 Welcome to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee's 33rd meeting of 2018. Before we move to the first item of the agenda, I would like to remind everyone present to switch off their mobile phones as they may affect the broadcasting system. The first item on the agenda is for the committee to take evidence on the climate change emissions reductions target Scotland bill. This is the fifth of the committee's evidence sessions with stakeholders. Today, we are holding an additional meeting to discuss innovation and what is required to meet the target set out in the bill. Delighted to welcome our witnesses this morning. Joining us are in the committee room are John Ferguson, eco-idea M Ltd, and Susie Goodser from Greenock and Coddy. We will have joining us, just going to be slightly late, Dave Mock, some Deputy General Secretary of the STUC. By videoconference by telephone, we have Angus Macaron, chief editor of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Good morning to you all. I will start our questions. I will ask an opening question, which relates to what we think has worked so far in terms of encouraging innovation and what has not worked so far in Scotland. How well are approaches to encouraging innovation for and solutions to climate change work to date? What measures have been taken and what has worked best? If anybody wants to chime in, I will say to Mr Macaron if he just let us know if he wants to come in. I will, yes, but somebody else can start. Okay. Would anyone else like to start? John Ferguson. I am Iaun John Ferguson. In terms of, first of all, answering the question of what has worked well, the clean technology and the low-carbon technology sector, if you take Apple's approach of one trillion dollar company, it is worth tens of trillions of dollars now. It is growing rapidly, it is exponential growth everywhere across the world. There is a well-networked clean technology sector globally. The UK has focused a lot of effort through knowledge transport partnerships in any of the UK and Scotland in programmes such as that that is delivered by Zero Waste Scotland on resource sector innovation. The technology innovation is there. My business is fundamentally about clean technology, so I have watched it as a scientist on an almost daily basis. I do not think that the issue is so much the technology that is working. There are areas where we still need innovation and improvement and that will continue. It is just an actual part of science and engineering. The bit that does not work is simply not bringing these technologies to bear into systems, and we are not creating the system transitions, which is about how our markets work fundamentally. I think that the technologies are there, the innovation systems to stimulate technology and innovation are there and increasingly successful. We are just not adopting them, bringing them in and transferring them to do their good work quickly enough. One of the things that I have been listening to people around this is that, obviously, Scotland is made up with quite a lot of small to medium-sized enterprises, and they are getting on with doing their business so that they do not have as much time to get involved in innovation. Maybe the links between small to medium-sized enterprises and universities or innovators are missing. Would you agree with that? I think that there are mechanisms there to encourage it. You can get innovation grants, but the purpose of an innovation grant is not innovation, but it is to get you used to working with the university. If you are a small SME and many of the SMEs are the innovation companies, my company is a tiny company, but we are innovating across a range of different sectors. I have done an innovation grant with the university, and I thought that I could do five more of those with the universities and five other ideas, but you can only get one of those, and that is maybe a limitation in that connection between small companies and universities. Would anyone else like to answer the broader question that I asked? Susie Good, sir. My focus is more on people and communities rather than on technologies, but a lot has worked there, particularly in the past 10 years. We have had the climate challenge fund, which has funded more than 1,000 projects in local communities to engage people and community groups in innovative ways of changing behaviours and attitudes around climate change. I think that there has been some fantastic work around raising awareness and setting the groundwork for behaviour change there. There has also been support from the local energy Scotland, a care scheme for community energy projects, so there has been some fantastic and innovative community energy projects that have happened particularly in the Highlands and Islands, and I think that there is a real potential for more of that to happen in more urban communities. Stuart Stevenson has a supplementary question. I do, and if I may, in the first instance, I want to direct it to Angus McRown, although I may come back to people in the room. One of the measures of how one is doing on innovation is the number of patents that there are, where technology is concerned. I understand that the number of patents is actually falling at the moment. I have no idea of the breakdown of patents between the wide range of things that are used in that particular area. I just wondered whether Angus McRown and I'm making him represent the whole of Bloomberg has any views on that and whether looking at patents is a good indicator of whether innovation is or is not taking place. Yes, I'm not sure I'm going to give you a very good answer on that, but it's obviously an indicator. I think one of the issues is that quite a few of the technologies in the low carbon tradition have actually matured a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. So, for instance, technologies like onshore wind, solar photovoltaics, offshore wind, those things have become pretty mature technologies with an established product. So, the innovation that's happening is generally by large companies and it's very much sort of incremental innovation rather than sort of small businesses in sheds inventing new products. So, I think that's sort of part of the overall picture, but I was going to sort of mention some areas where I think Scotland could take advantages of its sort of natural resources and could look to sort of push through innovation and be a centre of activity. So, in no particular order, the whole area of demand response is going to be huge in the balancing of the electricity system in the future. So, there are going to be new industrial processes to take advantage of the peaks and troughs that there are inevitably going to be in the electricity supply. So, Scotland with its large share of renewable generation could be somewhere that some of these new processes could be cited. Similarly, the use of batteries in balancing the electricity system, that's something that again Scotland could sort of help to pioneer with projects and the pairing of batteries with other technologies like wind, tidal and wave, another interesting area and then small island grids, a lot of islands in Scotland and the potential to pair technologies like wind with batteries and even with some diesel generation and then export that sort of expertise around the world. A final thing, we're seeing onshore wind projects beginning to happen, the very sort of very beginnings of those happening without any kind of subsidy support in parts of Europe and there's a potential for Scotland to be somewhere where that happens, taking advantage of Scotland's great resources in wind backed with corporate purchasing. So, you could have big companies buying electricity from wind projects and doing those deals in Scotland because of the good economics that could be available on wind projects there. So, I think that there are a lot of opportunities. Thank you very much. I want to, if I may just very briefly ask John Ferguson in relation to his company's activities, if you use patents to protect your intellectual property or how do you otherwise protect your own innovations from unhelpful exploitation by others? I would protect the know-how just by being sensible and who I speak to about it. It's often, I think, for small companies more about how you get to market, how quickly you get to market and just be the first mover because actually protecting patents on a global basis when you're in a globalised economy and you've got China breathing down your neck and basically looking at everything you're doing, how are you going to take on a Chinese company that takes your ideas? And I think that puts a lot of people off the cost and the time involved in patenting. And it's such a brilliant idea that you simply have no choice with your investor to have it protected from their perspective. So, a lot of the time the innovation isn't actually patentable, it's about know-how and it's about protecting that know-how. I just want to ask—we had a debate in Parliament about research funding post Brexit. Obviously, we talked about universities and universities can often be key when it comes to getting research funding that might drive innovation. How big a problem do we see that funding coming away from the EU in terms of driving innovation in this area? Is that something that's crossed your mind? I think it must have crossed everybody's mind who is involved in innovation and research. And I've certainly heard lots of academics speaking about it and I would probably leave the words to them. I think the academics are vocal enough in standing up and saying they have concerns about the networks, the connections and the flow of investment into research. I don't know enough about how academics are funded through UK government to know whether the UK government can take up the slack of any uncertainty that may come post Brexit, but uncertainty is not a good thing, I have to say. Thank you. Now we move on to questions from Finlay Carson. Thank you, convener. The just transition partnership suggested, what we're hearing just now, is that there's too lower rate of investment, particularly in clean energy systems. Your business has suggested that a clear route map and policy would help to drive investment, but it's not just about tech, it's also about innovation when it comes to people and activities. Do you think that there's been adequate leadership and support for new ideas to succeed and how could we encourage more innovation? It's important to include communities in energy innovation. Communities are impacted by the energy infrastructure. There's a lot of communities in Scotland with high levels of fuel poverty and there's also a lot of fantastic energy resources and to try and marry them up would be a great solution. I think that there's been some funding for community projects. A lot of it has been focused on the Highlands and Islands just historically, so I think that there's a real opportunity to do more with urban, central belt communities, around community renewables, possibly more support is needed for the CARES scheme, possibly more support is needed for organisations like Community Energy Scotland who work with local communities to try and ensure that they can take advantage of the innovations that are coming to the energy system. We've got smart energy systems coming, there's a lot of change on the horizon, the traditional model of a community energy project of the community having a wind turbine or a share in a wind farm. Those days have ended really, so there's a real need for communities to have a stake in the changes that are coming and in the new kinds of energy projects that are on the horizon to make sure that it isn't just corporate ownership and profits leaving our communities. Just in support of what Angus has said, Angus led in some areas where we could innovate. One of the things that we are doing is we are looking at how we embed renewable systems into industrial contexts in much the same way that we do into communities. It democratises, decentralises and it gives those communities of businesses or people long-term future price security and it really makes the market start to work for people and consumers and the environment perhaps is less than investors and we need investors. I'm not saying that investment is not important but I think how we structure the market can be orientated and biased in one or other directions. I think we need to come away from very large-scale centralised systems to decentralised embedded systems. If you take a wind turbine and put that into the grid, the sleeving costs before it gets to the consumer are enormous. If you put that wind turbine into a business park and sell it directly to the consumers, it works for the wind farm and it works for the businesses that are buying that power. Those embedded systems for communities and businesses is one of the ways that we need to move in the future. One example where that's worked very well is the Edinburgh Solar Cooperative, where lots of members of the local community have invested to enable solar panels to be put on lots of public and community buildings in Edinburgh. It's a very successful project and we could have much more of that. We've heard from other sectors of agriculture where there is technology and advice out there but the knowledge transfer is not good. In some way, that reduces the impact that those new technologies could bring. What would you see as the thing that would make the difference to whether it's small businesses or communities looking to drive innovation? Is there one magic bullet that would help when the knowledge transfer or whatever to get more companies on board and communities on board? For our sector, it's good, trusted, knowledgeable, intermediary organisations with funding support. Local Energy Scotland, Community Energy Scotland, organisations like that who have the technical expertise to support community organisations who are doing those projects on the ground with capacity building and project development support. Thank you very much for the question, Mr Fergs. I was particularly impressed with your evidence, I have to say, and your obvious desire to innovate. It stimulated my mind into thinking that you talk about community schemes, both of you, but in terms of being even more granular than that, digging it right down to self-sufficient households and the move that we're going to have towards electric vehicles. If solar panels, batteries installed in individual houses, solar panels through the day you charge up your car from these batteries through the night, and there's a virtuous circle, is that a practical thought, or is it just me being a bit a flight of fancy? It's absolutely a practical thought, and Angus mentioned demand response balancing, and I would add load balancing to that. Those systems of storage actually can function in that context as well. I'll hand over to Liz for just a moment, because she was talking about heat matters, and I think that that's another way, because 52 or over 50 per cent of our energy demand in Scotland gross is for heat, for commercial space and for domestic spaces, so go on and tell them the story that you told me. We're seeing in my organisation, Green and Hercody, we run an energy advice service where we go out to households across Fife, giving people advice on home energy use. A lot of that work is about fuel poverty, but a lot of it is also about carbon reduction and people who are interested in reducing their carbon footprint. We've found a small but growing interest in battery storage. People are interested in the idea of self-sufficiency. If they've already got solar panels or other renewables on their home, they're really interested in making the most of that energy, especially as the feed-in tariffs and the financial subsidies are decreasing. We're finding people interested in heat batteries. There's a product called Sunamp, which is a Scottish company, relatively low cost to install. It's a fairly small piece of equipment. It can go in your attic or next to your boiler, connects up to your home renewables, connects up to your heating system in hot water and will pay for itself over the lifetime of the equipment, probably much less. There's a real and growing interest in that kind of technology. People are up for it. The game changer there is that quite a lot of homes might have sufficient room to store, to have a battery installed on different configurations and shapes of batteries. I remember when I was a child that electricity wouldn't come from the lines and there was a whole shed that was devoted to battery storage that must have come from a generator and storing electricity then. It's quite possible to do it on an individual household basis, but I wonder how much thought has been given to that, the development of that as a self-sufficient household. The technology innovation curve in battery storage is again exponential in the different ways of storing batteries. It's all about balancing the—if you want to make a change at scale, you need to know that the natural resources are there. A technology that uses a lot of gallium, for example, might not be viable, because it simply isn't enough of that rare earth metal. The technology innovation in that space is very rapid, so I would keep an eye on both heat batteries and energy storage batteries as part of the solution, certainly for wind, because you're getting balancing of loads, so you're getting a base load system out of a wind farm that could not be baseload otherwise. I'm going to a supplementary question. Claudia Beamish, let's say good morning to Dave Moxham. Claudia Beamish. Right, thank you, convener. Good morning now, I can say to you all. Just to be inclusive of Angus MacRone as well, I would be very keen to know—I'm asking this question, it would appear from a negative position, but it's a reflection on the past, which I hope will lead us to a positive future. Some would say that when it comes to R&D Scotland—fantastic—we've already highlighted lots of things that are happening now, but there is a perception sometimes that comes to me in my brief that we don't get to commercialisation always. I use the example that everyone uses. I'm sorry to quote him in a way, but Professor Saulter's ducks with the wave power. There are lots of examples where why have we not been able to have manufacturing, for instance, of renewables here, which would be so important on the sort of scale that I frankly think is perfectly possible. I wonder if there's any comments on that from any of you, beyond what has already been discussed. I can have a go at that, maybe. The issue with wave energy is not that Scotland's missed a manufacturing boat because the manufacturing boat hasn't left the harbour yet. That sector really hasn't got going anything like as quickly as anyone in any country hoped. I think the mistake that Scotland made in retrospect was in investing public money in large amounts of public money in individual technologies. As it happens, several of those technologies then went out of the companies behind them, went out of business, and quite a bit of money was lost. I think some lessons have been learned from that, and different approaches now being tried via Wave Energy Scotland. Certainly, on the tidal side, there's been more an emphasis on backing some of the early projects, like the MAJAN project, rather than putting money on particular technologies. I think that's progress. In terms of whether Scotland could become a hub for mass manufacturing of some of these new technologies, it's not just a Scottish issue, it's also a UK issue, sort of invented in the UK, developed in the US, made in Japan is the usual thing that we used to hear about when it came to a lot of technologies a few decades ago, and that same principle is a danger when you have a situation where you get early support for a technology, and then the government then goes lukewarm on it, and somebody else picks up the pattern and develops it. So I think consistency of government policy is very, very important on that. But I think one of the areas where it's important to focus not just in sort of manufacturing factory jobs, but actually is sort of building up the expertise, and it's very often that sort of expertise and that service skill that is a lot of the valuable export opportunity. So I mentioned a few areas earlier on. We were talking a moment ago about electric vehicles, and that's another very sort of up-and-coming area in low carbon. Our forecasts are 55% of car sales globally in 2040 will be electric vehicles, so it's going to totally transform the transport sector, and there's a very interesting interplay between electric vehicles and the grid via what we call dynamic charging, which is the ability to charge your electric vehicle when the electricity price is low rather than when it's high, and that requires public acceptance for the use of smart meter and other sort of information on electricity prices coming into the home. So there's a lot the government can do in encouraging that take up, and early success in developing that kind of dynamic charging will, I think, provide some skills that then can be exported to other countries. Dave Moxham wanted to come in. A couple of the points that were made there where I was going to make were probably with less expertise than my colleague there. There have been failures in the past. I think it would be a mistake, number one, to do that we've had our fingers burnt before. We'll try again. There is an element of risk-taking here, but it's necessary risk-taking because of the stakes. The experience, as I say, I come from the position of both of the SGC, but more specifically the Just Transition Commission. The negative experiences that people have had in the past in terms of transition is really, really important to get right now and begin to reverse. We need to find a way, a better way of connecting some of the R&D that I think we all agree that we have to undertake with the transport to market, and for us there's a key role for government in that. A couple of the examples given there were absolutely ideal. From our point of view, we do see the potential for some really good work to be done, particularly through the establishment of the Just Transition Commission, with as much power as possible and as much direction or power as possible. To really ensure that when that R&D is in, when we begin to see that innovation, it's properly built into an industrial strategy. If there are gaps between the technology and the delivery to ensure that we have a plan, even if it involves government investment, to deliver that, so filling that gap we feel is a real role for a Just Transition Commission advising the Government. Matt Ruskell. Can I just ask briefly about the Climate Challenge Fund? It's been a phenomenal success over 1,000 projects. I was involved in some of the early discussions around the establishment of the fund and I always saw it as a community laboratory of innovation and ideas, but it does pose a question about how we mainstream some of these approaches, so there's some fantastic work going on in individual communities and that's having some reach, but are there particular lessons from CCF projects that now should be taken forward as mainstream approaches and how do we actually do that? I guess there's danger within the voluntary sector that you're continually trying to innovate to get the next batch of funds. That is a real risk. I think that with the Climate Challenge Fund supported over 1,000 projects, as you say, for, I think, £100 million over the last 10 years, one of the challenges with it is that it looks for constant innovation and the funding tends to be relatively short term. Often it's only for one year. It does take longer than that to embed projects and communities and I think a key priority for, certainly from the community's point of view for any future developments of that fund would be for funding to be available over periods of at least three years to really identify learning and embed the changes that they're making. I think that the key successes that the Climate Challenge Fund has had, I mean, it's made measurable impacts on carbon, but I think that more importantly it's learned us a lot about activating behaviour changes, opening up possibilities for people that they hadn't maybe considered before, things like battery storage, electric vehicles, there's been a lot of really good work done there helping people to overcome barriers and there has been a lot of learning about what the barriers are to uptake of green technologies in people's homes and lifestyles. There's probably scope for a review of the fund at this stage. I know there have been reviews done in the past to pull together some of that learning and talk about where it could be mainstreamed. The Scottish Government do have behaviour change programmes, but a lot of it is around communications and effectively marketing campaigns and then delivery through organisations like the Energy Saving Trust rather than mainstreaming it through grassroots bottom-up community type work. Mark Russell would like to move on to his team of questions of the targets. Go to a slightly bigger global question and that's around the targets, which is obviously a critical decision and question that's before us within this bill. We've talked a little bit about business and business's role in potentially meeting a 90 per cent target, but perhaps each of you could just explain how you think business and innovation would react if there was a higher target, a net zero carbon target, a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target by 2050 or 2040. What signal does that send to markets? How does that become a driver for innovation? Turn to my previous point that it's perhaps not the innovation market that's needing that stimulus, it's the organisational system issue of national governments, local governments, installing the new ideas, the new options for these technologies to do the work that they can do. I do worry that we are constantly trying to run after a moving ball and every time we get there it's 50 yards ahead of us, so whatever we think we're doing something, the issue is moving very rapidly and too quickly for us. That's why we submitted a paper on how we develop rapid transitions by changing how we do things, perhaps through joint councils in regional areas, by having special powers, by bringing in the agency Scottish Enterprise and making them work together under a specific mandatory framework to say, for example, I gave you the example in the paper of Tayside with the Western Edge project, the potential to put fossil fuel energies district concepts and use smart grids in there, the bin groups projects on plastics changing completely how we address plastics recycling. These can be catalyst to real commercial projects, but if we pick them up and spread them across regions quickly because we have the mechanisms in place to do this, then that technological innovation will get applied quickly, so for me it's about finding ways of applying the technological innovation that is there. It will keep changing and Angus mentioned, for example, the offshore marine renewables. There's an area where we keep continually needing to innovate till we see things that work and then we need to get them working and transiting at scale. We're just not good enough in terms of strategy to make that transition happen and we've got to find new ways of speeding it up. I do agree that it's show not tell in some sort of ways. The high targets are positive and they probably have a positive effect on the R&D environment in the sense that a positive response has been shown globally that you get a positive response to the setting of high targets. What that doesn't necessarily do is a, do the show not tell or b, guarantee that the benefits of that, which we need to be felt economically, industrially in terms of jobs and communities, necessarily reside in Scotland. In order to win that other big battle, which is the change of behaviours, we need to do that. It really is the nuts and bolts delivery. Getting ahead of the ball in terms of the quick expansion of things that work into high volume that will make those higher targets something that I think people can relate to, both the people we represent and communities more generally. From a point of view of communities and individuals, a target of zero sets a very strong signal. It would show the Government leading from the front and it sends a very strong message and will, I think, catalyse a lot of change. Would Angus Macron like to respond? I was just going to say that I admire the setting of tough targets. For sure it does give a sense of direction, which is very important. I think looking at it in terms of different pieces, you can say that the electricity sector is fairly clear how targets can translate into change in the electricity sector is already well in progress there. The UK, for instance, has been a good performer in terms of reducing emissions from electricity generation. You can see that continuing. The technologies are there. The choices are more about how quickly they're implemented and what more can be done to encourage it. Similarly, on the transport side, although it's come about a bit later and progress has been slower up to now, there's a pretty clear path ahead with electrification. Certainly by the mid-2020s, the economics will be switching fairly decisively in favour of electric cars. You can see how targets can be achieved in so far as they relate to the transport sector, but the big issue is heat. You can have a very aggressive target. That's great, but you've also got to bear in mind that the path by which we might get to that target in the heat sector is nothing like as clear as it is in electricity and transport. There are technologies, but it's not clear which of those technologies are really going to make a difference. It's obviously a massive issue in Scotland with its history of housing and the challenges of keeping people warm and so on. That's what I say about the target. It's good to have the target, but a lot more work needs to be done on what the pathway is on the heat side. Stuart Stevenson has a supplementary question on that theme. Maybe I'll start with Angus McRown. It's a very simple question. Who should determine what the targets are—scientists or politicians? It has to be a combination of the two. Politicians in the end should set them because it's part of the democratic process and they need to be answerable for how they go about setting policies to meet the targets, but it clearly has to be strongly based on the scientific evidence. Long-term targets are difficult because we don't know how technologies are going to evolve over that time, so there must be some flexibility to make targets more aggressive or less aggressive depending on how the technologies evolve, but it's important to, as a statement, to have those strong targets so people know what the direction of policy is. Other members of the panel? The policy is evidence-based and scientists are fundamentally important to do that, but you also have to take business and communities with you, so it's not just politicians and scientists. The global society has to resolve this issue and each has a role to play in that. Dave Watson? I mean, I think that I'm hopefully not taking this too wide or too global, but there's an enormous polarization happening in world politics now in the US, in Europe and in other places, where politicians—not in this place, as far as I can see, certainly not on this issue—but politicians are responding to what they perceive to be and sometimes actually generate the concerns of the dispossessed working class, the concerns of people who don't feel that they've been part or included in the six significant economic and industrial changes that we've seen. So I trust politicians, but the politicians that I trust are the ones who will also pay attention to how those arguments are one, a community, obviously I would say, at trade union level too, because without that buy-in, we undoubtedly risk in every country in the world that kind of polarization, one might call it the collapse of the centre, which I think is a particular danger in respect to what I hope of our shared aims on climate change and carbon. Mark Ruskell, you wanted to come back? Yeah, I mean, just coming back to targets again. I mean, there obviously isn't a clear pathway at the moment in Scotland's climate plan to get to a net zero target. Are there examples from the experience of other targets or aspirations of government, where there's been uncertainty and yet business has lent into that innovative working with or without communities in some cases, to establish a pathway and achieve a target? Mark, sorry, I didn't quite pick up the question. I'm thinking about, we've got a question around a clear pathway to net zero, and my question is around have there been other targets, aspirations that governments have had in the past where there hasn't been clarity at the outset of the pathway towards the objective, but business has had a role in innovation and bringing forward innovation over a time period to actually address that. I have an example of which isn't really from the past, it's from the future. There's a piece of legislation going through at the moment also around fuel poverty, which is going to set an aspiration either for fuel poverty to go to 5 per cent or potentially lower by 2040, linking to this issue around decarbonisation of heat. So I think there's going to be some very good synergies in terms of both of those targets. I'm not sure there's a clear plan of how to get to fuel poverty of 5 per cent by 2040. There's going to be a lot of innovation required there too, and hopefully that will be a win-win with the climate change targets. An obvious example is the aspirations of the US Government to put a person on the moon for the first time. There wasn't a clear pathway to achieving that, but what kind of collaborations between academia and business, what kind of works in terms of addressing a gap, filling it, innovating around those sectors? I mean, maybe Angus has got thoughts there around energy as well. Do you mind saying that again? I just missed the end of the sentence. Okay, I'll try it again. In terms of how industry manages to innovate, so meeting a target, you know, I mentioned the example of Government sets and aspiration. We're going to put somebody on the moon, then industry, academia, governments need to work together in order to understand the uncertainty, innovate around it, and actually achieve a target. My point for you, Angus, was around energy, whether you saw any examples within energy where there wasn't a clear pathway to achieving a particular goal around energy and yet industry managed to innovate around that. I mean, not in quite the clear way that you've said with the moon program. I suppose in that particular case, you know, the US Government was throwing vast amounts of money at the problems, so that not always helps. But, you know, obviously UK has met its CO2 reduction targets from the 1990 benchmark more than met them. And similarly, it's going to either meet or become incredibly close to meeting the 2020 renewable energy targets. So targets can be hit and the private sector does always prove to be very versatile and adaptive to think of ways of meeting them as long as the incentives are there and the price signals to make it happen. So that's obviously crucial. As I say, I think the issue with a sort of long term, very, very ambitious CO2 reduction target we're talking about here is what happens on the heat side until there's a little bit more clarity on what technologies are going to win through there. It's difficult to be certain about how that can be brought about from the government side. To give a specific example, Mark, I'll use the zero waste environment. Going back to, actually, before zero waste became a popular concept, it became very clear that we had to deal with landfill. 1996 were on the landfill tax. And what that did was that it internalised the external costs placed on the environment by landfilling. And when I started in this business, it was 97% of our waste of landfill. So it was a significant impact in terms of the methanogenic potential to drive climate change. So we banned landfill. And that changed how the industry structured its innovation, its investments and its assets. And that drove innovation towards reuse, towards recycling, towards finding cleaner ways of making energy from the waste that we can do nothing else with. So that was one way of saying, if you can't do this anymore. So if you did a say, for example, in the energy sector, if you said, look, within a few years you will not be able to use diesel-generated power systems, you'll have to have something alternative in place. That would drive a massive displacement. One of the businesses that I work for generates almost all of its energy from diesel generation. And it's trying to be a low-carbon business. How can it do that? Right? So we're trying to put alternative renewable systems in place. So you might say, you can create that transition and that innovation by saying, well, you know, there's a really bad thing. We're going to stop that, but we're going to stop it in a transitory period where you've got time to adjust and deal with it. But at some point, you can't do that anymore. So that's one way that you can make that transition happen. I think that there wasn't clarity at the beginning of that process when that landfill ban target was set. Nobody knew absolutely how that was going to pan out, but it set the environment of change. There will be a cost for landfill, and as that cost rose, the response rose in proportion to it. To the point where we're now in a position to say, and by 2021, we're pretty much banning this to landfill completely. So you move from one mechanism into another mechanism. Other examples? No, just a general comment, because I agree that there's certainly no dissent from us that this setting of targets can provoke positive innovation and positive reaction, even if you don't know exactly what the path might be. There's risks if it becomes profitable not to innovate but to find other offshoring or importing alternatives. So we have to be clear that by setting the target, we're also giving some sort of guidance about what constitutes a positive economic social benefit and what might be the opposite. So I'd be slightly careful of saying that a top-down mechanism in using the market to encourage people to decide can automatically do that, and undoubtedly can in some circumstances. Again, there won't be a broken record, but returning to an enterprise environment and a connected strategy, including the Scottish National Investment Bank and others, that promotes the best possible responses to that, which are socially inclusive. I think it's very important. To questions from John Scott. Thank you, and just dealing with the sort of micro ideas that you've been dealing with, just going towards the practical, is large-scale systemic change now required to ensure decarbonisation, and how can structural change be facilitated and financed? Do you want to talk about that from your perspectives, your different perspectives? Certainly from my point of view, a couple of points there. Certainly all available investment mechanisms, including the National Investment Bank, are going to be absolutely vital here. No apology here by saying increased government investment is absolutely vital. We certainly seen increased investment in R&D. We certainly wouldn't criticise what's been undertaken thus far, but if we are looking at the type of systemic change, whether we're talking about major systems or whether we're talking about frankly the redesign or partial redesign of a whole economy, then you are undoubtedly talking about a significant need for additional state investment, and I realise that in this place we're already talking about a competency that is partly UK and partly Scottish, but I make no apology for saying that we need to jump now for CCS and we need to have the investment in place in order to do that, the same with electrification. These are things that we need to do now, and we can't just rely on the private sector investment landscape to deliver. Are there some views on that? Thinking on a very micro-scale about individual households, we're talking about asking people to make significant changes to their existing homes in many cases, particularly older properties. We need continued investment in grants and loans that are currently administered from the Energy Saving Trust, Home Energy Scotland. Those are popular and successful, and that needs to increase and continue. Perhaps looking at how we use the combined systems of planning, fiscal taxation and statutory regulation to create, for example, transition levies in some cases, where you put something on the cost of something, a small marginal cost over a period of time to fund that change or a subsidy. If you change, you'll get this subsidy to help you make that change. For example, there would be fiscal instruments that could come in. We have to get our planning system fit for purpose. I genuinely think that it isn't. I don't mean to offend anybody involved in planning, but I've used the planning system for many, many years. I just think that it's part of the problem. It's far too slow. It doesn't set the strategic framework correctly. The national planning framework is a great idea, but it's underachieving. I think that we have to start with planning, because that is the framework within which everybody has to work to do anything that means infrastructure on the ground. You won't change systems without changing infrastructure. Mr McCrone, do you want to say anything or not? Yes, maybe. The building side is obviously absolutely crucial to this. I think there's a couple of questions. Are we doing enough new building regulations and also regulations for the conversion of properties? Are we doing enough to enforce very, very strong energy efficiency requirements? Is there enough being done when it comes to replacing buildings? If we have buildings that have really reached the end of their life or beyond, is there enough incentive for the owners of those buildings, whether they're landowners or individuals or councils to actually go about replacing them with something much more energy efficient? I don't know the answer to those questions, but those would be some areas to look at. Excellent. Would you therefore, all of you, regard this need as opportunities and business economic opportunities to be grasped, as it were, from mitigation and adaption to climate change? What do we need to do to maximise that? One of the things that struck me that comes across here is essentially the supply chain of going from ideas to enterprise companies to government approval. A big gap in all of that is the education of people like ourselves, because this whole process for us has been a learning curve about the potentials that exist out there, and probably for Government and civil servants too. There seems to be innovations out there, the sciences out there, but getting it to the next stage, Mr Ferguson has already spoken about that. I think that there's a real problem there through—I don't know whether it's through Scottish Enterprise or HIE or what, but would you like to develop that theme a little more and identify the problems and tell us where the sorbets are and how you think they might be sorted, if you easily can? One of the issues is the time scales required. I mean, I'm saying you need to make rapid transitions, but when you're looking at developments, there might be a rapid transition, might be a five or 10-year period. At the rate we're going, we might never do it. We're not good at doing the infrastructure. Waste is a good example. We've got a tremendously good waste, zero waste strategy, but no infrastructure to deliver landfill bans, et cetera, because we've not focused on some of the unpopular issues. I think we need to understand that the time scales required don't necessarily fit the political paradigm of short-term governments in power for four years, changing the guards, so you're clear you're doing this for four years and then, oh, it's changed and we're going over here. We need a little bit of time planning between political parties on a cross-party basis that certain things are sacrosanct. We need to do this. We all agree we need to do this. Let's put it into a safe environment. That's your framework for 15 years. That would create stability for investment, stability for planning and stability for business, and it would allow time for adjustment in terms of the public engagement, the messaging and the culture change that needs to go on. I think going cross-party, medium to long-term planning, getting consensus across some of these issues and stop them being political footballs, there's enough politics and politics for all of us, and I think that that's fine, but certain things are of mutual benefit to all people, and I think that we have to try and find that consensus between all parties on certain things and just say, that's it, we'll nail that down, we're not going to mess with that, that's the framework, get on and do that, and then within that framework we could perhaps accelerate transition. Does it make sense, self-evidently, if we're going for targets for 2030, 2040, 2050, that we have an agreed position also across parties, could that be achieved? I don't know, but at least some broad themes and some broad principles that could be agreed, that has to go hand in hand with setting the targets is the point that you're making. I think that's a very valuable point. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut across what other people were going to say. If anyone wants to join in this, but otherwise, I'll pass to Claudia Beamish who's got a supplementary question around this. It was actually a specific question for Angus about the target, so shall we just wait and see if we've got time at the end? Short question. Right. Okay, thank you. I'll just find it again then. I just wanted to pick up Angus with yourself, if I may, and be devil's advocate for a minute on the targets. I think that if I heard you correctly, you actually said that there should be the space or the ability to alter the targets, depending on how the technology evolves. Could it also perhaps be that there should be political leadership—and I take the point made by John Ferguson across parties—to drive the innovation and confidence in all sectors, and would this not guide new technology, bearing in mind that we do have successive climate change plans to actually set the policy frameworks into the future? Yes, that's all reasonable. I think the issue that was causing me maybe to give more of a nuanced answer was the issue of heat and what the winning technologies are going to be. In that particular segment, and that's not just an issue for Scotland, that's an issue for basically all northern countries that the technologies are going to win through there, and at what speed they're going to emerge. It's not clear, so it's very hard to be sure about whether targets for the set now will be overachieved or underachieved. What we have learned up to now with the European 2020 targets was that very rapid progress was made on the electricity side and much less on transport or heat. The transport side is becoming a lot clearer now subsequently, but there's still a lot of question marks on heat. Yes, a lot of political oomph can be created by the right noises being made, but, nevertheless, there need to be commercial technologies within sight to bring that about, and it's not yet clear what those will be. Okay, thanks. Following on from John Scott's theme and the general discussion this morning, we know that the transformational change that we need to see is a tall order, so to achieve transformational change, do you think that Governments should regulate lifestyles and reduce consumer choices, or do you think that markets will adequately innovate to allow for continued growth? To that, John Ferguson. Forgive me for speaking too much perhaps. I think there are times when you simply have to say that this is just not working, you have to stop doing this. Markets will operate wherever they can make money, and if you take plastics, for example, we put 300 million tonnes of new plastics into the environment every year, and we're recycling 12% of that, so there's 88% of that plastic on an annual basis. It's going into landfills, it's going into incinerators, it's going into the oceans, and part of that problem is we allow the manufacturing and the sale of complete utter nonsense, and that utter nonsense moved using carbon all over the world. So why are we such a consumer based society, and why are we not focusing more on the global equity issues of everybody has enough food, clean water, security, good quality air, and such like? If we invested in those things globally, there'd be a very vibrant global economy, but we wouldn't be wasting time resources and damaging the planet doing unnecessary things, so sometimes I think it's good to say no to that, we're just going to stop doing that, but I'm not particularly persuaded that that's a good way of necessarily regulating society, and you have to let people have a degree of freedom, so somewhere I'm in the middle of that one, I think there's a case to do it sometimes, and there's a case to let markets determine, but markets working in sensible places should be determining sensible approaches, and not left entirely on to their own ends. Mark Simpson. I'm kind of in the middle too, there's clearly a case for some regulation of consumer choice, but we also know, as I've said before, that people buying is really, really important to this whole process, and we have to be very careful in the regulation of consumer choice that we're being equitable in terms of people's choices and experiences, I think that it's dangerous to limit the choices of people who already have very limited choices, whereas others who can do that more freely are therefore able to do that, but really not without the same impact on their lifestyle. So consumer choice regulates it, yes, but be very careful who it's impacting and how. I mean, I just think there's a general case here for auditing the impact as we go along with a lot of the decisions that we maybe need to be auditing the jobs impact, we need to be auditing the consumer impact, we need to be auditing the community impact, so we need to process as we go along with these things to make judgments, and to make regular judgments on what it means for people, because if we don't do that, then we'll leave them behind, and I think that that's a real risk. I think that one of your previous evidence sessions talked specifically about behaviour change, so I won't go into too much detail, but the Scottish Government uses a model called ISM, which is around how behaviour change happens. It really talks about three levels, the individual talking about attitudes and behaviours, social, which is where a lot of community work comes in, setting norms, encouraging people to engage with their peers to make change, and the third level is material, which is about regulation and incentives. I think that for behaviour change to happen on the scale that we're talking about, we need all three of these levels to come into play and to be done in a coherent way. Right, we're going to move on to questions around the effect on people and areas of Scotland from Rhoda Grant. Previously, we had evidence on transport and recognised that some of the incentives to get people out of the car had an impact on rural areas. We've heard this morning about fuel poverty and how that impacts on urban and inner city areas as well. How can we make sure that this change is fair to all socioeconomic groups, as well as geographical sectors? It seems to me that those who have been left behind in the past will be left behind again. We see in more affluent urban areas that every roof has their photovoltaics, and they can afford to invest in all of this. It's the people who have the knowledge and have the finance that seem to be able to make that transition leaving others behind. That's a really important point. I'm particularly concerned about fuel poverty and how that relates to climate change. There are great Scottish Government schemes. We have the warmer home Scotland scheme, which is making huge improvements to homes for vulnerable households. A lot of that work is done in rural areas, but we could be doing more. There are people who fall between the gaps. We have the more affluent people who can afford to make the changes to their own homes. We have people who fulfil specific criteria such as passport benefits to be eligible for the warmer home Scotland scheme. There's a whole swath of people in the middle who would be classified by the energy saving trust as able to pay, but they're not really, they don't have the money for those kind of changes. We need to see more grants, more incentives, boilers, scrappage schemes, things like that, to help people to make the changes to benefit from the drivers that are in place, especially around home energy and heat. Of course, not everyone is a homeowner as well. There are areas where people are renting and they can't really apply for that sort of thing. Can I have a response to that? I was just going to add to that point not that I disagree with anything that was said, but we need to share the heat benefits as widely as possible and that certainly applies, probably even more applies to people in non-owned accommodation than anywhere else. Transport, we need to show to rural communities in particular that there can be positive benefits and integrated transport network, a better integrated transport network, more investment in that in our view, extension to public ownership in that area, because I think, as well as being absolutely vital in terms of car emissions, it's really important to show that benefit. In agriculture really as well, where we know we're not making enormous gains and any potential measures in agricultural could disproportionately affect rural communities, to pick up in particular on the job creating opportunities, the reforestation, the other things that make a positive impact, but can also bring jobs and growth to those areas. How do we proactively get that across though, because if you think people, especially urban in our cities, they're struggling to keep the roof over their head, far less going away and looking at who's going to give me this grant, who's going to give me this advice, it's a day-to-day struggle, it's not something where you sit back and do some horizon scanning and think where do I want to be. How in a way we have to be much more proactive? In our work we engage, our energy advice service engages around 2,000 households per year and we go out and find people. We go to mother and toddlers groups, pensioners, lunch clubs, any organisation that will accept us, anywhere where people are, we will go and talk to them about home energy use, we'll talk to them about things they can do themselves, we have a handy service which does simple measures for people, we'll change light bulbs for older people to low energy LEDs for people that might not be able to do that themselves and we'll put people in touch with grants and schemes to get significant works done to their home to make it more energy efficient. We'll also talk to them about behaviour change and simple things they can do themselves to save energy and we'll talk to them about what's coming, what's on the horizon and reasons why they might want to make these changes now to save themselves quite a lot of money in the longer term. There's win-wins with the work that that service does, we can put people in touch with other support services, often things like befriending services to tackle social isolation, we can put people in touch with citizens advice to get benefit checks so it's quite a holistic approach but we go out and proactively find the people who need that service and I think going forward there's thousands and thousands of people in Scotland in fuel poverty and a lot of them are not coming forward for help, a lot of people are suffering in silence and not asking for help so we need significant boots on the ground in communities, workers and volunteers to actively go out and find these people. And over to Grant has got the questions on the workforce but before we come to that, can you bring in John Scott on this theme? Thank you convener and I just applaud what you're saying, Susie, good sir. I'm just developing that theme and Dave Mawksom spoke about incentivising as we spoke on Tuesday about incentivising farmers to do the right thing and agriculture sector and in the home sector and the energy sector and the heat sector should we also be looking at incentivising people still more than we currently do. I mean we already suggested that people would benefit from our rates reduction if they did the right thing within their homes and I don't think there's been a huge uptake in that programme but if we were to further proactively market that idea about doing good sensible things to improve the quality of homes and improving heat loss then perhaps something could be worked out if you got a three-year rate window or a five-year white window then the scheme would pay for itself but you spoke about the need to embed the cost of embedding change within communities and you spoke about that being a three-year project so I just think do you want to talk a little bit more about that? I think make an energy efficiency improvements to an existing home, people have got to be motivated to do that, it's a lot of upheaval to get a new boiler, to get insulation in, especially when we're talking about wall insulation or underfloor insulation, it's a hassle for the householder so there needs to be an incentive to do it. There's an element of education about measures which might actually pay for themselves but then there are also measures where I think a financial incentive, a stronger financial incentive is definitely needed. Currently there are energy saving trusts to have an interest-free loan scheme, which I believe is supported by the Scottish Government, and there's a very small cash back grant component of that but it's small, it's not, I don't think it's a strong enough incentive for people in existing homes. Come back to Rhoda Grant's questions. Just turning to the economy and how we change, John Ferguson had talked about changing from a consumer-based society, so we need to shift the economic focus of our society but how do we make sure that we do that without a cliff edge for workers? Do we have the right skills? Do we have the right knowledge and the workforce for that transition to be seamless? How do we avoid, I suppose, some of that post-industrial societal change that we've seen in the past going forward to change the focus of society? One of the issues, I'm not a specialist in the next part on this by any means, but one of the issues is we have to see that question as a global issue. Going back to the earlier question of why don't we manufacture things in this country, there's James Dyson, one of the UK's greatest innovators. Pro Brexit, his next factory, will be in Singapore. We're probably all wearing clothes made in Indonesia and we probably many of us saw the very good programme on textiles and the impacts on textiles, so we're allowing our products to be manufactured in countries. I'm not saying Singapore necessarily in this instance but certainly in the cases of the textiles in Indonesia, most certainly, the environmental impacts are dumped straight down the pipe into the water that, funnily enough, the local communities also use and then out to the ocean, plastics and everything. We have to stop that. We have to stop allowing our consumer supply chains to be giving us products that are actually exploiting the environment. If we deal with that as a global issue, then we create that equity globally because the impacts on the environment in Indonesia in this specific case of textiles are on many of the poorest people in that country, but it harms our global environment, so we all suffer from that. There's got to be an expectation that we ask that question about how we protect everybody's interests. How do you do that? You're talking about some of the poorest people in the world, so you don't want to take the jobs away from them. How do you make that step change when we're ahead to a larger extent and that's why our costs are higher? They're desperate for that kind of work and they don't have the money to invest in cleaning up the output of those industries, which makes them cheaper. How do you get people to pay more to make sure that we're all in the same place? The fundamental issue there is fair trade. They have every right to make goods and services and send them around the world, but they have to do that to a standard and we have to set that standard and we have to be prepared to pay that standard and I think that's the issue. We're consuming too much because it's too cheap because actually the cost is hidden on the environment globally. That doesn't help workers anywhere. I can remember this very specific and quite personal to my area. I've come from Aberdeenshire, so I guess one of the big elephants in the room for me is the fact that in my area a lot of people's jobs are dependent on oil and gas. If we're going to be moving to our targets, there is a fear that a lot of people will lose their incomes and as Rhoda Grant has described, it could be, as we've seen in the past, a lot of people falling off this cliff edge if we don't do things in place to make a just transition and to provide jobs. Can I ask, when Dave Mawkson specifically on that we're talking, thousands of people in a particular area of Scotland? Yes, and there's a tendency to look at that in just-in-strike quantum terms rather than to look at it in quality of jobs and in particular those middle-income jobs that are not particularly prevalent in the UK economy just now and need to be held. As I'm sure you'll know, many, many people who previously worked offshore working as labourers. Now there's nothing wrong with labouring work, but it's not particularly good for an economy that somebody who was on 40 pounds an hour is then working for 10 pounds an hour. So it's a question of quality of job and that is difficult. It's very, very difficult for our members. It's very difficult for the unions that represent them. What we do need to see, again returning to our hopes for the Just Transition Commission, is real forward-looking analysis of where the hotspots lie, where the hotspots lie in the supply chain, where the opportunities exist. We need to look at maximising in areas such as decommissioning, where we believe that there's work still to be done. We need to be engaging with companies such as BiFab or what we hope will be an operational BiFab sometime in the next few months to look at which parts of their potential operation. We need to sell their services abroad, but we want to be selling the services abroad, which are the ones that are also most carbon, most carbon helpful rather than most negative. There is a real job there to do, there's a real threat, but I do think that with a joined up industrial strategy, which is informed by serious analysis, forward-looking analysis of where the jobs flows will be, that it's actually possible to meet this. Many of the people that we represent working in gas and other areas aren't necessarily looking at immediate job loss. I think it's fairly uncontroversial that gas is going to continue, but we should already be looking and questioning because it's not uncontroversial. We should already be looking at things like hydrogen. We should be looking at what the training and the skills needs will be in order to deal with that. Frankly, there will not be any pain here, but there are definitely prophylactic things that we can do and there's definitely investment-led things that we can do to mitigate the impact on the workers that we represent. Are we bringing up a generation of people that will be ready for that kind of change and innovation? I suppose that employers are also looking at their workforce because we've got people who are going to work a lot longer. We're all living a lot longer, and you can see the pension age gap. Are people moving through that workforce? Are they being retrained? Are they aware of the changes that are going to happen and what can we do to make them adaptable? I've seen some good examples. I couldn't honestly, with any authority, tell you systematically whether that's happening. I've seen some good examples. Returning to Fife, I've seen what Fife College is offering with respect to a potential apprenticeship and other training as it would relate to what we hope would be a rise in decommissioning and renewable production in that factory. I've seen it happen. Whether that's systematic or not, I think that we probably need to ask somebody else. Identifying it as an issue and an issue that we undoubtedly could do better on however well we're doing now is absolutely vital. It's also absolutely vital in terms of the kind of community messaging and the community development that I'm sure that, as soon as you would be interested in it. Thank you. We're going to move on to a question from Stuart Stevenson. Thank you very much. In the discussion, we've covered a fair bit about getting buy-in both from individuals but perhaps less on sectors. I've jotted down a wee list of counter things that make it difficult. I would like some comments on that but also some suggestions. I might just start with Susie Goodser because I specifically made a reference about driving acceptance. A few things, and John Scott mentioned the rating system. Of course, there is a counter to doing good things for your house because if you improve the quality of your house, the next time that's revalued, you might move to a more expensive notch. There's actually a perverse incentive not to improve if you look at it that way. The next one, mortgage providers. When you improve your house for climate sustainability purposes, it becomes potentially a more valuable house. It becomes a house with a longer lifespan and yet mortgage providers don't reflect that at all in the risk pricing which is the interest rate that they charge you for it, which they probably perhaps might should do. The next one, energy costs, heating our houses. The cleanest form that's readily available is electric heating but it's actually the most expensive way of heating your house. Isn't that a perverse thing in terms of the agenda here? Heat transmission, which is something that happens in relatively short areas, is the one area of public utility where there's no way leave. There's no utility that doesn't have an automatic right to deliver heat whereas telephones and electricity and gas have way leave rights. They've got to compensate land owners over whose land they go but they have a right to go over them. There isn't anything for heat. We've seen a huge move from diesel cars to petrol but diesel cars are about 50 per cent more efficient about extracting energy from their fuel, albeit they have in particular particulate contaminations that are the other side of the equation, but nonetheless on this narrow agenda is perverse to move back from diesel to petrol. Finally, just as a good example of behaviour change that might pick up on some things John Ferguson has said about plastics, I like others. I've got a plastic bag in my hip pocket alongside my wallet now. Now it's not an economic thing because I mean tempents for an MSP salary is neither here nor there to be blunt about it, but it has genuinely changed behaviour, that really quite tiny thing. What opportunities are we missing? Should we be more rigorous in... The plastic bag is not a tax, of course, but that's just a legislative quirk. Can we do something about the use of plastics in packaging and retail that would have the same effect? How do we get by in because it's probably policy makers and government who are not doing enough? Let's move on to a panel to get a response to that. Suzy Good, sir. Okay, so that's quite wide-ranging. I'll pick up on maybe a couple of points there. In terms of behaviour change and what opportunities are there, I think one of the most challenging things around behaviour change is transport and we've talked about electric vehicles. There's also air travel, which is possibly one of the elephants in the room. There's a big issue there around social norms and aspirations. I think that's going to be one of the challenges if we're talking about long-term challenging targets. Air travel is going to become one of the big issues over time. In terms of incentives for home energy changes, I'm not sure the rating system is the right way to do it. That was included in legislation 10 years ago. No one really picked up on it. I'm not sure about house values and energy efficiency changes. I don't really know how, when we buy and sell houses these days, they all have an EPC. Do people look at them? I'm not actually sure people understand them, to be honest, when buying and selling properties. I think that there's a lot of education that could still happen there. I think that the key driver for people making energy efficiency changes to their house is about the changes that will happen to their bills in the short term. That's probably the thing to focus on. The key barrier is the capital cost of the measures and the upheaval in the house. I think that any incentives just need to get people over that hump of making the changes in the short term. Anyone else have any points to make on that specifically? Richard Lyle wanted to come in briefly. As a councillor, I think that you'll find that the banding of houses don't change unless you sell it. I've upgraded my house quite a number of times and my banding has not changed in the last 40 years. I'd like to ask a question initially to Dave and then expand it and hope that others such as Angus might comment from a finance perspective or others will comment from their own perspectives. We're all aware that the Scottish Government has undertaken to create—in fact, it is creating a just transition commission—but, as things stand, it's not to be legislated for in the bill. I'd like your comments and others' comments, please, Dave, on whether, in your view, legislating would help this commission to carry out its functions better, whether independence from government would help, for instance. If you could comment also on the reporting mechanisms and any other aspects that you think are significant to help affected communities and workers. Maybe just very briefly to explain the kind of thinking—obviously, it's a just transition commission—is a Scottish Government initiative if we strongly support it. We believe it's got reasonable support across the chamber. The purpose really reflects—in our view, the purpose really reflects some of the evidence that I've given already. It's about how—the various ways, but we think that this is a key way in which we fill or bridge that gap between target, between idea and between delivery. How it engages with certainly key institutions, the investment bank that I've mentioned, but also with local authorities, with enterprise agencies, to ensure that—really, we would say forever, and we know that the Scottish Government's initial proposal, I think, is for a two-year—I've not given any secrets away here—a two-year commission, but really which sees that as the companion piece to achieving our targets right through the progress of our targets. That doesn't mean to say that it should be an unchanging or static body, but it does mean that that should be the initial commitment, because it really embeds, in our view, the principle that every step that we take needs—as we look forward to every step that we take, we also need to be looking forward to the economic impacts to the buy-in and to social justice. We say that it should have a fair degree of independence autonomy, not from the Scottish Government, but not as a matter of mistrust, but of experiences of commissions where they have independent or semi-independent secretariat where they are able to take advice from across a wide range have performed effectively. So, in legislation, because it really is a statement of future intent, suitably independent, because we think that that will make it operate more effectively. Requiring, or at least as far as any commission, can require input and report from all of the key institutions, whether that's the new infrastructure committee, whether that's the national investment bank and the rest of it, so that we really centralise that idea of decent jobs, community justice and proper climate change action as something that is burned into people's minds, whether that's legislators or eventually the consumers that we're hoping will change their behaviour. Will we just hear Angus as well and others if they want to make any comment on it? Yes, I was going to just on the oil and gas transition. Of course, electric vehicles are coming in the car sector and electric buses are also coming very rapidly, perhaps more rapidly worldwide, but that's only a part of oil demand. So, the car side is only about 20 per cent of world oil demand. Even on our very aggressive forecast for electric vehicle uptake, we see only about seven million barrels of oil per day being taken out as a result of EVs and e-buses by 2040. So, I think the oil sector is not going to die off very quickly. The same is true of gas. The gas is still going to be an important fuel in the UK and elsewhere for balancing the system. There's going to be a change in the way it's used, less for baseload and more for pico gas, but it's going to continue to be important. So, I think the scenario for oil and gas jobs in the Aberdeen area is probably maybe not as immediate as some people suggest. There are obviously issues for a kind of slow dwindling of that activity, but it's had huge swings before with oil prices as low as $10 and as high as $140. So, I don't think the issue is maybe quite as immediate and extreme as we might think. Can I just ask you then with a specific question about a Just Transition Commission or beyond that, a Just Transition, in terms of finance, can you give any suggestions or recommendations about how finance for the future can be equitable in the terms of supporting workers and can there be any criteria for investment or that any expectation set? Mark Carney's highlighted climate change as being a very serious imperative. How does this connect between companies and finance and R&D? Have you got any comments on that? That's not really my area. I think other witnesses might have a better idea. You have an investment community in Edinburgh with a company, for example, Bailey Gifford, who is one of the largest fund holders in the world, who have departments that look at the ethical frameworks of the investments and they have global concordats about what is ethical investment. Within that community, I think there are standards growing to ensure that those investments are secure, but there's a whole area of global investments that are not subject to those standards. If you ask the experts within the global financial community that are concerned about equitable investment, that they're investing in the right things and not in the wrong things, you'll find some very good indicators of what is good investment and what isn't. The global financial community is much wider and perhaps less well-intentioned sometimes. I'm very conscious that we don't have much time left and I apologise to members that want to come in. Questions from Richard Lyle, and if we have any time at the end, we can pick up on some of that. I think there's also a comment. There's been various comments and I haven't been able to basically have no time to go through. I come from an area that had previously had mining and Lanarkshire had steel. It was hard, but we basically have recovered to a good time. I wish Aberdeen, Shirewell and Aberdeen at the end of the day, oil is. They keep saying that there's no oil left, but then they come out the next day and tell us, we've just found a new field. We have to prepare and ensure that people who are in excellent good jobs up there continue and are supported in that. Anyway, can I ask you, as the last question, has any of the panel carried out an economic assessment of the costs and benefits of mitigating and adapting to climate change because we will have to adapt to climate change? A short answer is no, and it would be a quite enormous undertaking to do. I think I'm going to have to go back to my previous answer and say that that would be, in our view, that would be a primary function of a Just Transition Commission because you cannot look at this without looking at the employment impacts. I realised it was a question that I'll comment with back to the area that you represented and Cole, but that wasn't the universal experience of people in the coal industry. We actually see some quite nice examples at the moment in Canada and in Spain, where people are doing Just Transition from coal in a far more positive way that I'd be happy to link the committee to if people were interested. You've asked an enormous question. I would be surprised if any single panellist was able to answer that they had, but I think they might be able to suggest ways in which we might approach that in the periods that they have. We get comments of £13 billion. Where does that come from? Does anyone have an idea? I've seen various figures using various methodologies, but I think digging into that and doing it in a systematic way is a big job that I'm not qualified to do, but I'm very happy to provide some information. Don't focus on what it's come in to answer the main question there. I don't know if it was an economic impact assessment with the bill because you have to do that obviously with bills, but I will say this under regulation, environmental regulation, businesses like ours have to report their carbon performance. They therefore look very carefully at the auditing process of that and the cost-benefit analysis of saying, for example, we're going to stop using generated power, which is costing us a lot of money, and having a serious impact on the environment through carbon and make a transition to wind power, which will make us, so we do very detailed cost-benefit analysis at a company level, and that's driven by regulation. If you can extend that requirement to do that and aggregate the answer, you're going to get a good idea of what those savings are because it's a very important question. One minute left if anyone wants to come in and mark, Mark Ruskell. Can I just ask Dave Moxham just very briefly about the relationship between Just Transition Commission and the UK Climate Change Committee, which is obviously a statutory adviser. Somebody has to help government to make a decision about whether a pathway is technically feasible, socially feasible, economically feasible. What do you see as a role of Just Transition Commission in working with the UKCC on that question? It's a helpful question because we would see it as a very important relationship, not least because all of the things that a Just Transition Commission needs to consider are not limited to powers that rest within this place and creating the kind of investment environment that we need to achieve some of these things. Also because there's a number of issues in terms of what we would describe as the kind of quality of employment, because we're looking to guarantee quality of employment here, I haven't got very long here, but one of the problems just now for Just Transition going back to Aberdeen is that it's hard to capture the value in a place like Aberdeen of all of the opportunities because the way that employment regulates actually discriminates against local labour and in favour of different models of employment. For a whole range of reasons, because powers are held in a different place, it's absolutely vital that the Just Transition Commission has a strong relationship, although obviously it wouldn't be statutory with the CCC. I'd just like to say thank you very much to all our panellists, both remote and in the room. It's been hugely interesting. I'm sorry we didn't have more time. It's very difficult on a Thursday. Obviously things happened earlier on a Thursday. We had to close early. Thank you very much. At our next meeting on 20 November, the committee will continue its consideration of the climate change emissions reductions target Scotland Bill. The committee will now move into private session and I request that the public gallery be vacated as the public part of this meeting is now closed. Thank you very much.