things might go, can save a hell of a lot in terms of the investment cost in the medium to long term. Getting that extra layer of analysis and confidence pays back over the medium to long term. You can throw money at something, but if it is not well targeted, you have a risk of that money not being very effective. Thanks. I have got no further questions. Thanks very much, Collette. Next up, we have Jackie Dunbar to be followed by Monica Lennon. Jackie, over to you please. Thank you, convener, and good morning to you both. If you do not mind, I would like to ask a couple of questions around the oil and gas sector. My first question would be, are the oil and gas reserves that are currently being exploited enough to meet the domestic need to 2050? If they are, is it important to distinguish between the new reserves and the existing ones? I can pick this one up. We are an importing country when we think about it at UK level. When it is Scottish level, I am very happy to have the stats in front of me, but we are still importing a lot of particularly the gas that we use. We have bigger oil reserves. It is really important that we think clearly about that because we know that the problem of climate change is being caused by our exploitation and our burning unabated of oil and gas and sadly coal in some places of the world still. We have to focus on that global issue at some point. We use projections from the oil and gas authority who look across all of the UK continental shelf, and they provide us with an assessment of emissions from the sector, which we then take as a starting point to assess how emissions from the North Sea can be reduced. I am afraid that I do not know what is in those projections because they do not provide a breakdown of existing and new fields. One of the very controversial topics of Campbell, for example, is whether that is in the projections or not. I am afraid that I do not know because we do not get that breakdown. The important thing from our perspective is that in the end we have to do something about our burning unabated of oil and gas. There has typically been a discussion about reducing our demand for oil and gas on shore, principally, but we are more and more discussing the global question of whether we should continue to look for oil and gas and bring it out of the ground. We are planning to provide some evidence of that in the new year and we are going to try to take a more global outlook on that challenge overall. We absolutely recognise that this is a transition and that we will need fossil fuels over that transition and that it cannot happen overnight. However, we have also said that meeting net zero will entail moving almost entirely away from unabated use of fossil fuels. It is really just jet fuel that we have by the time that we get to net zero. We have to match those two things together. We will have to have a more sensible discussion about the outlook for production in the North Sea. It is not just as simple as saying that we have homegrown supplies and that we are therefore insulated from the price fluctuations that we have seen recently on things such as gas. We do not have the domestic supplies that would allow that. We will have to come to terms with that and recognise that although we need some fossil fuels in the transition, we need to be bringing them out of the ground only when we absolutely need them and in ways that are the absolute minimum in terms of the production of emissions at source. From my perspective, when it comes to those North Sea production emissions, that is the emissions that are produced through the production of oil and gas in the North Sea rather than the emissions that are produced as we burn them, I do not think that the industry is done nearly enough. The North Sea transition deal talks about reducing emissions by 50 per cent. We have said that that could be much higher. Our recommendation was 68 per cent. Until they are meeting that kind of ambition, the idea that we can bring more out of the ground is worth questioning. We are going to look at all of that in the new year, probably in January and might slip into February. We will do that in a consultation response to the latest publication from Bays, which has published something on what they call the climate compatibility checkpoints for new oil and gas licences. We will want to feed into that, so we will do some analysis and publish that in the new year. You touched on the new licences in the climate compatibility checkpoints. Do you think that the existing licences that have not been developed should also be subject to those checkpoints? That is an area that we are going to look at. Given that we do not know what is in the baseline, we should be thinking more about the central issue of what is put into the air. That is what matters in the end. That is the problem. I do not make much of a distinction between new licences for new fields and licences that have been granted but that have not yet been consented. In the end, what matters is the greenhouse gas emissions that are produced. We will do more work on that. Sadly, we do not have as much transparency on that as I would like to allow me to eyeball those projects that have been licensed but have not yet been consented. That is where we are with that. What matters in the end is not whether there is a licence in place or not, because the climate does not care about that. Professor Reil, you may come back a bit when there is an implication about a security supply issue behind that about domestic production meeting domestic demand. As Chris said, domestic gas production does not meet domestic demand as it is. I think it is roughly importing about 50% of our gas demand. If our demand was lower, then our kind of exposure to whatever is happening on the global market would be lower. However, if we had greater storage capacity, we should be better protected as well from global market fluctuations or physical supply issues. On a UK level, we do not have very much gas storage. There is a certain amount of line pack in the gas network. There are a couple of LNG facilities down south. The rough storage facility was closed a few years ago. It was closed by the commercial provider of the facility, Centrica. They argued that the earnings they could get from it, from the price differences through a year of buying the gas when it is cheap and selling it when it is expensive but insufficient to cover the costs. I only had a quick look at the numbers, but that might have been true just in the year or two before they closed the facility, but I am not totally convinced that it has been true since then. If they were making the decision now, their basis for it would not look correct. Anyway, there is a strategic decision there that I think has a place for government and plays into the security supply issue. On the petroleum side of things, I think we already export about 80% of our production. What goes through our refineries is mostly imported. It is the different kinds of composition of the crude that is brought out of the ground. It is not quite as simple as the domestic production meeting domestic demand. I think that my other questions have already been answered, so I will put it back to you. That is great, Jackie. Let me bring in Monica Lennon over to you. Good morning, convener. We have heard from Chris Stark this morning that the area that is giving him the most concern about the reduction of emissions is agriculture. We know that the Climate Change Committee has persistently raised concerns about the Scottish Government's agriculture policy. Chris, I can see some lovely cookbooks behind you on the shelf. I will ask about food and diet. The Climate Change Committee pathway requires a 20 per cent reduction in the consumption of meat and dairy by the end of the decade. So far, the Scottish Government has not made any commitment to reduce meat and dairy consumption at that level. That might work nicely for a new year resolution, but what action would you like to see the Government take in 2022, but also for people in Scotland? What should we be doing? There are many ways to answer that particular question, but briefly, the reason why we advise that diet should be part of the policy mix in terms of the objectives for the Scottish Government is because it is very strongly tied to how we use land. If we see a shift in diet such that we have fewer livestock, particularly sheep and cows, we can reduce agricultural emissions, but we can also free up land that is currently farmland for storing more carbon. There is an interesting interplay between the nation's diet and the extent to which we can change the use of land across the country. Use of land is absolutely essential to the achievement of net zero. We only have a fixed pot of land, so that is the reason why we come back to the diet question. It is really important to say that there is plenty of room to continue with agricultural practice in Scotland and that we can still have a nation that consumes meat. There is no question about any of that, but without the use of the change of diet as a lever, we are making it much harder somewhere else. The effect is that we therefore need to work harder at some of the other elements of the transition, and we have already talked this morning about the extent to which that is possible. We are trying to do everything at once—that is the challenge here. For us, it looks like a gap to not address the nation's diet. One other reason why that is important is because we know that the nation's diet is also tied to the health of the nation. The guidance on healthier diets already promotes a reduction in the consumption of meat. We are very clear that that needs to be part of the next. My point is that I do not know the extent to which the Scottish ministers regard it as part of the next, because they are silent on it. We already see a change in diet when we look at some of the very limited evidence that is out there about the diet that the country has by age. We see that younger people are already eating less meat than older people. It may be that that will deliver much of the 20 per cent reduction in meat consumption that I talked about in the absence of policy, but we need to see from ministers what they think about it. I suspect that there is implied change in diet in the plans that we have from the Scottish Government, but it is not written anywhere. There is no number that allows me to understand that. We have said in our assessment that there is some element of diet change that will happen naturally through that shift in the generations, but there is something over and above that required. However, we have stopped well short of anything that you might think of as a punitive policy. We are not proposing things like meat taxes. We are saying that this is about better information, getting better standards, giving the country a better sense of what would help overall and pointing towards healthier diets as being the key lever here. I think that that is missing. It is silent on diet in the round. I do not think that it needs to be. Part of the reason for that is that this is such a politically charged topic, and it will continue to be a politically charged topic unless we take the sting out of it and confront it and understand what is planned in the Scottish Government's climate change plan overall. I think that is what I am looking for, is that transparency more than anything? I will just add as well that the extent of the charge in this as a political topic—maybe we can discharge it somewhat because I would hope that there is a cross-party agreement, just as there is on the overall emissions reduction target, also about the different levers that need to be pulled to get there. I would hope that you yourself would be willing to engage with this as a topic. Another point is that 20% is very modest, I think, as a reduction. It may well, as Chris said, just happen anyway because of shifts in choices and behaviours across the generations. A further thing that is a recurring theme of our session this morning is about enabling things, making things easy to do. Making a choice of—even if it is still neat, but meat that has lower emissions associated with it—making that possible. How do you know where the meat you are eating has actually come from and what the practices have been in producing it? I do not know the data for how much of the meat that we consume in Scotland is imported from outside the UK, but some of the data I have seen suggests that the emissions associated with that production saved from Latin America are much, much higher. It might be more expensive per kilogram of meat produced here, but it is hopefully—I do not know if we can talk about better quality—it keeps the jobs going, it helps the management of the land in Scotland. If you are not buying as much of it, maybe you are still spending the same amount per week, but you are getting hopefully better quality stuff. This is an easy thing to say, but maybe a bit more difficult to help people to adopt in practice. People are more interested in the provenance of food now, and that is good. Again, it is changing the pockets of people, making that easy for everybody to make these choices. It is very difficult, in my experience, to find all of the ingredients in an autolengu cookbook like it is on the shelf behind Chris, but we want to make it easy to find low-emissions food, whether it is our kind of bit of meat that we enjoy a few times, a couple of times a week, but also in terms of the plant-based products, what are the emissions associated with that, and what kind of recipes we can use to adopt that are easy, satisfying, fun to eat, and healthy. Thank you, Professor Bell. I think that we are making everyone hungry. It is almost lunchtime, but as someone who has been vegetarian for almost 30 years, it is certainly a lot easier to be veggie now, but I have not gone fully vegan. It is really interesting to see some of the recommendations from the citizens assembly, the children's parliament, so there is a shift there. I wonder if you can say more about what the Scottish Government should do and could do to have a more integrative approach in terms of land use, agriculture and forestry. Also, if you have had a look at the draft national planning framework that is out for consultation, are there any opportunities in there that are not being fully realised at the moment? That is a great question. I think that the idea of being more integrative in an outlook about how we use land, agriculture and nature, we need to bring that together. That is a challenge that we in the CCC recognise as well. We in the CCC are tasked with not just looking at how we reduce emissions, we are talking about today, but also how well adapted we are to the change in the climate. That is another integrated challenge, and it is particularly obvious when you think about nature and land that we have to address those things together. We are on a bit of a journey to be more integrative in our outlook about those things. We throw biodiversity into the mix. We have a ministerial portfolio that covers biodiversity explicitly now. Those are the challenges that we see. It is very unlike the energy challenge. We have a heck of a lot of analysis now that points to meaningful strategies for how you tackle the energy challenges by extension transport. All the things that sit there tend to be well considered. That is a much more organic in all the senses of that word challenge and much bigger challenge overall. I think that we need to be better advising on it. There are a set of lifestyle issues in this, too, which I think is often where our advice in the past is founded politically. We need to understand that there are really important lifestyles and trades and skills that are across this country, particularly in Scotland, that are unique to this country, and it is quite right that we try to defend them. My own view on this is that we can do all of this together. There is no barrier to that. For example, in our assessment when we have looked at achieving net zero, we are maintaining the amount of food that is produced across the country. We are just changing the mix of food that is produced. It happens to be that you can have more land to store carbon if you have reduced numbers of livestock. When we look at what the Scottish Government has done, the policies that we see for agriculture are vague. We have a lot of doubt of whether they are going to be enough to drive that necessary emissions reduction that we talked about. Emissions from agriculture have been pretty stable in Scotland, particularly over the last decade or so. It is a difficult sector to decarbonise. It requires proper planning if we are going to see the results that we need to see. We now have a much more ambitious pathway from the Scottish ministers. I do not know how those two things will be connected together, but at the heart of it is a much-needed post-cap agriculture strategy. We are now out of the requirement to have the common agricultural policy to govern how we support farmers. That is a big opportunity to change. The climate change plan update does not really make any significant advances on that topic. It is still a strategy in development. I am sure that that can be addressed. I certainly have had sense from my engagement with the Scottish ministers that they want to address it. That is great, but it will require a lot of change very quickly. We have something called the agricultural transformation programme from the Scottish Government, which is going to help, I hope, but it does not look like it is going to be there on time. The earliest reforms to agricultural policy are probably 2023. In implementation, it is more likely 2025. I do not understand how you get to the pathway that the Scottish Government has laid out for us for agricultural missions unless you are bringing in some of the issues that we have already talked about—low-carbon diets—or being more active in pushing the idea of releasing what is presently farmland and moving it into carbon sequestration agroforestry. I am afraid that we do not have that kind of clarity. Therefore, I am doubtful that that is really the plan over the course of the early part of this decade. It may be that we get there in the end, but the targets that have been set are law and they are relentless. They say that we have got to meet emissions reductions by 2030, and we have already talked about the annual targets along the way. They are very difficult to meet, and they are particularly difficult to meet if you have not got a land use strategy and agriculture strategy that is wedded to them. I do not think that we do it at the moment. Overall, we see that the climate change plan is pretty light on intervention in this area. Everything looks like it is in the latter half of this decade. That is not going to cut it for emissions targets, so we need a better, more robust plan, one that provides much more clarity and one that has sooner action. That, for me, is the challenge. We have been making that point consistently now in all of the assessments that we have offered to the Scottish Parliament. I am afraid that it has acted upon. One thing that I would add in very briefly is that you made a great reference there to the national planning framework. It is really important. I am sorry, but I have not made time to look at what it is looking at and what it is going to contain. It is a very unsexy thing. We talked about things that were, but this is probably not, because there is a lot of important detail that underpins so many different sectors in the way that land is used. One thing we have not talked about very much, and I think that Chris touched on it very briefly in his remarks just now, is adaptation being adapted to the climate change that is already happening. One possible way of doing this is that things that are coming forward for planning approval is the proposed development, whatever it is, well adapted to the climate change that is already happening. The weather patterns that we will definitely see by 10 years time, 20 years time, and it could be if we do not have global action in the right direction, it could be even more extreme than the baseline assumption. Those sorts of considerations could be built into those statutory frameworks. Thank you. That has been really clear and helpful. I know that we are running out of time, so I am going to squeeze in one final question. Thinking about what CCC has said about Scottish Government having many of the leavers already, we know that the Scottish Government is a fan of the four-day working week and that there is a £10 million fund for pilot schemes. It is something that the Citizens Climate Assembly had recommended. What is the committee's view of the four-day working week in terms of its contribution to our journey to net zero? Is that a positive and how should that £10 million be used to demonstrate that this could be a game changer? It is important to say, and it is always best to say these things in this moment. We have not done the analysis on what impact a four-day week would have, but I am quite happy to flag some concerns that I have about drawing on the lessons from the pandemic and the requirement to work from home. It is appealing, in one sense, to have people at home more often in the sense that they are not travelling to work and commuting. However, what we have seen during the pandemic is that we had to heat this place while I would previously have been in the office. I am now eating my kitchen. I am in my kitchen because, sadly, my wife has Covid, so she is up at the top. That is one of the challenges that we now have. We have to keep this building warm and there are emissions associated with that. The other thing that we see—I am not in a position to be able to do this at the moment, but we have also seen during the pandemic that we have used the time that we used to use to commute for leisure purposes, and typically that has meant getting in your car and driving somewhere. It is not entirely clear that there is a direct connection between the number of days that is worked in the office and emissions reduction. It may be that we can cement that link, so I suppose that, in terms of what you might want to do with that £10 million pilot, you might want to make sure that there are ways in which you direct and help and encourage people during those three days that they are not working to not pursue that kind of higher carbon lifestyle and tends to be, of course, a very positive discussion when we do it in those ways. That is what the citizens assembly was considering. I think that the idea of focusing the £10 million on a set of ways in which you can try and encourage people to move away from high-carbon services and goods and lifestyles over those extra days of leisure that we have would be a really good use of the pilot money. There are all sorts of other things connected in with this. People have got responsibilities at home for caring for children or for older people or whatever it happens to be. Moriscope, maybe to do that, has a connection there, but the connection with emissions reduction needs to be clear. However, there is the potential for lots of different benefits. Thank you both very much. I hope that your wife is on the men's soon. Best wishes to all of you. Thanks, convener. Thank you, Monica. Likewise. I know that we are running slightly behind, but just one very brief final question is important to ask. What will be the on-going role of the committee in monitoring and reporting on emissions in Scotland? I hope that we will continue to provide the service that we do provide at the moment. The Scottish Climate Change Act makes it clear that there has to be an independent assessment of progress, and we are the body tasked with providing it. As I am the resident of Scotland and someone who has worked in the Scottish policy sphere when I was in the Scottish Government, I feel very close to the issues and I want the Scottish assessment to be done by the Climate Change Committee. The Scottish Government has announced on two or three occasions that it is keen for us to have an office formally in Scotland to allow us to have closer link to some of the policy issues, and a closer link to the Scottish stakeholders should allow us a better and richer discussion about the things that we have talked about already this morning. I am super keen to do that. I very much hope that in the course of the coming 12 months or so that the Scottish Government can find a pretty small funding that would allow us to do that. It is my intention that we would set that up pretty quickly and then have a richer relationship with Parliament, the issues that we talked about, and a richer relationship, a deeper relationship with the Scottish Government too. That has worked extremely well for us when we have developed those kind of relationships at Whitehall level and in London. We are finding more and more that we need to develop the local knowledge that you would need to give advice on some of the very fundamental societal issues that we have talked about today and in our report. If we can get that right, that will set us up nicely for the next decade and more of continuing to provide you with that service. Thanks very much, Chris. That certainly seems sensible to me. That takes us to the end of our allotty time. Thank you once again, Chris and Professor Bell, for providing your expertise and insights in the area and for your on-going support to the Scottish Parliament and for sharing various quotes with us this morning from Spinal Tap and Sir Alex Ferguson to name a few. I wish you both a very happy festive break and that takes us to the end of the public session, so I will bring this meeting to a close. Thank you both once again.