Making a virtue of renewables necessity

The SNP Government's renewables targets have come in for some criticism recently, and this has helped highlight the contradiction between the perennial Nationalist mantras relating to "Scotland's oil" and the more recent emphasis on renewables. For example, at a recent session of FMQs Alex Salmond had the chutzpah - or didn't notice - to in consecutive sentences speak of collaboration with Norway regarding renewables and then laud that country's oil fund: "I recently visited Norway and made a number of announcements about renewable energy and collaboration in Scotland. One thing that particularly impressed me as I visited Norway was the £200 billion oil fund that that country has accumulated by having access to its own natural resources."

A letter in the Herald earlier this week underlines this slightly hypocritical approach. The writer slams the industrialised world for sacrificing "the futures of our descendents [rather] than disrupt the profligate lifestyles enjoyed by the current generation, which has been getting rich by wilfully depleting the natural life-supporting externalities gifted by the planet such as clean water, hydrocarbons, minerals, forests, rivers, marine diversity and arable land, while delinquently choosing not to maintain sustainable flows."

All very eloquent and environmentally righteous, but he then says he hopes the Scottish Government "continues to give the world a lead in the drive towards sustainability".

Quite apart from the various arguments against this strategy, there's a very strong element of making a virtue of necessity here: there's no indication that the SNP would give up oil in favour of renewables, thus the wells will be pumped dry until the oil has either run out, or extraction becomes uneconomic having regard to prices on world crude markets.

Of course, there is certainly an element of principle - if not practicality - in the Nationalists' stance against nuclear power, but they - and the Herald's correspondent - are being just a tad too environmentally self-righteous, and their stance is not, um, sustainable.

(The above was to form the basis of a letter to the Herald, but I sent something else instead!)