Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Friday, 5 July 2013

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht

Heads of Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2013: Discussion (Resumed)

1:00 pm

Mr. Neil Walker:

I am not here to answer that question because the Bill will not set out what are those policies. There will be a committee of experts. I happen to have a background in this and I have a great interest but if the Senator gets me started, we will be here for the rest of the afternoon and he will not get any more questions answered. I have done a great deal of work on what technologies are available. It is one thing to identify a technology with potential but it is another to design an efficient policy that gets that implemented. For example, work done by McKinsey suggests many energy efficiency projects have a negative cost. Why are they not happening? If one cannot get things to happen of their own accord when they are a negative cost, how much more is policy needed to make sure things happen that have a positive cost and are done in such a way that they will create opportunities for the business community to deliver domestically rather than substituting a dependence on fossil imports for a dependence on technology imports?

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