Professor Peadar Kirby:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gcoiste as ucht cuireadh agus deis a thabhairt dom teacht i láthair chun cur síos a dhéanamh ar an téama fíorthábhachtach seo.

My submission to the joint committee dealt with five issues, namely, the absence of targets in the outline heads of Bill; allocating overall responsibility for climate change to the Department of the Taoiseach; the conditions written into the outline heads of Bill that may limit the achievement of the goal of decarbonisation; the composition and role of the national expert advisory body; and the need to balance reference to a low carbon economy with reference to a low carbon society. Assuming my submission has been read by all members, I will concentrate on emphasising the urgency of the issues involved and the need for courageous leadership.

I came to the issue of climate change through a career spent examining issues of social, economic and political development in Ireland, Latin America and globally. As I have acquainted myself with the growing scientific evidence on climate change, I have become increasingly concerned both at the enormous, indeed momentous, challenges this poses for society and the disconnect between the evidence of science, which is demanding immediate and urgent action, and the meagre and completely inadequate responses by most sectors of society, including our political leaders. As a professional social scientist, I have not hidden my view that most of what we are teaching in all branches of the social sciences – political science, which is my area, economics and sociology and development studies being those with which I am most acquainted - misses the fundamental challenges we face. We are educating a generation that is ill prepared for the serious challenges of social change with which they will have to cope. It is partly for this reason that I took early retirement last year to devote myself more fully to writing and teaching on the challenges climate change poses for society, including for the ways we teach the social sciences. I am currently writing a book on this subject.

In case members may be less than impressed by this subjective response, in other words, my wish to share my personal experience with the joint committee, I will substantiate my position by citing a most authoritative source, namely, the German government’s high level Advisory Council on Global Change - WGBU are its initials in German - which reports directly to the Chancellor’s office. In its 2011 report entitled, World in Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability, the advisory council highlights the "drastic change in direction [that] must be accomplished before the end of the current decade in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to a minimum by 2050". This "great transformation" as it is described, "encompasses profound changes to infrastructures, production processes, regulation systems and lifestyles, and extends to a new kind of interaction between politics, society, science and the economy". Such a transformation, it continues, is "unique in history" and goes "far beyond technological and technocratic reforms" involving "a new global social contract for a low-carbon and sustainable global economic system".

Interestingly, the report compares the extent of the transformation, which it states "can barely be overestimated", to the Neolithic revolution, namely, the invention and spreading of farming and animal husbandry, and Industrial Revolution. This comparison emphasises the enormity of the challenge we face, which will require a "proactive state, a state that actively sets priorities for this transformation, at the same time increasing the number of ways in which its citizens can participate, and offering the economy choices when it comes to acting with sustainability in mind". Despite actions being taken on climate change, the expert group states "there is a very real danger that the dynamics between change and dogged insistence on the established will lead to a lock-in; the transformation into a low-carbon society could also fail."

Each of our societies faces an unprecedented revolution in production, consumption, mobility, energy and construction, all within the most tight of timeframes. To lead this, a revolution in governance is required with courageous political leadership of a kind we have not seen to date. It must not be afraid to alert society to the realities that face us and must be decisive in facing down powerful vested interests which seek to minimise these realities. President Obama showed the way in a ground-breaking speech he made on climate change on 25 June last. I strongly recommend that members read or view the speech as it is probably the most important speech made by a political leader on the subject. We need similar leadership from the Oireachtas.