A real Green New Deal for Scotland

The following is a very quick summary of some of the key action points from the plan:

• Buildings: All new construction must be energy-neutral and have at least 60-year lifespan | Renovate rather than demolish | Set up National Housing Company and insulate all existing homes to 90 per cent efficiency | Make all construction materials organic or recycled | Make all public buildings ‘energy positive’ | Require businesses to achieve high heating efficiency but provide subsidies for small businesses | All electrical goods must have AAA efficiency rating
• Heating:Set up an Energy Development Agency to plan the shift to renewable heating | Set up a National Energy Company to install a national District Heating System with renewable heat generation | Install renewable heating in off-gas-grid houses | Invest in training the workforce | Establish a Heat Supply Act to make this happen
• Electricity: The Energy Development Agency plans the move to a zero- carbon electricity | Set up a National Energy Company to build the generation and energy storage | Build electrolysis plants to generate hydrogen for energy storage | Nationalise and upgrade the National Grid with local storage and ‘smart grid’ technologies | Gradually take existing generation capacity into public ownership | Use an Industrial Strategy to develop domestic supply chains for all of this | End the extraction of oil and gas in Scotland
• Transport: Create a National Transport Company to plan the transition to carbon-free travel | Use better planning to reduce the need for car journeys | Begin installing charging and refueling infrastructure for zero-carbon vehicles | Replace or retrofit existing public transport to be zero-carbon | Commission more hydrogen ferries | Develop an air transport strategy
• Food: Set up a National Food Agency to plan a transition to a regenerative food system | Move to an agro ecological system for Scotland’s food production | Implement a strategy to greatly reduce food waste | Invest in new forms of food growing like vertical farming | Shorten supply chains by supporting new food processing businesses in Scotland | Strengthen regulation of the food industry and redesign farming subsidy regimes to encourage agroecology | Use pricing mechanisms to embed environmental externalities in the cost of food | Pursue import substitution to reduce the environmental impact of unnecessary imports | Institute a legal Right to Food to ensure that changes to the food system do not harm the access to healthy nutrition of anyone in Scotland | Consider implementing a Universal Basic Income
• Land: Set up a National Land Agency to oversee the management of Scotland’s land | It should then deliver a target of 50 per cent reforesting | Introduce a process of National Land Planning to zone rural land for specific purposes | Strengthened regulation and reporting on land management | Train roughly 20,000 additional land managers | Take direct action to diversify land ownership in Scotland | Develop a rural industrial strategy | Allocate fishing quotas on the basis of environmental performance | Implement Scotland’s water shortage plan
• Resources: Set up a National Resources Agency to oversee the move to zero waste | Develop a circular economy | Set a hierarchy for resource use: deconsumerise → dematerialise → simplify → share → reuse → remanufacture → compost → and only then recycle | Create a national waste collection and reprocessing service | Use ‘Producer Responsibility’ to make manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of the goods they produce | Use ‘externality taxes’ to ensure the price of goods reflects their true lifecycle costs | Invest in a wide range of initiatives like National Deposit Return schemes, container standardisation and tool libraries to optimise resource use | Ban single-use plastic | Regulate to discourage and then end the use of most single-use materials | Set up a National Consumer Agency to monitor all products, require them to be manufactured along circular economy lines and ban particularly harmful materials altogether