Professor Barry McMullin:

It is not a blank sheet. The council has done tremendous work. We are not starting from nothing. What the council has done, the reports it has commissioned and the work of the carbon budget working group is a great foundation.

However, as the Deputy saw, this particular piece of the jigsaw, which is in the Act - consistency with Article 2 of the Paris Agreement, which is where the temperature goal comes in - was not, for reasons I cannot speak to, undertaken during 2024 when the council was developing these budgets. When the council was prompted by this committee, it did so, but it was clearly done under severe time pressure. The council came back to the committee within two weeks. I certainly do not want to personalise anything, but there are papers in the peer-reviewed literature to which the council did not refer but to which it could have. Had it had more time, it could have done so.

We are learning how to do this. We have a very good foundation but there is more work that needs to be done. It would be imprudent to just push ahead, particular as, in terms of immediate climate policy, we have the confirmed budget for the next five years. We have a perfectly good provisional budget for the following five years. It may change a little on the basis of these deliberations but it is not going to change hugely. The proposal is to increase it by a small amount. It is certainly not going to increase by a major amount. In that sense, there is not a time pressure which means that these budgets have to be adopted right now.