Professor Peadar Kirby:

If I had the answers to any of these problems then I would have won the Nobel Prize. Deputy Mulherin has stated it exactly. These are the challenges. It is fine to discuss realistic and achievable targets. At the moment our governments are negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Its purpose is to try to take seriously what the scientists are telling us about the targets we must achieve. Anyone could say these are completely unrealistic or unachievable targets.

Last Tuesday, President Obama pledged the leadership of the United States to ensure that robust targets would be set. Then it becomes the challenge for governments to be able to translate these into the changes required. This is why I said that we need to put an emphasis in the Bill on a low-carbon society, because it is not only the economy that needs to be changed. If we are to take seriously the German experts who have said that this is akin to a transformation similar to the Industrial Revolution or the Neolithic revolution, we must concentre our minds on the fact that the way we do things now is not the way we will be able to do things in 30 or 40 years time.

We will have to go through a revolution in the way in which we produce food. A great deal of emphasis at the meeting has been put on food, and rightly so, but let us we consider the entire structure of Irish agriculture. When I go to Cloughjordan to buy my fruit and vegetables, most are imported. Why can we not re-balance our agriculture such that we produce food for local consumption? The effort to reduce carbon emissions will necessitate far fewer carbon miles in our food and drink production. In other words, we must source more locally. This will immediately change the conditions or incentives for the way in which any of our economic sectors operate, including agriculture. We need to be imaginative, think big and realise that we are truly facing the most swingeing and radical changes. Only by working together can we begin to explore and find answers to them. One of the essential answers must come from those in political leadership. They must not kick the ball down the road. They need to realise that we are facing momentous changes ahead.