If the past, according to author LP Hartley, is a foreign country where they do things differently, then the world before the pandemic often seems like a different planet.
Looking back at events towards the end of 2019 exposes a time in which optimism was often runaway – think Boris and boosterism – and in Edinburgh the council could afford to pull the plug on its marketing agency in the belief that the tourists would continue to flock in ever-growing numbers.
But the warning signs were often clear before a mysterious leak from a Chinese laboratory, or war in Europe on a scale not seen since 1945. And like the attitude towards tourism, in 2019 Edinburgh, the council’s official view was anything could be achieved if the Nicola Sturgeon wannabes running the administration just stamped their feet hard enough, like the declaration that 20,000 new affordable homes would be built by 2027, when it was obvious from the start, even to those needing their toes to count above ten, it was just a dream.
Then there was the drive to net zero carbon emissions, a game of political one-upmanship when practical barriers were as viewable from space as the Great Wall of China. The UK Government set a target of 2050, which was nowhere near good enough for Edinburgh’s SNP-Labour administration which boasted it would be reached 20 years earlier because they were so much more ambitious than the Toarees. Even the SNP government wasn’t so stupid and went for a much more modest, but almost as speculative, deadline of 2045.
Net zero by 2030 in a city with the most densely populated district of Victorian tenements in Scotland, if not the UK, strained credibility beyond breaking point, but it was not hated climate change sceptics who sounded the alarm, but Leeds University experts the council commissioned to conduct a feasibility study. Their report went before the policy and sustainability committee in October 2019 and is so lost in the mists of time that I had to check if I was on the committee at the time. And indeed, I was.
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“The unique composition of Edinburgh’s built environment also presents a challenge to decarbonisation,” it said. “With approximately a quarter of Scotland’s protected historic domestic building stock in-use, Edinburgh presents limits to the technical applicability of many cost-effective energy-efficiency and energy production technologies,” they observed, predicting that even if the city collectively threw the kitchen sink at upgrading every house and ignored the ruinous cost, overall domestic carbon emissions would only be halved, not eradicated. Cost-effective measures by 2030 would be over 60 per cent short.
None of the other sectors – transport, industrial and commercial – was anywhere near on a cost-effective basis, and only commercial got close, with a possible 96 per cent reduction by 2037 if expense was ignored, which in a commercial environment simply wasn’t going to happen. But no, it was all deemed possible by the cheat of offsetting, which would have meant planting a forest about the size of Siberia to compensate.
“We predict that to meet its carbon reduction target for 2030, Edinburgh would have to at a minimum exploit the full technical potential of all of the energy efficiency and low-carbon options identified in this report, and also hope that a significant number of new options become available before 2030,” said the academics. Relying on yet-to-be-invented solutions was some hope.
(Image: AlbertPego)
Admittedly I’m a cynic, so how has it all worked out? For climate alarmists, a report to this Tuesday’s policy and sustainability committee will make sobering reading, and I can already hear the Conservative group leader Iain Whyte telling the meeting he told them so six years ago.
It reveals that since 2005, Edinburgh has reduced overall emissions by 48 per cent, two below the “core cities” average, not too bad and at current rates the city will have reduced emissions by between 59 and 61 per cent by 2030. A creditable effort indeed, but 40 per cent shy of 2019’s ludicrous target which has driven so many unpopular policies like the city mobility plan and the low traffic neighbourhoods.
And sure enough, net zero by 2030 is still the main justification for spending £3billion on two new tram lines, around the same amount it is estimated that transitioning the city’s heat sources away from gas will cost. It’s £6bn the city simply doesn’t have, but cue catastrophists wailing that Edinburgh can’t afford not to spend that sort of money.
An extensive background paper gives detailed explanations of the many “challenges” which the 2030 policy has faced, all of which can be summed up as “unachievable in the first place” and with considerable understatement the report concludes, “there are reputational risks associated with citywide emissions not reducing at a pace that will achieve the political 2030 net zero target.” But there’s no reputational risk for those who from the outset said it was bonkers.
· Councillor Jane Meagher, condemned to lead a ramshackle administration when she’d rather be at choir practice, can barely get through a week without some new crisis emerging from the downfall of her shamed predecessor Cammy Day.
Now she’s trying to sack her housing convener, the veteran Labour councillor Lezley Cameron, for suggesting, with some justification, that the council’s policy of forcing housing developers to make 35 per cent of new homes affordable is a disincentive when the city needs all the houses it can get.
And again, not without reason, Cllr Cameron jibbed out of obeying the whip at the last full council meeting to vote herself off the policy and sustainability committee to make way for Cllr Day. So presumably at the next full council meeting on October 30 Cllr Camerson will be expected to vote herself out of a job on the housing committee as well, or face suspension.
Poor old Calamity, it never gets any easier. And maybe Cllr Day will become an advocate for the Scottish Conservatives’ Right to Rehab bill.