I interviewed then Treasurer John Brumby in Edinburgh’s grand Balmoral Hotel in early 2006. Brumby was in good spirits, having formalised an agreement with the Scottish Executive to share expertise and resources in the life sciences as part of a “sister state” agreement that had been signed a few weeks earlier.

In between discussing Collingwood’s win over North the weekend before, Brumby told me there many areas where Victoria could learn from Scotland, citing policy fields as wide ranging as the regeneration of public housing to mechanisms to use private finance to fund school building programs.

A lot has changed since then. Brumby has, of course, become Premier and the Scottish Labour First Minister with whom he met four years ago, Jack McConnell, has done what all good socialists do and taken a seat in the House of Lords, having been beaten by Alex Salmond’s Nationalists in May 2007.

We don’t hear much about the “sister state” relationship any more, with the Scottish Nationalists particularly keen to forge relationships with independent sovereign nations rather than sub-national entities such as the state of Victoria. Brumby too seemed much keener on the idea when it was his Tartan Labour comrades he was dealing with.

But now more than ever Brumby should be looking to the far northern hemisphere for political direction. Desperately spooked by the swelling inner-city Green vote,  Brumby has been trying to defend his climate-change flank, even if it means cutting his own federal leader’s lunch in the middle of an election campaign.

But the climate-change action plan announced last week isn’t the solution. It doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in weaning this state of its fatal addiction to dirty coal and it offers no genuine strategic vision of how we will achieve the transition to a low or no carbon economy within a generation, or two at the most. And it won’t swing voters back from the Greens.

The situation is very different in Scotland. Last year, the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed the Climate Change Act. That in itself is something we in Victoria — and Australia — should strive to emulate. While Tony Abbott retreats into the kind of denialist position more associated with frothing mouthed US talkback radio types and Julia Gillard tries to kick climate into the long grass by proposing ludicrous “citizen’s assemblies”,  in Scotland all shades of politics, from the Conservatives, to Labour members representing areas containing what is left of Scotland’s mining and heavy industry, and even a pair of Greens, managed to agree on legislation to tackle what is the defining challenge of our time.

And tackle it they are. Where John Brumby could only manage the meagre ambition of a 20% cut in our carbon emissions by 2020, in Scotland, it is now enshrined in law that by 2020, the country will have reduced its carbon emissions by 42% from the baseline year of 1990. It’s worth noting that emissions in Scotland have already fallen substantially since that point.

They don’t stop there. It is now the law of the land in Scotland that by 2050, the country will have reduced its carbon emissions by 80%. That is a low carbon economy. Will Victoria be able to match that effort in less than 40 years? Not with our current leadership.

There are those who say Scotland has an unfair advantage. It might not seem like it on a freezing winter’s night, but Scotland’s incessant wind and rain give it a limitless source of clean energy. The country already exploits hydro power and is rapidly expanding its wind generation capacity. The SNP-led Scottish Government has more than doubled the pace at which renewable projects are being approved and has reformed the planning system to make it even easier to get clean energy producing facilities up and running quickly.

It doesn’t stop there either. While having fully one third of Europe’s wind generation potential, Scotland has a similar share of the potential to generate energy from wave and especially tidal power. Just one small area of the wild north-western coast, the Pentland Firth,  has been described as the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy and could power much of Britain by itself if fully developed as a source of tidal energy.

But this potential requires huge amounts of money, will and political effort to get from being wind and waves in the Highland to the alternating current that powers appliances in homes in Glasgow and Edinburgh and perhaps soon, further afield. And government at all levels in Scotland is working hard to meet that challenge, with success too.

First Minister Alex Salmond loves to boast that Scotland is actually ahead of its targets for generating electricity from renewable sources. It currently generates 31% of power from clean sources and that will rise to 50% by 2020. Consider that Victorian Labor promised we’d be generating 10% of our energy from renewable sources by now, and failed to hit even that low target. We’re not in the same ballpark, either for ambition or results.

The Scots are now working with the EU to develop the North Sea Interconnector. In layman’s terms, this is a huge substation under the North Sea that would process energy developed at the fringes in places such as the UK and Scandinavia and allow it to be used in continental Europe itself. Wind and waves in the Orkney Islands or off Denmark will power Xboxes in Munich and Marseilles.

The EU has earmarked this as one of its key priorities for the next decades and is willing to spend €30 billion on the project. It makes sense: not only does Europe get clean energy; it reduces its reliance on a Russia increasingly willing to use its energy stranglehold over much of the European continent as a geo-political weapon.

Sensing huge opportunities to create the fabled “green jobs” that have become a mantra for all politicians, the Scottish government is tipping in its own cash to fund feasibility studies and the like. Where is the same vision from Labor in Victoria or Australia? Do we honestly think that as climate change begins to have a tangible effect on the rest of the world in the next decades, they will somehow forget we are, pound for pound, among the biggest carbon emitters there are, and that much of that comes from our dirty brown coal?

The Brumby government has had a decade to introduce a genuine strategic vision for how this state will react to our changing climate. It’s a decade where we have seen record temperatures and climate-linked natural tragedies. It’s only going to get worse and a plan cooked up in panic a few months from an election to try and save a few inner-city seats will do nothing to stop it.