It is less than three years since Nicola Sturgeon was taking selfies with Greta Thunberg at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow. Now in this election the climate, if you’ll excuse the pun, has changed beyond all recognition. Gone is the moral posturing and climate alarmism of recent years as the Scottish parties desperately roll back on their climate rhetoric in the face of huge job losses in Scotland’s energy sector. Black is the new green.
Oil and gas companies are no longer climate pariahs.
It was of course Nicola Sturgeon back in 2021 who made Scotland the first country in the world to declare a ‘climate emergency’. We cannot continue to extract another drop of oil from the North Sea, she said, if we want to avoid global catastrophe. There’s not a moment to lose.
Lonely voices in the SNP pointed out that her party’s independence strategy was built on revenues from Scotland’s oil and had been for decades.
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