Clearly I'm a strong believer in the need to take urgent climate action, but I'm also a realist and a pragmatist. We're stuck with petrochemicals until we phase them out, so if we could keep the refinery at Grangemouth open for another decade or two I'd be all for it. It isn't going to produce any more emissions than the alternative. But that only applies if no public investment would be needed, and that's not the case.
In 2013 the Scottish Government tried and failed to find a buyer for Grangemouth and it has been run down further since. No-one wanted to buy it in 2013, no-one wants to buy it now, so taxpayers would have to pay – at the expense of investing in something else.To give you a sense of scale, significant public money was put behind the plant in 2013, including a £230m loan guarantee. That saved about 1300 jobs for ten years. Saving them again would be much more expensive. And that is before you realise that rising sea levels mean Grangemouth will be under water soon. While parts of Falkirk will be abandoned to the see, there is a plan to spend £500m on an experimental sea wall to save the part of Grangemouth where the refinery is (because corporations always come before citizens).Nationalisation would be a massive investment which would require us to maximise the retur