Humza Yousaf has gone to something called the Climate
Ambition Summit in New York. Given that Yousaf lacks the ability of walking on
water, we can assume that he flew there. It may also be that he is having a
pleasant time on the Staten Island Ferry learning about how ferries work and
not having to think about any other type of ferry including Broughty Ferry
which likewise lacks a ferry in just the same way as many Scottish islands. New
York in the early autumn will be still warm and Yousaf will be able to enjoy
roaming in the gloaming with whoever he has to roam with.
But is there any point in Yousaf being in New York? No.
Regional leaders of places like Bavaria, Burgundy and Bohemia will doubtless
have reflected that their best contribution to limiting carbon emissions was to
follow events in New York online. But it is crucial for the SNP to pretend that
Scotland is a nation state just like every other UN member state despite
Scotland never having been a member, because it is eh not independent.
But there is a more important reason why it is
pointless for Yousaf to be in New York. It matters not one little bit what
Scotland does about carbon emissions.
Rishi Sunak has decided to delay the ban on petrol
cars and gas boilers from 2030 to 2035. There is an enormous fuss. But the
truth is that it will not affect global warming in any measurable way. It would
be impossible even to try to measure how this delay will change global temperatures
50 or 100 years from now.
It's nice for Humza Yousaf to feel involved and to
think that the decisions he makes in Scotland will make a difference to climate
change, but the truth is they won’t. A brief look at some figures shows this.
Carbon emissions in million tonnes
Scotland 41.6
China 11680.42
United States 4535.30
India 2411.73
Russia 1674.23
Japan 1061.77
Even if Scotland had no electricity. Even if Scots
drove no cars. Even if we lit no fires. Even indeed if we went back to the Stone
age, it would make no measurable difference to global warming or climate change.
Our 41 million tonnes will be well within the margin of error of China’s 11000
million tonnes.
People say the problem is not the amount of carbon emissions
each country produces but the amount each person produces. But this is
obviously false. The country in the world with the highest per capita emissions
is Palau an archipelago of 500 islands in the South Pacific. Palau had 1.24
million tonnes of emissions in 2020, but it only has a population of 18,000.
Perhaps they use a lot of petrol travelling between these islands. Palau though
has done well in 2017 it emitted 1.41 million tonnes. But the idea that the actions
of Palau will make a difference to climate change is clearly preposterous. It’s
too small. The saving of 0.17 million tonnes changes nothing globally.
It would simply be a waste of aviation fuel for the
President of Palau to travel to New York, but at least he would be a leader of nation
state rather than a region of one.
But the most important reason why Yousaf’s trip is
pointless is that the UK has already massively reduced carbon emissions, while
other countries have increased theirs.
Change in carbon dioxide emission from 1990-2022
China +426.5%
India +348.3%
South Korea +133.5%
United Kingdom −41.4%
So, while we have been cutting carbon emissions since
1990 the savings we have made have been and are continuing to be made pointless
by countries like China and India. It’s as if one member of a family is buying
the cheapest Tesco tins of beans while another is buying caviar and vintage champagne.
The savings of the one are made pointless by the extravagance of the other.
The SNP and the Scottish Greens want everyone in Scotland
to be forced to buy an electric car by 2030. They want us to be unable to sell
our house if we don’t have a heat pump. They want us to pay a deposit on every
container we buy so that we have the pleasure of queuing to get our money back.
But Scotland already has the carbon emissions of Laos
and if China continues to increase its carbon emissions at the rate it is
doing, our decrease won’t make any difference at all. Whatever savings we make
will be outstripped thousands of times over by China and India.
I think it is a good thing in itself to emit as little
carbon as possible. There are better more efficient ways to get the energy we
need.
There is no way to stop developing countries using
ever more fossil fuels unless technology provides them with a cheaper more
convenient alternative. China and India can reasonably point out that the
alternative to burning fossil fuels is to remain poor. The same goes for every
other developing country that wants the standard of living we have.
This is why it is pointless for Yousaf to go to New
York. It ends with him virtue signalling about cutting emissions when we
already are cutting, while the developing world burns as much coal oil and gas
as it can buy and will continue to increase its rate of burning still further
while we keep cutting.
It will be an advanced economy like the UK or the USA which
will discover the technological solution to global warming, but we will only
remain advanced economies if we ignore the SNP and the Scottish Greens who
would prefer, we had no economic growth at all and went back to driving horse
drawn carriages.
Net zero is a con and the con is created precisely by
the kind of meeting Yousaf is attending in New York. It’s only a few Western
countries that are even attempting to cut carbon emissions, because our leaders
like Yousaf love to feel important at international meetings, enjoy making grand gestures and pretend that we set others and example, which in fact they ignore.
But it is us that suffer from their virtue signalling
when our houses are too cold, or we get stuck in Sutherland with an electric
car and the nearest charging point is Inverness. We miss out when we can’t
afford to fly somewhere warmer on holiday. Soon it will only be Humza Yousaf
who can afford to travel anywhere.
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