Mr. Peter Brennan:

The advisory board should be independent. It should have a full-time secretariat. Whether that will be NESC will be a matter for the Government to decide. Since it is to be independent, it will absolutely need the support of the two key agencies, namely the EPA and SEAI. Whether they are members of the board will be a political decision. The more expert the group, the better for accountability.

It is possible to buy credits; it is allowed under the burden-sharing directive. The exercise on cost effectiveness has not yet been done because it is crucially dependent on the price of carbon. The price of carbon is really low at present, at only €4 per tonne. Therefore, if we had a problem amounting to 2 million tonnes of an overshoot, we could certainly buy in 2 million tonnes at €4 a pop. It would not matter in those circumstances, but if the price of carbon reached €20 per tonne, we would have serious issues.

In his speech during the week, the Minister referred to the land use, land-use change and forestry, LULUCF, sector, whereby we will potentially be able to offset, at or after 2020, the forest and land-use carbon against our agricultural emissions. That is probably the best way to arrive at a solution to the agriculture issue. It is written into the burden-sharing directive that the Commission will, in the context of an international agreement, bring forward proposals. I would be very confident that, by 2020, this will be in the picture with the Commission proposal.

We did not refer expressly to a carbon budget in our submission. The length of the budgetary term, be it five or seven years, really depends on the period that the Government is responding to at international level, particularly EU level. The current burden-sharing directive covers a seven-year period. It makes sense that the carbon budget, or our entire planning process, would centre on the seven-year period. If the European Union decided to have a planning period of five years, one would produce a five-year budget. It is correct that the Bill would not necessarily stipulate a period because it might not coincide with what the European Union wants subsequently. As we all know, a set period represents the way Brussels does business, so we have to go along with that.