Scottish Renewables, the Green Energy trade body, will submit its response to the Scottish Climate Change Bill today saying that climate change targets would be "meaningless" without a clear path to delivering massive cuts in emissions across society driven in part by the renewable energy sector.

The body is calling for a range of measures to be written into the bill including all Scottish Government financial spending to be carbon costed, the net C02 reductions achieved from renewable energy generation to be publicly reported and the purpose of the bill should be explicitly to limit climate change to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Scottish Renewables welcomes the Scottish Climate Change Bill as a way of uniting the public, private and voluntary sectors in the fight against climate change and points to Scotland as a potential global leader with the renewable industry in the vanguard of action on the ground.


The body however points to mis-information about the contribution that renewable energy is providing to de-carbonise energy production as a distraction from the need to make progress in delivering renewable projects.

Jason Ormiston CEO Scottish Renewables said: "There is often ill informed speculation from the anti-renewables movement about the overall net contribution to C02 reduction that renewables, especially windfarms, provide.

"We are calling on the Scottish Government to take this issue head on and publish each year detail on what the real contribution from renewables is in both heat and electricity."

Scottish Renewables is also calling for the carbon assessment of the annual budget bill and the Scottish Government spending review to consider the carbon impact of policies and for the Scottish Parliament to make adjustments to financial budgets on that basis.

Mr Ormiston added: "It is vital that government spending and policies are aligned towards bringing down emissions from one year to the next and we welcome the recent commitment from John Swinney to assessing the carbon impact of government spending."

Scottish Renewables believes the purpose of the bill must be to limit global increases in C02 emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. This may require the revision of targets as the science around climate change evolves.

(GK/JM)