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Good morning, convener; it is nice to see you again.

I will pick up on Liam Kerr’s questions about a just transition. In the SNP-Green policy agreement that will be presented to Parliament today, there is a line about better understanding what our fossil fuel requirements will be as we make that transition and how that relates to field development in the oil and gas fields that are already being exploited and which may come under licence.

How would you see such a programme of work to better understand the speed of that transition? How could that be done, and what could be the role of the UK CCC in coming to a conclusion around how much fossil fuel resource we need to meet our domestic needs and how that will change over time?

I thank Dean Lockhart for giving way. If he backs economic growth, will he back the target in the Green agreement to double onshore wind capacity in Scotland?

The agreement between the Scottish Greens and the Scottish Government is historic. It is a new model of politics that responds to the code red for humanity on the climate, while building a fair recovery from Covid. The agreement has a bold and far-reaching programme, which will accelerate a just transition, double the size of the wind industry that was previously butchered by the Tory party at Westminster, invest £1.8 billion in energy efficiency and renewable heat, and invest £500 million in a just transition fund for the north-east. Does the First Minister agree that the programme will help Scotland to grasp the economic opportunities of the just transition by creating new fair jobs while tackling the climate emergency?

Will the member take an intervention?

Empty town centre properties are being repurposed into spaces to house artists’ studios, venues and workshops, including Fire Station Creative in Dunfermline and Creative Stirling’s hub. How has the culture organisations and venues recovery fund directly supported those types of initiatives? What further support can be offered in order to provide a viable future for our town centres?

I have nothing to declare.

Thank you, convener. I congratulate you and Fiona Hyslop on your appointments. I look forward to working with colleagues across the committee. It is good to hear some early areas of consensus emerging.

I served on the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee in session 5. It was a hard-working committee, as you can see from our 119-page legacy report. We faced some particular challenges, and it is good to see that one of the key recommendations—that there should be a dedicated net zero committee—has been picked up on. That is a great first step. It is important that some of the key sectors where we face new challenges in terms of a just transition have been brought into the remit of this committee, and that our remit mirrors the cabinet secretary’s responsibilities.

Members have already spoken about some of the challenges around energy and about the public energy company, which I am also interested in. There are massive issues around how we scale up delivery. Particularly in relation to heat, there will have to be an unprecedented increase in effort and installations if we are to meet the targets and deliver the progress that is needed.

On transport, a few key points have come up. The strategic transport projects review, the national transport strategy and the national planning framework are all hugely important, alongside the climate change plan, when it comes to how we build future-proofed infrastructure that will tackle the climate emergency. It makes sense for us to deal with all of that.

As other members have said, there are a number of other cross-cutting areas that we need to address. I point in particular to the need to work with the committee that has responsibility for farming and land use, because that is another sector where there must be a transition. That process must support farmers and managers, but we need to see cuts in emissions in that sector.

I am interested in how we might work creatively with other committees. For example, we have to think about whether we could appoint reporters or conduct joint inquiries, for which, I think, there is some precedent. In order to avoid the siloed scrutiny that has been mentioned, we will have to work across the Parliament, and we faced some challenges in that regard in the previous session.

Housing and planning are two other areas where, again, we will need to do some further work to get the most out of our time.

I am looking forward to the discussions ahead. We are dealing with the biggest issue that faces us, and we need to tackle it.

Families in Fife who are waiting for autism assessments for their children are at crisis point. There have been no assessments since the start of the pandemic, and there is now a backlog of more than 1,000 children waiting for support. Given that there is currently nothing in Government guidance to prevent autism assessments from taking place, what more can the First Minister do to ensure that NHS Fife clears the backlog and gives families the support that they desperately need?

Three years of missed targets shows that we need that transformative step change. We have already seen what is possible with renewable electricity, in which this country has taken a great lead in the UK.

On renewable heat, the statement talked about 1 million homes needing to switch over to green heating by 2030. That is 100,000 a year, but we saw only 3,000 installations in homes in Scotland last year. How will the cabinet secretary work across the Government and the Parliament to fill that huge gap between ambition and reality?

I welcome the minister and the cabinet secretary to their new posts, and I welcome the many members who have given their first speeches in the Parliament this afternoon. I was particularly struck by Mercedes Villalba’s points about the transformative role of the state in investing in solutions and the importance of a green new deal that involves the unions and workers in the transition.

I have been looking at what is happening in the US under Biden’s Administration, with the absolutely transformative investments in new technology and industries there. That is not just about fixing markets; it is about creating new markets, so these are exciting times.

I say to Labour colleagues that, if the Parliament had more borrowing powers and powers over electricity regulation, we could fix things such as the unfair transmission charges. However, this is a consensual debate, so let us hope that, in this year of COP26, we can achieve a new spirit of co-operation with the UK Government and that it will understand that Scotland’s contribution to tackling the climate emergency is absolutely critical. The UK Government needs to allow Scotland and our industries to thrive.

It is important that we define what a just transition is. Claudia Beamish, who used to sit near me in the chamber, was absolutely pivotal in getting measures on a just transition into legislation, and I miss her work greatly. I absolutely get that the transition has to be just and that nobody should be left behind. That is why, in the Greens’ manifesto, we proposed extending the jobs guarantee to workers in the oil and gas industry.

Over the past five years, Gillian Martin and I have had a lot of conversations about a just transition, and I am struck by the strong work that she is now doing to survey workers in the north-east and to find out where the skills gaps are. It is hugely important that we learn the lessons from the 1980s, when coal mining communities across Scotland were absolutely decimated. In recent years, we had the closure of Longannet with no transition for the 360 workers there. Rather than involve those workers in a conversation before the closure, everything that was done to secure their employment happened after the event.

I say to Liam Kerr and other members that, although the transition has to be just, it also has to be a transition. It is not a transition from the current estimated level of extraction of oil and gas resources from the North Sea—around 5 billion barrels—by licensing for 20 billion barrels to be extracted. Well, it is a transition—it is a transition to the extraction of four times that level of resource, which is simply incompatible with the Paris climate change agreement.

To answer Mr Kerr’s question about where we draw the line and how much time there is left for the oil and gas industry to transition, we must start with the science of climate. We must look at what the carbon budget is under the Paris agreement and work back from that. As a lawyer, surely Mr Kerr understands the importance of international legal agreements. We must stick with that.

There are even signs that the UK Government now understands that. In its North Sea transition plan, it is starting to question the policy of maximum economic recovery. It is starting to turn the corner. It is not doing so quickly enough, but we can get there. I say to Mr Kerr that, if the UK Government turns that corner, it will join other Governments that are dangerous: the Governments of Ireland, New Zealand—New Zealand has Greens in Government, too—Denmark, which is now Europe’s largest oil and gas producer, and France are all drawing a line under licensing and moving on.

Carbon capture and storage is the wrong priority at this point. Even the Tories on the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee agreed that we cannot meet the target of a 25 per cent reduction in emissions using CCS. Therefore, we must move on, work collaboratively together and test one another’s arguments to destruction. There are some inconvenient truths that need to be addressed, and in today’s debate we have just started to uncover and examine those.