Mr. Stewart Stevenson:

I will respond first on some of Deputy Stanley's points. Annual targets are more difficult to achieve because of the variability. If the winter is tough, it is difficult to meet the targets. John F. Kennedy said, "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men". Setting annual targets is a motivator, because it puts people under the cosh and lets them know what is coming. There is lag and lead in that. We have found that annual targets are a great incentive.

With regard to what happens if targets are not met, under the legislation the Scottish Government must then bring forward a programme which will deal with the failure to meet the target. That is what it boils down to. The Deputy is perfectly correct that ultimately the court of public opinion decides what happens. Will the Minister with responsibility for climate change or the First Minister be carted off in chains to Edinburgh Castle and incarcerated for the rest of their natural lives? No, that is not the way it works. However, it is part of the narrative of a government that it can succeed in the big challenges. The more it can succeed in the big challenges, the more it can convince people, even in areas where people find it more difficult to agree with a policy, that it is a government that will take on difficult challenges and rise to them. That is the politics, but what this means for Ireland, Ireland must decide. I could not comment in that regard.

Scottish farmers are probably happier with government, across the range of its policies, than they have been for many generations. There are a variety of reasons for this. Part of the reason may be that the revenue from having wind turbines on their land is not insignificant. Therefore, they do not find the agenda difficult at that level. Methane is a big by-product of agriculture, in particular, methane from ruminants. Work has been done to try to change the bacterial load in the rumen and to change the way the fermentation happens so as to reduce the methane emitted. This worked, but made the animals very thin because the nutritional value of what was ingested was being extracted. This was not good. However, we have good research facilities and our researchers are looking at what appears to be a big variability between otherwise identical ruminants - even in the same herd - and the methane output for the grass input.

It is thought that there is genetic variation, so one of the things being examined is whether selective breeding can be undertaken to produce the same kilogram of first class Irish or - even better - Scottish meat for the same input but with lower methane. Science has a role to play and we have got our scientists engaged helping the agriculture industry to discover this.

For us, the day of wide-scale further onshore wind energy is probably coming to a conclusion. The next phase of wind energy will largely be offshore. The costs are higher but the turbines are bigger, so there are some economies of scale involved. For us, the real opportunities are going to be in tidal energy. We have 25% of the potential tidal energy in Europe off our shores. We have the European Marine Energy Centre, which is the testing station in the Orkneys, and we have projects from China and all around the world, and we already have grid connected tidal energy that is delivering to us. We are an exporter of electricity. I did say that 100% of our consumption would go to renewable. We will run our two nuclear stations for as long as we can, because the carbon investment is made and we want to get what we can out of it, but we will not build any more.

We have some fungible material, mostly wood for burning. Some of it is exported, but the UK's plans to move to depend on wood burning and so on will significantly distort the market. They are expecting only to be able to support 9% of the wood they need for their plans on an indigenous basis. The difficulty with driving up consumption of wood for burning is that it will distort the market, replace the multiplicity of local buyers, who are often working in craft industries and so on, with a few big buyers who ultimately will control the market and drive prices back down again. So the forestry industry, interestingly, is not interested in having big buyers.

I thank the committee members for having me here. If they think I can help in any other way, I am happy to do so. I am very keen to see as many countries as possible pursuing a positive agenda on climate change. I hope some of the things we have done are of interest. I will be the first to congratulate Ireland if it picks up some of the things we have done, especially if they are tough, like having legally binding annual targets.