Leader: MSPs must see the light on unrealistic green targets

Into the gales of hot air which politicians, up to and including the First Minister, have inflicted on the country about Scotland's potential for becoming "the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy", is injected a chill wind of warning, blown into the public weather system by the respected head of one of the country's most successful companies.

Rupert Soames, the chief executive of Aggreko, yesterday told Alex Salmond and MSPs from the other main political parties to their faces that their "green" policies are imperilling the nation. He warned that by setting idealistic targets for reducing carbon emissions so far into the future they had lost sight of the dangers in the coming decade.

As you would expect from the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, Mr Soames paid tribute to politicians - and like his distinguished ancestor he also found a pithy phrase, a soundbite in modern terms, which summed up his case: unless we start to build more power stations in the UK within two years there was a serious danger of the "lights going out".

Mr Soames is not a climate change denier, to use the inappropriate and offensive term used by some environmental activists to slight those who challenge the global warning orthodoxy. He believes that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is bad for the world even if, as a successful businessman who runs a firm which makes generators, he might have something to gain from global warming.

But he is also a hard-headed realist who has dared to point out the National Grid will lose a third of its capacity by 2018 as a number of nuclear, gas and oil-fired power stations across the UK are retired, including several in Scotland. He called for construction of new stations to begin within two years to avoid the lights going out and advocated pushing back green targets by a decade.

Perhaps most telling was his analysis of Scotland, where he warned of the danger of believing that "if you wish things to be true they will be true". He cast doubt on the chances of Scotland becoming a major exporter of renewable energy, on the hopes for an interconnector across the North Sea and pointed out the benefits of being part of the UK national grid.

The First Minister did not appear to react, but he should have been squirming in his seat as he listened to such a clinical, logical, fact-based demolition of his case. The Emperor's new green clothes have, in short, been exposed as a product of his, his advisers' and the green lobby's over-optimistic imagination.

Mr Soames's conclusion was that Scotland cannot sit around dreaming of a carbon-free future that may or may not be possible some decades ahead. Instead, steps must be taken now to safeguard Scotland's power sources very soon, and nuclear provides a CO2-free way of doing it. The government should heed this timely message or the last person to leave Scotland won't have to switch off the lights.