WHAT ON EARTH SPRING 2022
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A decade of progress, but not enough By Dr Richard Dixon, Director As campaigners, we are always after more. As soon as we win something, we want the next thing, and, in the face of an existential threat as big as climate change, no response from government is ever really going to seem good enough. But in the years I’ve been Director at Friends of the Earth Scotland, I have seen change – and it’s worth pausing to remember that the last decade or so has seen some remarkable progress. Who can forget the children’s climate strikes and the 25,000 people marching through Edinburgh in September 2019 to rally outside Parliament, resulting in a big, last minute tightening of the targets in the new Climate Act? Or the 150,000 people from across the world who marched through a storm in Glasgow during the climate conference, as part of the biggest climate march the UK has ever seen?
Real progress includes the equivalent of 98.6% of the electricity we use generated by renewables in Scotland in 2020 because of the remarkable growth of green energy. We saw 60,000 people say no to fracking as we worked with nearly 40 protest groups across the country, leading to Parliament voting to ban fracking, then an official moratorium on fracking and eventually a policy ban, despite a legal challenge from INEOS. It was an amazing moment to be part of the human chain of protestors which spanned the whole length of the Forth Road Bridge.
