Scotland 2070
by Ian Godden, Hillary Sillitoe and Dorothy Godden
(College Publications, £13.99)

SCOTLAND 2070 boldly proclaims on its cover that it is “an ambitious vision for Scotland’s future without the politics.”

Written by consultants to oil and engineering firms, the non-political caveat reveals itself to be a fatuous one as its authors bring a very particular class perspective to their vision. To them, climate apocalypse is not so much a crisis but an opportunity for capital accumulation.

This is not to suggest that none of the book’s proposals are of no value. Godden et al are correct to argue that Scotland’s landscape is severely underutilised. To reforest much of the land, with requisite ecological sensitivity, would not only create jobs but provide natural carbon capture to combat fossil fuel emissions.

It is a pity that they seem less concerned about contributing to fossil fuel emissions in the first place. While they sensibly recommend investment in public transport infrastructure, the authors paint the exploiting of Scotland’s remaining oil reserves as the reasonable way to fund the transition to renewable sources, claiming even if we left our fossil fuels in the ground it would not make much difference to global carbon emissions in any case.

But could Scotland not lead by example? This mixture of fatalism and insouciance, utterly lacking in international solidarity towards those who will suffer its worst consequences, is typical of the book’s attitude towards combating climate breakdown.
 
Occasionally, the book gets painfully close to broaching the more fundamental issues of our current moment. Drawing on modish economic indicators like GINI and the Happiness Index, they observe that jobs which offer more responsibility are at the heart of healthier societies but the authors do not recommend anything that might bring about this goal.

Labour, studiously avoided throughout, is indeed one of the blind spots of their vision. There are crotchety swipes at the deleterious impact of social media on young people’s mental health but the anxiety generated by increasingly precarious low-wage work is passed over in silence.

And while much is made of cultivating a culture of leadership in the workplace, institutions that already do just that called — trade unions — are conveniently forgotten.

Rhetorically, the authors claim to be against the depredations of neoliberalism but often they recommend bringing more government sectors, like healthcare, under the dominion of the market to cut out bureaucracy.

Questioning economic growth is denigrated as “crashing the economy” and they refuse to consider how it may intersect with environmental devastation. Thus their proposed schemes are sufficiently toothless, making them perfectly amenable to the current stewards of capital and posing absolutely no threat to ruling-class power.

Some of the tract takes the form of excruciating fictional vignettes, pseudo-Socratic dialogues leaden with statistics and exposition that contravene the cardinal writing rule to show, not tell. They give a science-fictional gloss to the status quo, seasoned with the driverless cars and hyperloops of Silicon Valley’s boosterist fantasies.

Any manifesto that fails to grasp how climate breakdown is inextricably linked to the destructive tendencies of capitalism is a futurology of fools.