 Welcome to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee's 15th meeting of 2019. Before we move to our first item on the agenda, can I remind everyone to switch off mobile phones or put them on silent as they may affect the broadcasting system? The first item on the agenda is for the committee to take further evidence on the climate change emissions reduction targets bill at stage 2. This morning, I am delighted to welcome Chris Start, chief executive officer of the Climate Change Committee, Professor Keith Bell, Professor Pierce Forster, and David Jofie, the team leader for economy-wide analysis on the UK Committee for Climate Change. Welcome to you all, and thank you for coming and seeing us so quickly after your report was issued, which we have all found very interesting. I will talk about the report and ask you some questions about how you compiled your report. You just had six months to compile the report and to research it as well. Are you confident in that relatively short space of time that you have considered all the available options open to the UK and devolved nations? Good morning, and thank you very much for having us. Can I start by acknowledging the fact that we are horribly undiverse? There are four white men here, and I am very sorry about that, but it does not reflect the makeup of the committee when I thought I would start by acknowledging that. Yes, I think that we are confident. The work of course of six or seven months is intensive work to produce the recommendations that we have in the report for the Scottish Government and the UK Government. Of course, there is a lot more behind it than that. We have been in training, if you like, for a while, expecting this commission. There are a number of pieces of evidence that we are drawing on in this report, not least the work of the IPCC last year and its landmark report on one and a half degrees. If I may, the basis of the work is the IPCC work, a set of very in-depth reports that we produced last year on land use, on biomass and on hydrogen, three of three essential components of the deep emissions reduction that we have projected in this report. Then there is the body of work that we have managed to put together over the seven or eight months since the commission was received from ministers, all of which, when we boil it all up, allows us to say something that we have not previously been able to say. We now have a set of scenarios that take us out to 2050 and which, for the first time, permit us to talk about this net zero goal. We did not previously have the evidence base to do that. I am certain that the evidence will get better over the past months and years, but I am very confident with the set of recommendations that we have provided to ministers in the report. As we go forward, I am sure that we will want to look further at some of the issues that underpin our recommendations. I think that this is genuinely one of the best pieces of work that the committee has ever produced, and I think that we will stand the test of time. You mentioned that, as you go into the future, there is more in-depth work that you want to do around some of the pathways. Could you outline what is your top three years at where your priorities are? Necessarily, we have had to do something that looks in the main at the UK. I have appeared before this committee many times before, and you will know that I have a certain prejudice that we should look very closely at the Scottish issues, too. We have done a very good job with that in their support. The main thing to say is that some of the pathways to reduce emissions in Scotland will be contingent on things that happen UK-wide. We intend to look very closely at some of those things over the course of the next 12 months. In the UK act, there is a requirement for us to give advice on the sixth UK carbon budget next year. The basis of that is that there is a huge amount of work in the support that allows us to give a very accurate assessment about the sixth carbon budget and the pathways to achieve the long-term target UK-wide. That will allow us to look in much more detail at the Scottish issues, too. Briefly, the things that we will want to look at are, for example, the plan for decarbonising heat pan UK, how we approach the challenge of carbon capture and storage in the UK, which is such an important thing for Scotland, and some of the big issues that are uncertain at the moment, such as the policy towards land use and agriculture post-EU exit, if the EU exit happens. We have made good and educated guesses about those things. We have made a good assessment of them, but we will want to look at them in more detail over the next 12 months or so. We have hit upon another area of questioning that I want to ask about the equity involved. Obviously, there are a lot more challenging targets for Scotland to deliver, but a lot of that is dependent on what happens at UK level. The question is, is it equitable and realistic to put those challenging targets at the door of the Scottish Government when, as you say, decarbonisation of the gas network or carbon capture and storage is at UK level? I would extend it. This is a global issue, not just an issue that the UK will have to deal with. In the end, the world will have to do something about all those issues, too, so we are all going to have to get to net zero or the games of bogey. We can be pretty clear that those things will be in place or that the overall mission is going to be off track. On that basis, it is fair at this stage in the climate change bill to give this advice to Scottish ministers to say that set this target, this 2045 net zero target now, and be confident that there will be a UK framework in place to deliver those things. I might say that, in inserting the new target into the bill at this stage, there is a very strong lever over the UK Government that I hope is used as much as possible in the way that the two Governments co-operate with each other. I do think that it is equitable to do it now, but I do think that it is very important that both UK and Scottish policy steps up to the task, and it is not there yet. Is there an interdependency between Scotland and the UK as a whole in reaching both the targets that we are recommending for Scotland and for the UK? There is a lot of the energy sector decarbonisation that needs to go on. The UK has already benefited from what happened in Scotland, the development of the CCS resource, the forestation. It is a two-way interdependency, so there is strong reason to believe that we hope that those recommendations will be adopted. Perhaps I can just add, too. If you look at the cost analysis that we do, there is a cost analysis that does for disproportionally on Scotland, and we estimate that about 13 per cent of the overall cost of the UK is zero target that has fallen on this country. That is much higher than your share of population or GDP. I think that there is an opportunity to send the rest of the UK quite a big pill for your forestation and for your carbon capture storage. I have a couple of other members who want to come in on that, Stuart Stevenson. I just wanted to briefly pick up on what Chris Stark said. I very much welcome his confidence in his report. It would be rather depressing if he said something different, but there was reference to further evidence that will emerge. I just wondered two things on that. First, the implication is that the evidence will reinforce the report from the way that it was presented. When do you think that it would be appropriate to look at the evidence that you expect to come to further visit the targets for the UK and for Scotland in the light of that evidence? In other words, what cycle do you think? I get the clear implication from that and from my independent reading that the targets that we have are with the evidence that we have today, but we could in future find ourselves being even more ambitious. When is likely to be the right time to come back and have another look at that? Of course, there are some pressures to look at different targets right now, which I am resisting, because I want to support what the scientists have said. That is such an interesting question, because I think that the whole mark of the Scottish framework—and indeed the UK framework—under the act is that when the evidence supports that we do revisit the targets—and this is the moment, of course, about 10 years after we set that framework in place. In response to your question, firstly, to say that it is difficult to be certain what will happen with evidence in the future. We have been prudent and cautious about the way that we approach things such as cost reduction and use a basis on which we can be confident that those costs are in the right mark, in the right ballpark. The second thing to say is that this is not a static position. In fact, the application of policy has a direct impact on especially cost. There is a really excellent section in this report on when that happens. You get this very happy feedback loop when policies are framed in the right way, when markets respond in the right way, and you get this remarkable impact on cost. However, we have been prudent. We have not seen those costs fall in all areas, most notably not in nuclear, for example. It is appropriate for us to be prudent and transparent about the way that we approach those things. The question of when we might return to it is really difficult, but I would say that a period of a decade has been quite useful in establishing what happens when you have a framework like this and when policy steps up to address it. The other thing about that period is that we have had several changes of government over that period here in Scotland and indeed at UK level. The key component of the success of the climate change act is that it should ride out those political shifts. I feel that it is the appropriate time at the moment for us to revisit the target. There may well be a time to look at it again in the future. The last thing that I will say is that we do not have that much more time to achieve those kinds of targets. The luxury of looking at it with thinking that we might have decades and decades of time will soon evaporate. Setting a target like this at this moment is quite a fundamental step. I do not expect that we will be back revisiting it any time soon, for example. One of the kind of strap lines that I was using with the team when we were putting this together is that I do not want to be doing this again. This is the kind of moment for us to do as fundamental a piece of work as we can on this so that parliaments up and down the land can make the right decision. Mark Ruskell, just to pick up on what you just said, the methodology around it and targets is one thing but pathways is quite another. What model did you use to come up with the pathways? Was it the times model again or was it something different? I am past to my colleague David in a second, but no, we have not used times and I can speak from experience from using it in the Scottish Government of course, but we have a different approach to it. Indeed, we have used times in the past, but David, do you want to say something about the modelling approach? Sure. We did not use a single model to come up with our analysis. We used detailed sectoral analysis and constructed an economy-wise scenario based on modelling in the power sector, buildings, industry, transport, et cetera, so that we could get the greater detail that you can get from sectoral approaches, but then we combined them together in a way that made sense across the economy based on insights from doing modelling, not with the times model, but a similar model, the ESME model that we done last year for our hydrogen and biomass reports. We think that we have the underpinnings and the insights from that modelling, but we wanted the greatest level of detail possible than that meant doing sectoral analysis rather than a big times type model. As I understood, I have come relatively late to this process, but I am very pleased to be part of it. The priorities are to identify that there are credible, affordable pathways, multiple possible pathways. There are uncertainties there about some of the further ambition options where you get right down to net zero. The fact is that there are options and that is the most important thing to establish from the detailed modelling that there exists. The priority was not as times tries to do to find a single optimal pathway given the data that is fed into it. You mentioned interdependency between Scotland and the UK in terms of policy and one target potentially levering another one. What about the European Union? We see a drive now of the European Commission wanting to set up an EU target of net zero by 2050. How important is that interrelationship in terms of research, innovation, for example a EU-wide electricity grid, innovation research? I do not know, is there uncertainty? It is not as important as the UK, is the short answer, but it is very important. Some of the strategies to achieve deep emissions reduction in some sectors do rely on there being a UK, I am a bigger part in an EU approach that is compatible. I think that the best example I can think of at the moment is heavy goods vehicles. It is very difficult to conceive of a situation where the UK alone and certainly not Scotland alone could have a strategy to get HDVs to zero carbon without there being some EU-wide approach to that. In the report, we emphasised the importance of hydrogen, for example. That means that you would need really an EU-wide system of freight management that uses hydrogen infrastructure to achieve outcomes. We look at alternative options, too, but it is fundamentally an international question. The other aspect is that, at the moment, as members of the EU, we can sit behind some of the big frameworks such as the EU renewable energy or energy efficiency frameworks. We need to see what happens after we leave Europe and the European Union and see how those are replaced. We are in the main well ahead of some of the targets in those frameworks, so we have not really had the opportunity to understand what happens when they start to bite on domestic policy. It is more of a theoretical exercise to consider what might happen in the future, but Europe is, of course, very important. I will make one final point on that if I may, which is that I think that there is another interesting and important relationship between setting a domestic target for emissions reduction here in Scotland and the impact that that might have on the UK setting a similar target and the knock-on impact on other countries around Europe. In the report, we make a lot of that that there is a huge and underappreciated role in leverage, if I may, for the UK and Scotland in setting a target like that, which far outweighs the impact in raw emissions terms. A rich industrialised economy, such as Scotland and the UK, setting a target as ambitious as that gives a much stronger platform for the EU to set the target that has been proposed by the commission. In general, we can feel much more confident about the world getting on a better pathway if we approach it that way. Just to flip it around, the counterargument is that if we do not do it, it will be very easy for other parties, especially the EU, not to do it as well. That is a critical moment to set a target like that. The other thing that you mentioned is innovation and electricity. Electricity is not the whole story. Chris has already talked about the hydrogen sector as being extremely important. Electricity remains very, very important. It is a fair amount of electrification of heat and transport that is built into what we see as being the credible pathways. There is interdependency with the rest of Europe, so interconnection as a way of balancing out the surpluses and deficits of renewable energy as they vary through time. For imports of electrical energy to be genuinely low carbon rather than offshoring the carbon problem, it depends on the electricity sector and the rest of Europe decarbonising. In Germany and Poland, in particular, that kind of political leverage is really important in helping to move that. The innovation bit is extremely important, as innovation needs in all sorts of sectors. We have been careful not to make bold assumptions, excessive assumptions about what they are going to deliver. We are not quite sure. You can never quite predict where the main outcomes are going to arrive, but if the capacity—this is something that I would feel quite strongly about myself—the capacity to do innovation is really important. We pointed in the report to the need for investment in skills, for example, not just in terms of deployment but also in innovation. We could look to the offshore wind sector deal as being an example of something around that, but it should not be seen on its own. There has to be a wider framework for this. How the system works has an engineering system across the multiple vectors, and there are still challenges within the electricity system and how it is operated. It depends on people with the deep knowledge to go and do that, both within the industry, in academia, in consultancies and so on. It has been disappointing to see that there are a set of centres for doctoral training that are really important UK-wide in delivering those people with that level of skills and how to do research. There were 75 CDTs that were announced by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in February. None of them is concerned with the energy system or the electricity system. None of them is concerned with energy storage. A serious trick has been missed there. Other colleagues, I want to ask you about the evidence that you got from sectors. We are going to meet a few representatives from various sectors who have been challenged in that. When you were taking evidence, were there any particular sectors that were not behind the net zero ambition and could you maybe outline some of their reasons for that? David, I do not know if you have a better knowledge of that. I am afraid that I have a summary knowledge of what was responded. I have to say that most people who responded were advocates for this more ambitious target. There were a few from memory who did not, but I cannot think of a single sectoral representative who argued against it. However, there was lots of caution about setting a target that could not be met. That is one of the messages from our report that this is about much more than a target. It is not credible to have a net zero target unless there is policy to match. At the moment, we do not have that policy. David, do you want to give us that? Perhaps I can speak from my experience of the aviation sector and of the agricultural one. As Chris Dysart said, they are cautious because they have really big implications for their industries. They are probably the two industries that cannot decarbonise completely. However, I think that they understand that they have to do more than they are doing currently. I think that they are not completely a cancer-eyed chair, but I am almost 100% certain that they are going to come back to the Government and demand financial support of some kind to be able to get there. If I can just add the process for this report, inevitably the input that we got from stakeholders was via the call for evidence and those sorts of things. Before we had really done the analysis, what we have not really had the opportunity to do is then show the analysis to stakeholders before we publish as we might do if we had more time. Inevitably, stakeholders will have been seeing the analysis for the first time on publication and we would expect them to have reactions to that because, of course, it is important to their sector. We will see what the reactions are over the coming weeks and months. I would like to look at your views and the evidence from your committee on the appropriate contribution from Scotland in relation to capability, equity and, of course, supporting the global effort. Can I start with a view from Chris and any other panel members who wish to answer about whether, if adopted, the Scottish and UK targets will represent the most ambitious globally? We are very clear in the report that this is the appropriate contribution to the Paris agreement. One of the stipulations of the Paris agreement is that countries of the world must offer their highest possible ambition, so we go on to define that. It is very important to make this point that the IPCC has often been cited since we published the report, and regularly I hear that IPCC offered an idea that the world should reach net zero by 2050, and therefore this is an ambitious set of recommendations. That recommendation was for curm dioxide only. We have offered a recommendation for all greenhouse gases, and that is well in advance, then, of the global average that would be necessary for the Paris agreement temperature goals. We are in every sector straining every sinew if we approach a target in the way that we have recommended in this report. We have looked at an earlier date for the UK, and necessarily it follows that we have also therefore looked at an earlier date for Scotland. It is a judgment—that is why we have the committee here to offer that judgment—but any date prior to 2050 for the UK and prior to 2045 for Scotland carries a huge amount of risk of failure. We can go into more depth than some of the sectoral strategies that are necessary to get to the 2045 date in Scotland, but there are physical and real barriers to achieving it, and those things are not easily fixed even over our time period of 25 years. We have looked at a really ambitious strategy overall. We have departed in two ways from the cautious approach that the committee has typically offered over its 10 years of existence. One is that we are now suggesting to the UK and Scottish Governments that we should go ahead of the global average per capita of GHG emissions. We have never done that before. Secondly—this is true of UK-wide at least—we cannot actually get you to net zero. We can get you almost all the way, and we can be confident enough that there will be a part of speculative options that will be available to get to net zero. Again, that is a step in advance of where we have typically been as a cautious committee. I am very happy to defend that, but it is a measure of how hard it was for us to put together a set of strategies and scenarios for deep emissions reduction in every sector. That date is as early as we can confidently predict, given all the other factors that we are required to consider as a committee under the Climate Change Act in Scotland. Do you want to add anything to that? I can just say that some other countries are considering quite similar targets, but we can say with confidence that the 2045 target for Scotland that we set is currently the most ambitious in the whole world in the country scale, if it is going to be adopted, because all clean house gases, as Chris said, are not just for carbon dioxide. It also considers international aviation and shipping as part of its target. The other thing is that we want to do it as much as possible without international offsets of some kind. With those considerations, we think that it is probably the most ambitious one that we can set out there. Can I ask you how considerations of equity, in the context of global nature, were factored into the net zero calculations and whether directly tackling consumption-based emissions was considered as part of the equation? Just for the record, the consumption-based emissions were estimated to be around 70 per cent higher than territorial-based emissions in 2016, which, of course, you will know, but just for the record. I think that we made a really transparent and honest appraisal of the equity issues. It is worth saying that there are, on some measures—we put them very clearly in the report—there are some measures that would see the UK adopting an even harder target than that. It is quite considerably harder target, and these are UK-wide, I should say. In summary, you are right to raise consumption emissions, something that we worry about a lot. The basis of the statutory framework in the UK is territorial emissions, but that does not stop us from looking at the issue. The problem, I suppose, with consumption emissions is that we cannot control entirely the reduction of emissions. The majority of consumption emissions is still what is produced here. Secondly, we know that pure chemistry is never mind science. If we are going to tackle this issue of global warming, we must, as a globe, get to net zero, and therefore the consumption emissions line will eventually fall. Thirdly, in achieving a domestic net zero goal—whether that is in Scotland or UK-wide—we will reduce our demand for some of the things that push those consumption emissions commissions as high as they are at the moment. In summary, given that we can consume more than other parts of the world, it is one of the strongest arguments for us to go ahead of the global average on that territorial basis than setting a net zero target overall. We have given, as thorough a description of what can be done about the consumption emissions problem, including the potential to set new policies that actively tackle it, for example carbon border taxes. We explore them in the report, but it is still appropriate to use the territorial emissions as a basis for our target setting, given that that is what policy can control directly. Do you want to add anything to that, Gens? The other thing that I would add is that calculating consumption emissions is complicated. There is a big time lag between the emissions occurring and having the data, and there are different ways that you can do it that will come out with different answers. It is a less transparent framework to measure emissions. As well as the considerations that Chris has set out, it becomes much more difficult and much less transparent if you do it that way. The international process, as Chris said, is a global challenge. Those things have to be accounted for somewhere. If the globe is committed to whatever the Paris agreement said, those emissions have to be counted in the global ledger. I just make one. For the consumption emissions, we were the first report to really calculate those accurately, and they were calculated by Dr Tante Hoen, who is from my own department, and I do think that she really did a fantastic job at doing this. I think that we can be confident that they will reduce, because if you look at what we are advocating, a policy for the UK, about 60 per cent or so of the heavers that we want to pull off of the UK to focus on demand, or how to release some element of reducing demand. We can be quite confident that consumption and emission will also decline, going further forward in time. Can you please clarify whether the target of net zero by 2045 includes an overshoot scenario or not? I might ask David to say more about this, but no, it doesn't, or it's at least a minimal overshoot, so we've looked at a number of ways of achieving the target and concluded that we should be again cautious and prudent about that. Is there anything that you want to add to that, David? I would just say that if we go to net zero greenhouse gas targets, we will be in a situation when your contribution of temperature change will be declining over time, so you will be beginning to reduce your contribution to temperature change. Why, from the report, the rebalancing of effort towards existing climate leaders and richer nations appeared more plausible than increasing the effort of middle income and developing countries? This is one of the most important aspects of this report, so we've been let loose to look at a set of global issues that we wouldn't typically be able to look at. There's a great deal of new work in here that you won't find in any other report. One of the really good contributions that we are making now to the global discussion is that we've tried to model a different sort of scenario, which is much more in line with the goals of the Paris agreement, where the richer developed countries go first and take a lead. The reason for that is because they are able to do so, and they can afford it, and there is a great service in them doing so. We've been doing that here in Scotland and in the UK very well for the last 10 years. One of the best expressions of why it's important for us to do this, never mind the fact that we have a relatively small proportion of global emissions, is that we've been successfully with policy bringing down the costs of some of the key technologies. That's a service, frankly, that other countries will benefit from. It is most obvious in Scotland when we look at the offshore wind story, but there are other technologies, too. It's by supporting those technologies, deploying them and bringing those costs down that we can feel more and more confident about the costs of those technologies coming beneath fossil fuels globally so that those countries that are still developing may never need to use fossil fuels and may never need to build the infrastructure. That is essential, frankly, in achieving the goals of the Paris agreement. It's a really important thing in this document that we look at those global concerns and model something that is more credible overall. That's something that I hope that other countries around the world and indeed the UN itself pays attention to. Economic opportunity in there, as well. The pioneers of the technology are going to be able to export that expertise and that technology. That's one of those things that we can be confident will be addressed in other countries. Everyone must reach net zero when my stock answer to some of those questions so far. In the knowledge that that is the case, developing some of the technologies to do it here in Scotland is a very sensible economic development strategy. I suppose that the other thing to say about that is that the record of the last decade and more is that having had the climate change act in Scotland and again at UK level, we haven't ruined the economy, quite the opposite. We have become a very strong example of what happens when policies framed in the right way. The economy has grown while we've successfully cut emissions. That's exactly what needs to happen in every developed country as a demonstration of how we can achieve it overall. I'm confident that it can be done if other countries follow that framework. The big take-home message from the IPCC report was that we need to take action in the next 10 years. That early action is absolutely critical. I'm wondering what kind of research and analysis you've done around the 2030 target. There's much more about what we do now, what we put in place now, today. I might open that up in a second, but just by way of introductory comment. We have necessarily had to look at a UK-wide strategy for net zero and drawn some conclusions about how that effort can be achieved in Scotland and indeed in Wales and Northern Ireland for that matter. What we haven't been able to do is to build a detailed pathway here in Scotland yet. That's something that we acknowledge in the report and that we intend to do something about over the course of the next 12 months or so, 12 to 18 months. That has meant that we've been prudent again and cautious in how to assess the need for that as the very sensible and important need for entering targets under the new climate change bill in Scotland. We've used the best evidence that we have of what the pathway might look like to get to that 2045 date. That has been a straight line assessment. I think that we will revisit this. I don't know whether that means that we will revisit the 2030 interim target, but I know that we'll have better evidence on which to base our assessment when we do so. Again, the key component of our ability to assess the interim targets, especially in 2030, will be the assessment that we make of the UK's sixth carbon budget overall and the pathways to achieve, hopefully, a tougher target, if Westminster follow Holyrood's example. However, you are absolutely right to make reference to the importance of short-term action. That is an issue overall globally where, especially long-lived gases, as they are emitted adds to the global stock of CO2, which is after all what global warming is all about. The more that we can cut that in the short-term, the better the impact on global warming overall. You can be assured that the committee's interest is in seeing as much action as possible. It is, frankly, as soon as possible to deliver those goals. That is something that I think we will want to look at in more detail when we have the evidence to do it. Do you want to add something to that, Piers? As Chris said, we don't go into detail about what to do with this next 10-year timeframe, but there are some definitely key things to come out of the report. The first thing is we want to bring forward the data, we want to the government to petal and diesel cars from that 20-30 time period. The other thing is that we want to develop carbon capture storage clusters, and we have to develop them in the next five-year timeframe. The third thing that I want to say is that we have to change a forestation target immediately, and we have to plant trees, because they take time to grow. They take time to suck that carbon from the atmosphere, and we recommend for Scotland the current forest cover of around 20 per cent, or to be rapidly increased to 30 per cent. In terms of what needs to be done, with only around 25 years to get to net zero, some of the things that we are going to need in terms of infrastructure are going to need early action, so it is not just the CCS that is crucially important. If we are going to be using hydrogen, infrastructure for both the hydrogen production and hydrogen supply is going to be important. Electricity grids, but also on the softer side, public engagement and the skills side of things to make sure that over the following two decades we are actually in a place to be able to deliver things. I think the infrastructure question is really challenging for policymaking. A lot of the infrastructure that we have had in respect to transport and energy was developed quite a while ago under a completely different market or financing arrangements to what we have now. To develop a hydrogen and carbon capture and storage infrastructure, what really is the right framework within which to do that is no longer well. The electricity and gas sector has incremental or big increments to accommodate repurposing of the gas grid or electrification of at least some part of heat and transport. Starting from scratch, where you need something pretty big, what are the policies to enable that and how is that going to be financed and delivered? That has to be decided really quickly. I appreciate that. There are some big questions there and there are some, as you put it in your report, some speculative ways to meet the emissions. We are talking about the next 10 years here and it seems very odd that you have effectively just drawn a straight line. Let's look at the increase in effort that would be required for 2030 if we were to adopt your target. It represents 4 per cent, so an increase from 66 up to 70 per cent. What do you think is going to fill that gap? Do you think that there are areas where, in your previous advice and current advice, we could be ramping up ambition to go a bit further than 70 per cent? In the report, we acknowledge that that is indeed absolutely, and we acknowledge in the report that it is perfectly possible to go faster at some of those things, and indeed that will make it easier overall to achieve the net zero target. Let's just list the things that need to happen. We are talking about an utterly incredible increase in electricity production and an amazing increase in electricity production from low-carbon means over the next 10 years. That needs to be ramped up. The policies are there to deliver that, but it needs the appropriate ambition to deliver it. In the report, we reflect on the UK Government strategy for having 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Were that to be increased, were we to go faster at the questions of electrification from some of the key technologies, we might be able to get on ourselves on a different kind of trajectory? It would certainly reduce some of the risks of achieving net zero overall. Is it so high to steeper than the straight line? Yes. The point is that we do not have the data on which to base a more detailed pathway yet for Scotland. I am sorry about that, but it is best that I acknowledge it because it involves us understanding first what the UK wide position looks like and then understanding what share of that Scotland can take. That electrification strategy is one of the things that we can go faster at. We have mentioned the EV switch-over date. It is indefensible to have a UK-wide switch-over date of 2040. We know that that is incompatible with the 80 per cent target of a net zero target. A car bought in 2040 that is still using fossil fuels will still be on the roads 15 years later. In the report, one of the best bits of analysis is that we show that it is a boon to the economy to do it and indeed it is a boon to the economy to bring forward the switch-over date as soon as an early date is possible, preferably 2030. Agriculture and land trees? Agriculture and land trees—we have to start planting trees. It is very obvious. That involves us changing our approach to agriculture overall. We have been cautious about the things that need to be done, but we need to free up agricultural land for natural stores of carbon. That takes time. We have already discussed carbon capture and storage in the related issue of hydrogen. If that is to play a meaningful role in the way that we think it should over the next 25 years, the sooner we get started on that, the better. That is one of those areas in which we need a genuinely integrated approach between the Scottish and UK Governments, the likes of which we have not had over the past 10 years. If those things are put in place, if they happen sooner, we can be more confident overall about achieving a net zero target. It may be that we can come back to look at the date, but at the moment the best assessment that we can make of how quickly one can do this is in this report. That 2030 interim date is something that we will, of course, look at once we have a better understanding of the UK pathway and more generally. You perhaps understand the difficulty that we have. We have a bill before us. It will be through stage 3 and through into law by the end of this year. Are we then to wait another two years for you to have more certainty in order for us to set a 2030 target? Let's go back to the IPCC. They are saying 10 years tops. We are now on to eight years, so the time is running out. We need to make decisions now on what that realistic 2030 target should be. We have offered you the best assessment of what we think is achievable in Scotland. We have not been able to offer you the detailed pathway that might inform a different 2030 target. That does not mean that we will not come back to it. I am not asking you to wait to know. I am asking you to take the advice that we have offered in this report, which is very ambitious. If the UK-wide frameworks and let's not let the Scottish Government off the hook here, there is a set of things that can be done in Scotland too, most notably around agriculture and the built environment and housing. If those things are stacked up and if we see that happen over the next 12 months, then we can indeed be more ambitious about the interim targets. I will go back to my earlier point. It matters immensely what happens over the next 10 years. This is something that the committee cares deeply about. You can expect us to look at that, David. If I can add, I think that it is really important to distinguish between what are the actions that we can take over the next 10 years and what will that mean for emissions in 2030? We have a clear idea of what the set of actions that need to happen over the next 10 years now, and we have set some of those out. What we don't have is exactly what that means for emissions in 2030 because we haven't been able to do that analysis. But the priority now should be putting in place the policies to reduce those emissions rather than working out exactly what the numbers should be and then targeting exactly that number. We know we need to get to net zero by 2045, and there is a set of things that we will need to do to get there. Precisely what the emissions reduction needs to be by 2030 on the way there. We think that it is less important than simply putting in place the policies to make sure that we can get all the way to net zero. That is why we have focused on the end point and on what are the actions required rather than specifically on the percentage reduction, though we will try to do more accurate analysis than that straight line in the future. I have a lot of ground to cover. I apologise to colleagues who have wanted a supplementary question. Maybe you can wait until I come to you for your main line of questioning. Move on to questions from Maurice Golden. I wonder if the panel can reflect on changes to the emission inventory and specifically around the global warming potential methodologies, as well as the inclusion of peat. Again, I will turn to David in a second on the way that we have approached this. Just to say that our general approach was to be cautious again about those changes. We knew that they were coming. We know that some of the emissions inventory changes impact in Scotland in a greater proportionate way than the whole of the UK. Some of them are very big, especially things like peatland revisions. The advice that we have offered overall is offered on the basis that there is the maximum impact on the emissions inventory so that we are being conservative in the right way about how to assess that. It may be that those global warming potentials and that the peatland revisions come in at a lower level, in which case the targets overall would be easier to meet. That is something that we have accommodated in our assessment. David? Yes. Just to echo what Chris Smith said, we have tried to be conservative. We had the option of making recommendations on the basis of the existing inventory, but clearly if we had recommended a net zero target that was more ambitious than what we have ended up recommending, and then we have to say in three years' time when the inventory changes, sorry you cannot meet it anymore, that would be quite damaging to confidence in the act. We are very careful to be conservative and we have confidence that this target can be met with any known changes that are forthcoming to the inventory. Clearly there may be things that come down the line in the 2020s or the 2030s that we have not anticipated, but given known changes, we are confident that it can be met. Just to give you some idea of their significance, if you were to make those changes today, they could increase your issence by about 15% or that sort of order of magnitude, so that would also get to your particular point about it is quite hard, depending on how the change will go to try and set a precise 2030 target. I think my advice for that would be you have to really make sure which of the baseline that you compare your target to, in fact so which of the peatland missions you compare it to and what of the GWPs you can achieve for your particular target. I think you have to have some continuity there, but they have a bigger effect today, but then hopefully when you begin to do lots of peatland restoration and you also reduce your pissing from agriculture, by the time you get to the 2045 period, they oughtn't to be so significant. It will have a big effect on the inventories if you change them today, but they do not have such a big effect when you go further forward in time. I was going to ask about peatletta, but it's come up now. The baseline for peat is presumably the 1990 of late 1995 baseline. The change of the methodology is presumably incorporating what has happened since 1990 to the present time, which we acknowledge is not very helpful. In terms of what is happening in peatland restoration, my own experience tells me the environmental restoration seems to happen extremely rapidly in the peatland, the diversity and so on and so forth. What sort of impact in terms of starting to reduce in particular methane emissions and indeed absorb greenhouse gases, what does the graph look like for peatland as we move forward? It's all very well-talking about peatland restoration, but it's currently being done for environmental reasons as much as climate change. A very simple thing that you can do is lock up the drainage so that you don't have any drainage from your peatland, but just doing that one simple thing. In fact, that almost instantly reduces the emissions of the methane that you get from the peatland thing. But the securitation of carbon dioxide to take more time, peatland does take thousands of years to eventually regenerate. Just to be clear, the peatland restoration, and I've seen examples of blockage of drain how quickly that works, reduces the emissions, but given that it's going to take a lot longer for the peatland to start to absorb CO2, is it the most effective land intervention for absorbing CO2, or are we back to forestry as the much more effective and quicker way of absorbing CO2, or is there enough—we'll talk about land, I don't want to open that up too much at the moment, or are there other interventions on land that are just going to be more effective? Since we've got to prioritise what works best faster. I would say that it is still a very effective form about reducing emissions and securitation, and I think that one good thing about it is that we're talking about not very big air areas, so if you look at the amount of the land surface of the UK and Scotland that we're talking about, it's not a very big area, so that means that you can really concentrate your policies on relatively tiny areas, and if you're talking about targets of a forestation, you really have to engage with many more sand toners throughout the country, and with the towns and the cities and the parks and all the communities, so it is a much more difficult logistical challenge, so that's why if you delve into the detail of the land use report we published in December, we think it's a really effective way of doing it still. While I completely understand where you're coming from in terms of where is the priority, is it here or is it here, the magnitude of the challenge that we have now in getting to net zero by 2045 means that we need to do the afforestation and the peatland restoration, but nevertheless I understand where you're coming from in terms of priorities. Thanks, convener, and good morning to the panel. Just on that point, it's worth pointing out that hailing from the Isle of Lewis have seen trees planted on peatland 40 years ago, and they're no higher than this desk, so there's numbers. There's certainly challenges there as well. If we could look further at the challenges in realising net zero, the panels touched on this earlier in response to some of Mark Ruskell's questions, but with regard to the further ambition of electricity generation, what challenges are there to increasing renewable generation to four times today's levels? This is definitely one for Keith. One of the major things is getting the supply chain going and the finance going. We have a situation at the moment where contracts for difference, which help to manage the risk of the variability of the wholesale price, are only being offered for less developed technologies, but for the more mature technologies, it's only for offshore, whether it be in the middle of the sea or island-based. The Isle of Lewis has to be a big topic of interest for you. The financing for onshore wind also remains very important. For me, there's a lot of uncertainty about whether merchant development of onshore wind is really going to happen in the short term or the medium term. I talked to some people who seem reasonably confident in developing the power purchase agreements to underpin those investments. Other people have talks who say, no, no, there's no way, it's just not going to happen. What we say in the report is that some sort of financing mechanism is necessary for onshore wind and we also need further development of solar PV. There's also a network investment question, so accommodating those new developments of generation where they are, but also we've talked about electrification of demand of heat and transport, which will grow the electricity demand, something that hasn't happened in this country for years. That also has to be facilitated by the network investment at the right time, and that's something that we say in the report about timely investment. There's a regulatory role in this. The network companies are putting together the distribution level right now, putting together their investment plans for the period, I think it's 2021 to 2026. The amount of money that they are allowed by the regulator is going to be really important in how that gets delivered. Some of that growth in demand we would expect to come through during that period. The distribution plans will be coming the year after that for, again, a five-year period. Up to now, the regulator has been very worried about stranded assets over investment, the risks that things are put in that turn out not to be needed. Given what we are saying about the pathways to electrification of heat and transport, I think it's a matter of personal opinion, an over concern with stranded assets would not be helpful in terms of managing the total cost of facilitating electrification of heat and transport. Moving on slightly, we know the Scottish Government's position on nuclear energy, but what role does new nuclear play in the CCC's scenarios where current difficulties with deploying new nuclear are factored into planning? David Scott might want to come in on that. We need an electric system that works. That is necessarily a mixture of things. Renewable electricity production has been proving itself to be a very useful addition to the energy system overall here in Scotland and in the UK. However, there are limits to how far you can go unless it is paired up with other technologies. In the report, we explore that. In fact, there is a whole document that we published alongside it that looks at the question of intermittency, which is often one of the key challenges that is viewed. Again, this is one of those areas where we have been cautious. We are assuming that we get a 60 per cent penetration of renewables in the future. It will be, I think, perfectly possible to go further than that, but we have assumed 60. There is a mixture of things that go alongside that to provide the flexibility that would be needed to manage renewables and penetration. That would include either firm nuclear power or firm carbon capture and storage. We do not make an assessment of the choice between those two things, because in the end it is the market that should deliver that outcome. Nuclear might well have a role, but it needs to do so at a price that the market can deliver. The best way to summarise our position on those things is that the committee is agnostic about technology, but not about the price at which it is developed. That will be the key challenge. If nuclear is to play a meaningful part in the mix by 2050, it will have to do so in competition with other technologies. I think that there is a really good and cautious assessment of how that could play out in the future. It is important to recognise that our approach prioritises looking at how low could emissions go rather than the precise mix of technologies that would be required. Clearly, you can do it with a different mix of technologies than we have assumed. You get very similar levels of emissions. It might be more expensive and might be slightly less expensive. That was not our primary focus. Our primary focus was how low can emissions go and on what timescale. Clearly, you could have more or less nuclear than we have assumed. That might still get you to the same level of emissions as long as you have a mix of technologies that can give you that emissions reduction. We need to get policies right in terms of enabling the right kind of capability. The market left to its own devices in terms of schedulable generation, which you can plan days, weeks and advance. At the moment, it delivers unabated combined-cycle gas turbines. That is not going to be acceptable at all from very soon, given the lifetime of the plant. What are the instruments by which we ensure that we get the right kind of capability? We are not thinking about exactly the technology that is used, but its service to the system has to be enabled. We have a capacity market right now, for example, which contributes towards meeting the cost to developing new generation and keeping existing generation open. It is pretty crude in what it commissions. It is the total for the system somewhere. It does not currently think about its ability to flex this mid-merit type of plant to help to manage the intermittency. It does not currently think about exactly where it is on the system. In terms of security of supply in Scotland, for example, that sort of thing becomes really important. There is a review going on at the moment in Bayes of how the capacity market works. It is in a bayance at the moment anyway. We assume that it will come back at some point. What features it has to enable the right technical characteristics is going to be really important. Moving on to low-carbon heating, what challenges did Stuart Stevenson want to come in on? If possible. Off-gen network pricing strategy discriminates against distant generators who are distant from consumption. Given that renewable is rarely on the doorstep of our major cities, is it not time for us to have a pricing strategy for the network that relates to the climate change efficiency of the generation process, rather than being based on the distance that the generation is from the consumption point? I guess that this is a level of detail that the CCC has not gone into for the net zero report. It happens to be something that I worked on myself a few years ago. I think that my view is that the interests of society are served by two things. One, that they have affordable access to electrical energy. Two, that we decarbonise the electricity system and that contributes to the overall picture that the CCC has set out. The minimum cost bit, affordability can be related very strongly to a minimum total cost of the energy. That means that the right technologies have to be developed in the right places. In terms of their cost, there are clearly trade-offs. If you're going to build a wind farm, you want to look at where you can get the most wind, get the most energy for the unit investment cost, but there's also a cost of the network to accommodate it. I think what's important is that the signals are given to the investors to make rational choices given all of the variables. I think it's really hard to intervene, try to intervene, by playing games with the detail of various industry mechanisms other than to set at the highest level what the system needs and what society needs in terms of decarbonisation. We have to develop wind offshore and onshore. That has a cost. Chris has already mentioned that those costs have come down because we've given them support over the last 10 years. The market will have to make sure that the investment is covered, that the investors do come forward with a business plan that works. That will include the cost of the network to accommodate it. The pricing signals have to incentivise the minimum total cost. Those signals are really important not just for the development of generation but also for how we accommodate demand and what choices users of energy can make. This is going to be really hard. Do you build the network, the electricity network, to accommodate his and hers fast-charging Teslas simultaneously or do you say that you don't have to fast-charge not simultaneously when you need it? You could do it when it's windy or when it's sunny. You don't have to do it just any time. In essence, at the moment, we are paying drags to feed Manchester and penalising renewable energy in more distant areas. It's about signalling what the cost of the network is to developments in different places. Many people would argue about the accuracy of those signals, but I still believe that, in terms of the overall affordability of energy, giving signals to what the costs are and informing the rational choices by investors is really important. I'm conscious of time pressures, convener, so I'll try and cram in a couple of questions. Going back to low-carbon heating, what challenges are there to increasing low-carbon heating from 4.5 per cent to 90 per cent by 2050? Is there an opportunity, for example, to accelerate action to decarbonise the gas grid and consider the balance of taxis across different heating fuels to enable affordable low-carbon heating in homes and businesses across Scotland? Right, heating. If there is a test of whether we're serious, it's heating. We have an extraordinarily useful energy system delivering heat to every home in Scotland and the UK at the moment. It works extremely well, but sadly it's based on fossil fuels in the main. It is not going to be easy to change that, but it is necessary that we do so. The targets that we have at the moment require that, and the net zero target just makes it even more obvious that that needs to be done. We do not have a strategy across the UK that will deliver a decarbonised heat system. There are big choices to be made about how to do it, and the key message, I suppose, from the committee to governments here in Scotland and in the UK is that you have no excuse to make that plan now. It is essential that that happens. That doesn't mean that we need to see exactly the detail of what the system looks like in 2050, but it does mean that there has to be a clear commitment now from especially the UK Government, which holds most of the policy levers here, to a fully decarbonised heat system at the latest 2050 and preferably before that. The key choices are what do we do with a gas grid? We are in the main country that still uses gas. It's an extraordinarily useful thing. We do have a choice here. We can use hydrogen as an alternative to that. It's not a case of flicking the switch to achieve that outcome. In this report, we lean very heavily on electricity as a basis for heat using things like heat pumps. It's perfectly possible to have a mixture of outcomes here, for example the hydrogen question and the heat pump question in combination. There are even other alternatives that could get us there. This is one of the key issues that I expect us to look at more detail in the committee over the coming years, but I would really like to see a strategy UK-wide for domestic heat now. We said in this report that that strategy needs to be formed by 2020. You may know that there is already a plan for the UK departments in Treasury and in base to put together a plan, especially to consider what happens after we close the renewable heat incentive. That's not enough. This has to be a comprehensive plan overall. One of the key components of that plan is to address one of the things that you raised, Mr MacDonald, on your question. There is an in-built penalty to the use of electricity in the system at the moment and an in-built incentive to use gas. That has been a very sensible policy for a long time on the basis of fuel poverty, but it's not a very sensible policy for climate change. I would like to see that strategic question of how we address the imbalance as one of the key components of the review that we've recommended that the Treasury makes. There are policies to deliver a different outcome, but it must also consider those regressive impacts on vulnerable consumers. There is no easy answer here, but it's one of the major costs in achieving net zero, but it needs to be addressed. Perhaps I could just say to that that Scotland can set a good example for the better UK compared with the better UK. A lot of the homes in Scotland are not on the cash grid, so with those homes that aren't on the cash grid and that, it's even more of a cost incentive there to go over to electricity with those homes as fast as possible. They ought to be really the first adopters of trying to put in this new technology. I think that if it gets to your point about the next 10-year time frame here, I think that there's an opportunity to really go after those off the gas grid parts of the country within the first 10 years. I think that that's another important thing that you're behind on, which is the evidence to inform the heat strategy. Part of the heat strategy is a degree of flexibility there, because exactly what's the right option depends on where you're starting from in terms of location and what the resources are. For example, someone is on the gas grid or is not on the gas grid and the density of demand, but the evidence is lacking. We're only now getting trials going to test out how people would respond and be able to interact with hydrogen-based appliances, for example, and how people understand and use air-sauce, heat pumps, ground-sauce, heat pumps. You heat your home in a different way. One thing that I think is really important that very often it's state money through, for example, UK research and investment or through the Scottish Government, is that the evidence that comes out of the trials is clear. There have been too many of those trials. I think that there was a report that was published not long ago by the UK Energy Research Centre that looked into energy system demonstrators and trials going on since 2008. The reporting of them has been poor. Some of those projects are no reports at all. The whole idea is that we get evidence to inform what policy is, what works and what the challenges are that still need to be met. This is an element of innovation policy that's been really lacking. It's actually to make sure that we capture the learning and disseminate it properly. As I said, we're already behind on this, given the other urgency, as Chris said, of getting a heat strategy in place. I'm sure that we all will follow that and look for quick progress in the near future. Just using off-grid as an example, would you say—but not just off-grid—that the general public is ready for net zero and how can a positive public discourse be built, particularly with hard-to-reach individuals and communities? All the evidence suggests that the public want net zero, at least in the majority. We explain in the report that to get net zero we need to do something that we haven't done in the past 10 to 15 years at least, which is to properly engage citizens of the country in how we achieve it. I don't think that there's anything to be afraid of in that, but it does mean that there will be shifts in behaviour, shifts in societal choices that help underpin that. One of them is the question of heat, for example. Where are we to be heating our homes from things like heat pumps? It works extremely well, but it involves interacting with your home energy system in a different way. I would like to see us begin properly to tackle that issue. We cannot keep doing what we have been doing for the last 10 years, which is very successfully decarbonising electricity production and expect that that will get us all the way. It happens to be that last year more than half of the electricity supply to UK homes was low-carbon, but most people haven't noticed that. That's been a remarkable success of policy. The stuff that comes next involves different types of behaviour and needs to be explored properly with real people, or that we won't be successful. The whole thing will go off track, frankly, if we are not managing in that way. The final point is that I don't think that that means that we need to engage everyone in the task of climate change action, although I'm sure that that's something that we'll want to do as we go along. Some of the things that need to happen if you're using a smarter home energy system or a smarter charging system for your car, for example, don't necessarily have to be seen as climate change measures. This is about engaging people in the new technologies and new uses of technologies that will come along in a positive discourse, as you say, to keep the overall mission on track. We need to get on and do that as soon as possible. I want to say that it's a worry about whether people will be able to adapt their behaviour. They all seem to be worrying that they have to do things differently. I'm tend to be a bit more optimistic on that. We can look at how people are using electric vehicles. There's not that many of them yet, but the feedback is often really positive. They get used to doing things in a different way and like a lot of the features that come through. There's a lot to be hopeful about in terms of the public engagement if we keep this momentum going. I guess the other elephant in the room, and that's land use. Before I go to Finlay Carson, can I ask my colleagues to look at the questions that you want to ask and check that they haven't already been covered? We are running out of time. Good morning. I declare an interest as a member of the NFU and also a former dairy and beef farmer. It suggested that more ambitious uptake of existing measures is needed alongside improvements to livestock breeding and diets. How should the Government ensure that a more ambitious uptake of existing measures is adopted? It starts with having the honest discussion about it. I'm afraid that we haven't quite got to that yet. I might say this, but there seems to be more of an open discussion at the moment in Westminster about some of those issues than there is in Scotland. Perhaps that's not the case, but it certainly seems that way to me. In particular, Michael Gove's interest in public money for public goods is the idea that there are a set of services that the land delivers. Amongst them is food production, but there are others to, including biodiversity and carbon sequestration. The agriculture community understands climate change better than any other community. They can see the change in growing seasons that's coming. I would love to see us engage them properly, not regardless of the enemy, which is sometimes how some of these discussions are pitched. There are real emissions from agriculture. Some of those emissions are perfectly manageable, and that community, if we engage properly, can be a real part of the solution to getting us to those deep emissions reductions that are necessary for net zero. They should expect to be recompensed for that, but we will need to broaden the set of incentives that are provided for agriculture beyond food production to achieve that. In this report, drawing on the work that we did last year on land use, we are advocating a set of measures that free up agricultural land to help in the process of storing carbon more actively. That's about forestry, peatland restoration and possibly bioenergy crops in the future as well. Just on that, do you believe in a move to a multi-functional land use scenario, whether that's voluntary or otherwise, which would look at specific areas? Soil types, soil designations, different land use, should that be looked at? Should we move to that sort of scenario? Yes. Nice and simple question. The next one might not be quite, so it's straightforward. There's a suggestion that we should reduce meat consumption by 50 per cent. Currently, I would suggest that that would decimate the agricultural industry, particularly in Scotland. Has there any thought been given to the rate that we could expect culture change or behaviour change and the potential for displacement of meat production? So the impact of potentially more of the meat that's eaten in Scotland being produced elsewhere in the world with a bigger impact on the climate? Just to clarify the point, in our scenarios, we model a societal shift where we are consuming 20 per cent less red meat than dairy. Amongst a set of speculative options to get us all the way UK-wide to net zero, we consider that one of the things that you could look at is a bigger shift in diet. It's not something that we're advocating, we're saying that it's a potential option. I happen to believe that a 20 per cent cut in consumption of red meat and dairy is a relatively conservative assessment when you look at just the changes in diet between younger generation and older generation that's broadly in line with that. It's worth knowing that we looked at some of the public health guidance out there. There's nothing to do with climate change. Public health England produces a really good assessment of how your diet needs to shift if you wish to be healthier. The implication of that is an 86 per cent cut in red meat and dairy. That was a bit racy for us. What we've gone with is a 20 per cent cut in steerage. Rather than having a policy for that, it looks very much like it's broadly in line with social trends and therefore doesn't see us importing lots of meat. The key point that I'll make out and make it again is that that frees up land to do a broader set of things, for the land to provide a different set of services. As long as the agriculture community, the owners of that land is recompensed to do those different things. It's a profession like any other. I don't see why we couldn't achieve something like that. I think that just to come on that too, I do think that we aren't going to get a net zero without taking the agricultural community with us. I think it's important that we work together on this. Whatever solution we provide, it works for them and it works for the country too. We're talking about transferring 20 per cent of total pastures into aforestation or biotennagy or these sorts of things. We aren't talking about complete changes to the way that agriculture is done but we're talking about incentivising it to take alternatives. OK. That takes me on to my next question, agroforestry or forestry. What proportion of New Woodland should be coniferous and what proportion should be broadleaf? I don't know the numbers in front of me but what we haven't assumed is that we're just going to grow conifers. Again, this is one of those areas where we could have gone, frankly, the cheapest strategy overall would be just to build. Let's not use that word. City boy. It's to plant lots of conifers. I think that we've been cautious and sensible about this. There are other things that play here, not least biodiversity, that need to be considered alongside this. I don't know if any of you have the stats at the time. Yeah. In fact, it's a very interesting point that you've raised there because this is really where we need the help of the research community. We know more about agroforestry properly in tropical countries than we do in this country. A lot of the research in this country comes from forestry commission and that relatively big plantations. We don't have enough research on fielding, what it does for the soil carbon and things like that. It is really probably dependent on what you plant in particular locations. You talk about trying to put your trees on the island and do something. The tree you plant there might be different than some else. It becomes a really challenging point for the research community, but we do not currently have all the chances for that. Sticking with wood, why is there only a presumption of a 10 per cent increase in the use of wood in construction? Could you maybe lay out what the barriers are to increasing that number, that percentage? That seems low. We might have said more for Scotland, but perhaps we can come back to that. The barriers are that again, this has been a very deep piece of research that we did last year on biomass where we looked at the questions of wood and construction in deep engagement with the construction sector. The kind of scenarios that we have in here, which again are cautious, as a word I am using a lot today, are to many in the construction sector still very difficult to conceive of. We have not seen that there are major barriers to using wood and construction, even for high-rise buildings. It is a very sensible use of that biomass resource. I would love to see that outperformed. It seems to me that it is a very sensible use of Scottish biomass resource, and we have a lot of capacity to grow it here. 40 per cent of houses and flats are built with a timber frame up from under 30 per cent today. We are going to move on to talking about obstacles and costs, because we have picked up on quite a lot of the other issues that we want to discuss along the way. Can I turn to Mark Ruskell to start us off in that direction, please? Yes, there are a couple of areas here. We live in a fossil fuel economy. UK, big, oil and gas producer fossil fuels are cheap. Can we continue to extract oil and gas at the current rates? Can we adopt a policy of maximum resource extraction and still meter, and that zero target by 2045? That is one of the most difficult areas for us. The short answer to that is probably we can, but we need a set of things that are not in place yet to deliver that. The extractive industries that we have at the moment are clearly not compatible with our net zero future overall forever more. We in this report, just as David said earlier, have been focused on the question of whether we can get the net zero. We clearly nailed the answer. In this report, using very cautious assessments, we use a lot of fossil CCS, but there are alternatives. At the moment, they look like more expensive alternatives, not least the greater and more extensive use of electricity. At personal views, I would love to see that improve. When we come to do our more detailed assessments over the next 12 months or so, we will look at some of the alternatives to that fossil CCS question. We still need, for example, in that hydrogen-fuelled economy that we have talked about a few times in this discussion. It is likely that some of that will come from natural gas, for example. There are alternatives to that. There are more expensive alternatives. That does not mean that we should not pursue them. Yes, there is a world in which we continue to extract oil and gas, but there cannot be a world in which we burn that oil and gas unabated. That is the key thing. One of those areas is that I would love to see a much clearer strategy from the Government on what it intends to do about that overall. Some of the things that we are saying in this report, I am sure, do not sit well with some of the campaigns, for example, from the NGOs. In the future, I hope that we can look at more of the options around them. What is your view of countries such as New Zealand that have said that we are going to draw a line? We are not going to go for more licensing and exploration licenses, or even Norway, who recently said that they are not going to allow exploration of the Lofoten Islands. I mean, it does seem that countries are looking at the demand side, but they are also looking at the generation of fossil fuels and extraction of fossil fuels and saying that we need to start transition now. Perhaps I can speak to that, because I was a author of that IPCC report from last year. We did look at all possible pathways that could get us to one and a half degrees, and as Chris said, there is the clear option in those pathways. You either have the extraction in industries continuing with huge amounts of carbon capture and storage accompanying them, or the alternative is that you really rapidly phase out the extraction industries. We have a range of pathways, and it really does not go between those two extremes, so you can either phase out the extraction industries as fast as possible and replace them with something else, or you have to increase your TCS at the same time. There is not one perfect way. In terms of your advice, where do you sit at the moment? Is it just assuming that we are going to continue the current levels of extraction, or are you assuming that there is a certain level of transition within that? Otherwise, we are taking a big risk on the TCS. It is not clear in this report that, one way or another, what we looked at is what is the feasible strategy overall that could get us there. As I mentioned before, we have a lot of fossil TCS in there, and that probably amounts to a similar size of industry, but there is a different approach to that that could also be assessed where it could be taken. You mentioned New Zealand. That is a choice, a political choice. It is one that gets us to that net zero target like any other. Our job in the committee is to try and avoid the political choice instead of giving you the assessment of the implications of those choices when they are taken. I think that that is as good a report as any for that. Again, a personal view, I would love to see us go harder at some of the options that see a much reduced use of fossil fuels in the future. At the moment, they look like more expensive options. We are required, as the Committee on Climate Change, by the Climate Change Act here in Scotland and at UK level, to assess the cost-effective path as best we can. On the oil and gas industry, at current levels, if we were to move to a model where we used hydrogen as fuel for heating and transport, and we used the feedstock from natural gas that is produced by the North Sea in West of Shetland, the oil extraction as a feedstock for manufacturing would that effectively mean that we were able to manufacture more here, reducing the need to import as many goods? That could have a knock-on effect in terms of reaching net zero. With all those options, we still have an oil and gas industry, but if we were to shut that down tomorrow, it could mean that we would not have a feedstock for hydrogen and that we would have to import quite a lot of our goods from our feedstock for manufacturing and chemicals industry. David, do you want to add anything? It is really important to recognise that if we do not produce the oil and gas here but we still consume it, it will need to be produced somewhere else. The best thing that we can do for the climate is to reduce the amount of fossil fuel that we consume in areas where we can do that. In some areas, we will still need it. The question of what we end up with in terms of fossil fuel consumption, whether that is produced in Scotland or whether that is produced elsewhere, is not a matter for the climate, it is a matter for how the economics play out. We are rapidly running out of time. In terms of the modelling that you carried out, did you look at the projected co-benefits, for example, those long-term benefits in terms of almost a preventative spend on carbon reduction versus air quality impacts on health, active travel, healthier diets? Did you model that? We did. What we have not done in this report is wash all that together with the costs overall. We wanted to be completely transparent about the reality that there is a cost in achieving net zero. We assessed, on a UK-wide basis, that cost between 1 and 2 per cent of GDP. That is our best assessment of something that is extremely difficult to assess. We also look at the co-benefits, not least of improved health and air quality. If you take the Treasury's green book, which is the basis in which investments can be appraised, and roll forward some of those benefits that are more difficult to assess, it is worth seeing, and to monetise, you get to something that looks in the report. We talk about 1.3 per cent of GDP coming from benefits, just from those two things. It is a clue that doing all this is much more than just an exercise in addressing climate change. There are real benefits in reducing emissions, especially that air quality question, and there are wider ones to biodiversity overall. The biggest benefit of all, of course, is avoiding the huge impact of climate change in the future. That is why we have not tried to give a false prospectus here. There are real costs that need to be managed with policy, but I expect the benefits to be enormous as well. The early action now is going to prevent the huge cost in the future of climate change. Just to say that you do have to get those early actions correct, that is why it is good that you have to just transition commission, because you get the benefits for the provider that you do things in the correct way. Right. Thank you, convener. I was very pleased to hear you highlight the just transition commission in the context of the fossil fuel industry. In terms of the extractive industries, is there a place—I hope there is, but what place is there? I will rephrase that for the circular economy and remanufacturing of plastics. Looking at that perspective, rather than talking about CCS, I do not mean rather than talking about it, but as another consideration. Yes, there is a place. I am afraid that I do not have any stats in front of me that I can set that out, but one of the things that we do reflect on in the summary at the start is the importance of using and reusing the goods that we purchase and buying high-quality goods in the first place. The circular economy is a broader set of things than just climate change, but we look at the waste question more actively in here and the emissions from waste, and that is one of the key ways in which you might see reduction from that. It is a harder thing for us to assess in terms of the overall emissions reduction that we proposed, but I will make this point that we need to throw everything at the net zero challenge, and that would include having a much more circular economy overall. David, is there anything that you want to say about specifically how we have approached that challenge? Only that, really, for the first time in our analysis this time, we have looked at the potential for resource efficiency and what that can do for reductions in emissions from the industry sector. We have taken our analysis forward there. We have a new evidence base, and we have been relatively ambitious on that. I am sure that there is more that we can do, but it is an area that we have looked at. In particular, we want to look at where are the bits of the economy that are still going to be hard to fully decarbonise even by 2045, 2050 and what can we do on the demand side. We have been looking more at that, and I think that it is an important area for further work as well. Mark, do you want to finish up your question? I wanted to ask you about infrastructure projects. We have seen recent Scottish budgets and the Government grading their infrastructure investments around high, medium, low-carbon infrastructure. Do you believe that we should be aiming for a particular target? It is also a danger that if we build high-carbon infrastructure, we are locking in emissions by design, not just for 10 years but for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. I do not have a strong view on how we approach infrastructure questions except to say that we must approach them properly. To get to net zero with the costs that we have assessed is perfectly possible—indeed, I would say that those costs are relatively small and very manageable—but those costs will be much, much, much higher if we do not think about the turnover of capital stock that is necessary to deliver net zero. That means transport and energy in particular, but also the housing stock. If, at the end of this period, we are scrapping capital assets with the costs that we need to incur to do that in a market like this, that will be much more expensive than it needs to be. I would like to see infrastructure provision made here in Scotland and across the UK in light of the net zero target. It is interesting that the National Infrastructure Commission UK-wide said something very similar yesterday—anyway, it is certainly this week—that the Government needs to think in those kind of timescales to deliver the right outcome. Infrastructure is one of the—we have a whole section on the infrastructure requirements of net zero that needs active thought and active planning, or we will not get there at anywhere near the right cost. What does that actually mean, then? Are there fewer road building projects? Yes, road building projects, again, are one of those areas where it is not of possible for us to be completely definitive on it, because if we are all driving electric vehicles, then it becomes a much lower carbon infrastructure asset. I am thinking less about road building and more about the energy questions. When we were forecasting a doubling of electricity demand, that has a big infrastructure requirement. The biggest infrastructure requirement of all, the hardest one, is the housing stock. How one approaches that? I have to say that in Scotland, there is a much better plan for that than there is UK-wide. It is the idea of achieving something over 10 or 20 years, far more sensible, but there is a clear goal in mind and a clear set of policies to deliver it. That is something that I would love to see the rest of the UK adopt as well. The timing issue there, as you mentioned, Chris, is very important. As the capital stock gets replaced and knowing what the lifetime of it is, to make sure that that low carbon consideration is built in at the beginning. If it is going to be there for 25 years or whatever, early asset write-off is not going to be helpful. Just a very quick question regarding obstacles and costs. How reliant are your ambitions for 2045? How reliant are they on behavioural change and taking the public with us? And what risks are involved around that? On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is behavioural change? I can do better than that. Hang on, if you bear with me, I will tell you exactly what role behavioural change plays in their assessment, because I have a handy pie chart that I will now bring up on my iPad here. We are relying on a mixture of technological change and behavioural change to achieve net zero. The key message here is that we are not going to achieve this overall unless we engage people properly in this challenge. 38 per cent will be achieved through low-carbon technologies, 9 per cent as large as societal and behavioural change and the rest is a combination of those two things. That is clearly an art rather than a science, but it gives you a sense of the proportions overall. Come back to the costs and the cost benefits of doing all this work over the next couple of decades. Do you think that the Treasury review should be looking at that now? Absolutely. We very carefully gave the recommendations to Treasury that they should review this. I hope that it is a recommendation that they accept. I do not know whether they will or not, I should say, but I hope that it is something that they accept. I might say that I do not think that we will make much further progress if the answer to decarbonising the whole economy is simply to lump more costs into the electricity bill. There is a real need to look at this properly. The key outcome at the end of this is that we need something that delivers net zero in a way that is not regressive and does not have a damaging impact to vulnerable citizens, but also does not impact regressively on competitiveness. I do not think that that has had nearly enough attention in policy terms. There are real reasons for the Treasury to look at this. Some of the environmental taxes that have delivered very high revenues for a while—think of fuel duties for a fuel duty, for example—will not be there in the future as we switch to electric vehicles. The Treasury will have to think about this if only to think about the revenue issues that we are all. I would love to see them approach this strategically, as they once did with the Stern review. The next Stern review, which is still looking at the basis and the economics of a lot of the work that we do, was a Treasury commission document 12 years ago. At that point, they viewed it as a big strategic challenge and an economics challenge. Now is the moment for them to re-engage with it on that basis, too. I am optimistic if they do so, then this whole thing can be managed in a way that is not regressive and does not impact competitiveness, but that requires proper thought. It will take a political will to look beyond an election cycle. Absolutely. The Treasury in the past has been very good at doing those things. It generally takes a long view on the UK economy. If we do not take a long view on it, it will not be a successful transition overall. Piers, your earlier point about the just transition being so important to this, is a really important thing. That was the second part of our recommendation to the Treasury that we think about with the fiscal issues and the big strategic issues, but also the regional impacts and the impacts on vulnerable communities alongside that. I want to ask questions about your response to the Scottish Government's response to your report, Mark Ruskell. It was obviously early days because we are not fully into stage 2 at this point, but I wondered if you had any reflections on the early response to your report from the Scottish Government. I am delighted that our recommendation was accepted so early. I think that it was accepted at two minutes past midnight. We will allow them 60 seconds. In many ways, the Scottish Government had to respond quickly given the stage of the bill, but it matters immensely that it chose to accept this recommendation as quickly as it did, because it now gives a much better platform for the rest of the UK to follow. It is much clearer now that we need to stop talking about targets and start talking about how we deliver those things. That, to my mind, has been fantastic in Scotland. That is a fantastic signal, absolutely. It highlights some of the things that we have talked about already this morning, some of the action that is needed, the interdependency with other action. That is a thing to be considered, I guess, is the fact that a meeting that they have proposed and recommended target for Scotland depends on action UK-wide. It is the other way round as well. UK-wide depends on action within Scotland. Just to get on with it, another thing is the interim. What is the kind of head you prioritised action in the short term? You are asking very fair questions about that. As we have said, we are aimed to inform some of that, but some of these things are political choices as well that we have also talked about. What can you do to inform that critical 2030 target ahead of stage 2? Is there more work that you can supply this committee in order? No, I don't think so. That is a political choice at the end of the day. Well, there is always political choice, but what to set that target at, but we haven't got a basis in which to offer a more comprehensive assessment of that target yet. Again, I am sorry about that, but it does rely on a set of things that we haven't got the evidence for. I think I would say, though, that we really pushed everything almost to the far that they could go in a certain way, so I do think that if we were to go back and do some advice and modelling, and we did that through the six months of producing it, we went back over them, time and time again, and things changed by one or two per cent, because we are really asking these calculations to do everything, so they really don't change in a huge way. In terms of just meeting that 2045 target that has been adopted by the Government, what chance does that give us of keeping the world below 1.5 degrees? Well, I think that it sets a really good chance, because things are really poised internationally now quite well. Scotland is a really developed common way, the first country to set such a strong target. Things are carefully poised in new countries, so I think that adopting a net zero 2050 target becomes more credible at that point, and I think that when the EU adopts a target, other countries will also fall into place. I think that the UK wants to hold the net cop meeting in 2020, and what a better place to do it than Edinburgh or Glasgow, so I think that the opportunity there to set a target for the rest of the world to come after you will be good. I read somewhere that it gives us a 5050 chance of meeting 1.5, is that right? Across the world, and if coupled with those ambitious near-term reductions, that would deliver a greater than 50% chance of limiting time to increase the 1.5 degrees. We do not have pathways that deliver much more than that, so we are drawing on the best evidence that we can, so this is not us conceding and throwing in the towel, this is as good as we can give it, and this is as ambitious as we feel we can be at the moment. But there are big risks? Well, there are, of course, and you would expect the committee to be all over that. She said that we should prevent every bit of warming possible, so as soon as the warming goes up, which it will do from today, those risks will go up. That is why it is important to set the most ambitious targets. Stuart Stevenson, I would like to put a little early bed for Aberdeen to host COP 2020. I think that that would send a really good signal. I was just going to make the almost frivolous comment. The Copenhagen COP, which I think was 15, I very call, there were 45,000 people at it. Is not it time the COP started using video conferencing rather than transporting people all around the world? It is an enormous thing. It is a mini Olympics. I have to say that that was one of the, that was, it would be a much bigger COP where I would be to host it in 2020, and I would make a bed for Glasgow to host it given that it is a good glass region. Thank you, convener. I wanted to go back to the 2030 targets, and we weren't sure there would be the opportunity, the time to ask this question. I was very pleased to see that the CCC acknowledges the UK's historic climate debt. Has equity been, or will it be, factored into the 2030 interim targets, as well as into the 2045 net zero targets? And if so, how? When we come to make a more detailed assessment in light of the better information that we have at UK, we will boil up a number of things, including that. I am sure that we will look at the equity considerations, too. I would like to again come back to, we have talked about the various opportunities in developing the technology and the just transition to different sectors that are moving into a carbon neutral economy. What do you think that both Governments can do to ensure that all the opportunities that come for work and industry around this stay in the countries that are making this initial, I suppose, taking on the challenges that Scotland and the UK may face? It is really hard for us to give a quick answer to that question, except to say that it is very important that those strategies are made. I suppose that what we could do is to kind of lurch into this set of targets and then have some policies that get us some of the way in the short term and just hope that they will be there in the long term. That will not be an effective strategy overall and it will damage the overall task of reducing emissions if we have that kind of strategy. What we need is a set of long-term strategies for the whole economy that includes strategies for growth and strategies for jobs that are compatible with net zero. I might add my own personal reflection on the story of renewables in Scotland. If we had been as ambitious as we are now being about the growth of the offshore renewables sector and indeed onshore renewables sector, now, if we had been that ambitious 10, 15 years ago, we would have developed more of the homespun industry for those sectors. Some of it we still would not have developed. I have to say that the UK and Scotland has been very good at capturing the high value bits of those sectors and that is not an off-discussed topic, but we have been pretty good at it, but we could have had more. I think that the most successful strategies are the ones that bring everyone along with them. I would love us to think about net zero not just as a challenge of emissions reduction and not even just as a whole economy question but also a question of how you build the right jobs and skills to achieve it. Before we go into a brief pause, I would like to ask—we have asked a lot of questions—is there anything that our panel thinks that we have not covered that you would like to mention any final points that you want to make? We have a good seven minutes for you to do so. I want to make this point that some of the coverage that we have not been fighting with Nigel Lawson. We have instead been having a discussion with a good discussion with the Extinction Rebellion. That, to me, is a remarkable bit of progress over all, demonstrating that we are discussing climate change in a way that we weren't 20 years ago, for example. I think that there is now a broad consensus that this thing needs to be fixed and needs to be focused on. However, the discussion that we have been having has been good since we published it. There is still a feeling that we can do it something even quicker. I would love to see that happen, but I would also love to see us focus on the credible strategy to do that. We are talking about a set of, in many cases, physical barriers to doing it sooner, that we should not lurch into and consider that we can put a policy in place to deliver unless we have thought through carefully the implications of it. This report is as ambitious as we have ever been in the committee and gives us a platform to say quite credibly that we are among the most ambitious countries in the world when it comes to emissions reduction. It may be in the future that we can bring forward that date, but at the moment, the evidence does not support that. I wanted to make this point. Occasionally, I have seen this described as an unambitious strategy. It is so far off that I wanted to have it on the record. This would be a huge statement where we would deliver it globally. The Scottish Government has done the right thing by setting the 2045 target in the bill already. When the UK does the same, we will be in an remarkable position, but the task of delivering that is enormous. The kind of transition that we have never successfully achieved ever. The policies to deliver that are not in place at the moment, so we will need a different sort of integrated discussion between the UK and Scottish Governments to deliver that, which is not there at the moment. I am an engineer and I am interested in the system working and the elements of the system working. We have to get much better at understanding the interactions between them and the detailed engineering challenges. I think that the way that we are tackling that at the moment as a nation is a bit sort of piecemeal. I think that we need to get much more serious about some of those things. A system-level perspective includes understanding how the different investments might happen and how they are influenced by policy levers such as the other market mechanisms or regulations or whatever. We are very slow at making progress and understanding those things at a system level. We really have to do that, I think. Off-gem changes are there. They are only thinking generally in silos about electricity or gas and very rarely the interactions between them and any change seems to take forever. Unfortunately, I have not got a magic wand that I can wave and speed all that up, but I have to take all those things much more seriously. The Scottish Government has a more integrated approach generally because it does not have the Whitehall system. The silos are still there in the Scottish Government, I can say, from a better experience. There is a more integrated discussion in Scotland on some of the things that need to be done. In my former role as director of energy and climate change in the Scottish Government, I was able to make housing policy. That is an amazing thing to be able to do. You would not find that in Whitehall. I do not underestimate the governance challenges overall. That is not something that we have tried to deliberately draw out in the report, but it is definitely an influence that you can draw from all of that. To achieve net zero requires a level of integration at every level of government and between the departments of government that does not exist at the moment. When we say in the report that net zero needs to be among the top priorities, right the way through the departments that have the key levers. At the moment it is not. It will not be achieved if this is only a second-order priority in Bays, for example. Good as the stuff that has been coming out of Bays is. This has to be given a much more prominent role overall in the Government's mission. If I could ask Chris a question. Is that allowed? Could I just say that it does not just involve the government integration. We have to get better at really taking it out to the community. A lot of the things that we talk about now are talking about the agricultural community. We are talking about particular towns and cities of the UK and even kind of parishes and villages and households. We have to get better at integrating across those and really communicating the opportunities across all the different levels of community. It is not just a role for central government. There are opportunities internationally as well, but we are talking about adopting a clear target of one thing to do, but setting up the ambition to bring those opportunities now is what we have to do. I am really interested to hear what Keith Bell's question is. Keith Bell, you are going to give me an opportunity to ask your question. I was just wondering whether the departments have the support behind them in terms of the analytical capability and the expertise. No, I do not think that. It is such an easy thing for me to sit here and say that they do not. I think that one of the great services that the committee offers is that integrated view. It is frankly not acceptable that we are the only bit that can offer that integrated view at the moment. I would love to see Government invest in the analytical underpinning that will deliver net zero. That means that we have to be much more conscious about knock-on impacts of decisions in one bit of Whitehall versus another, for example. There needs to be some force at the middle that coordinates that properly. That does not need to be Treasury number 10, but it does need to be someone that has an interest in each bit of Government and each layer of Government and how those things co-operate. None of that is achievable unless there is a fully fledged strategy here in Scotland and a fully fledged strategy in Whitehall that works with it. Again, I am very optimistic about the ability to do that and to bring that together, but it does require everyone, civic society and Government, to focus on the goal overall. I want to thank you all very much for your time this morning. I am going to suspend this meeting briefly until I was the one to private session. Thank you. The second item on our agenda this morning is to consider the committee's draft annual report for 2018-2019. Members have had a good look at it. Are there any comments on it or issues? It is a very minor one, which I hope I am not speaking out of order. I think that my colleague next to me agrees. The photograph was not very keen on either the colour or intensity of the hue of the background of the team's photograph. It is on page 1. Immediately under. I am not going to direct it. Is it not getting your skin tone? I think that it is just a very intense background of a colour that is not terribly friendly to figures. Star Trek or something like that, I would suggest. I am not quite cool. I had a comment about the evidence that the people who gave us evidence that one of the things that I think is important to do is to look at the gender breakdown. We want this drive to have 50-50 parity. We are improving on it year on year. It is important to be upfront about where we are on that. Mark, you had some comments on that, too. I agree with you, convener. We reported on this last year, so it would be good. I know that we have done some work to contact witnesses who have given evidence to committee to incorporate their feedback as well about how our sessions are run. It would be good to report on it again this year. Any other questions? Is the committee content with me to sign off on the final version of the report with the adjustments that we just said? That concludes the committee's business and public today. Nick's meeting on 15 May is tomorrow, and the committee will be taking evidence via video link from right honourable Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. As agreed, we will move into private session now and ask that the public gallery be cleared as the public part of the meeting is now closed. I will never set suspension. Thank you.