A MAN falls from the sky out of a plane into the back garden of a house in Clapham.

His partially frozen body makes an indent.

Like a sign from the heavens of a world completely out of control, it passes the headlines for a day and then is forgotten.

These signs are increasing now. Like the winter-summer we just passed off with a shrug.

Our “climate emergency” is declared often, but closer examination suggests little real change.

Examples of bogus propaganda and inertia are everywhere.

Etihad, we’re told, which offers customers a three-room “suite in the sky” with butler, has pledged to remove 80% of single-use plastics across the business by the end of 2022.

This is high-end greenwash.

Climate science denialists used to be cranks and wilfully ignorant old men with difficulties in social integration, or people in pay to Big Oil. These types have now been taken out of service, abandoned even by the tabloids and right-wing press who employed them as “columnists” then, routinely printing the apologies on page 54 when a press regulator forced them to acknowledge that last week’s five-page package was a tissue of lies and disinformation.

Now, climate science deniers come into two new and different categories. There are those still clinging on to the idea that our lifestyle changes are in some way relevant to where we are now; the second is those corporate marketing people – the Don Drapers of the climate crisis generation – bunkered down protecting or advancing some of the worst polluting industries in the world.

But how are we faring in Scotland?

The new EDF offshore wind farm has a lovely Gaelic name – Neart na Gaoithe, which means “power of the wind” – and promises clean green renewable energy. It’s a £2 billion investment. The project has the potential to generate 450MW of renewable energy, which is enough power to supply around 325,000 Scottish homes – more than the whole of Edinburgh – and will offset more than 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year.

All of which is great. But instead of using the BiFab shipyard at Burntisland currently lying idle some 15 miles from the site, EDF are using Indonesian yards some 7300 miles away.

This, we can exclusively reveal after work with the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), means that shipping the turbine parts from Indonesia (7000 miles away) will cost 16,000 tonnes of C02.

That’s a huge carbon cost, but the combination of globalised capitalism and Scotland’s energy policy being run by Westminster means there’s nothing we can do about it.

Our inability to create a just transition programme of any meaning means that the opportunity to take people from industry in oil and gas and re-employ them in clean green energy is being lost. Scotland, having lost out on North Sea oil, is in danger of losing out to the renewables revolution through lack of control of our economy and our energy policy.

Just over the hill from Burntisland nestles Cowdenbeath, and just before it ExxonMobil’s ethylene plant at Mossmorran.

“Representatives of ExxonMobil’s Fife Ethylene Plant have apologised after unexpected flaring sent black smoke high into the skies across Fife for most of the past week. But the community remains furious at what it sees as regulatory failure and corporate evasion from ExxonMobil.”

I wrote this in May of this year, but I could have written the same words last week, as it happened again (and again).

Apart from being the top polluter in the whole of Scotland – the plant produces 885,580 tonnes of C02 per year – it routinely terrifies local inhabitants in Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath who are exasperated at the prevarication and uselessness of the Scottish Government to take control of the situation and address the reality that the regulatory body is not fit for purpose.

Much of this is just routine powerlessness and incompetence by government in the face of oil companies.

But the level of intransigence in the face of climate breakdown pops up everywhere.

Last week, retired politician Kenny MacAskill wrote in The Scotsman about cruise liners in the Forth (“Why Edinburgh needs a new cruise liner terminal”). He started strongly, arguing “cruise liners emit as much emissions as one million cars” and managed a few lines about the need to deal with climate problems (or something).

But then he concluded that we really needed a cruise liner terminal and they’d be around for a while so “let’s maximise profits from them”.

It’s a sort of desultory ignorance of an entire generation of people. It’s woefully inadequate, it’s morally unforgiveable and it shouldn’t have been published.

Our climate change emergency is really a performative act where we do nothing at all.

A man falls from the sky out of a plane into the back garden of a house in Clapham.

His partially frozen body makes an indent.

Like a sign from the heavens of a world completely out of control, it passes the headlines for a day and then is forgotten.

Theses signs are increasing now. Like the winter-summer we just passed off with a shrug.