Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Morgenroth for his presentation today and also the paper commissioned by the EPA and the ESRI. Has he seen any research to consider the long-term effects of vehicle taxes on petrol or diesel vehicles and the evolving development of electricity as a fuel transport system? The Government has said that by 2030 we will have a ban on any new vehicles with internal combustion engines. I presume it will still take a couple of decades after that for the lifecycle effects to take effect but one would hope that by 2040 or 2050 we will have a 100% electric fleet. Is Professor Morgenroth aware of any work done by a government to look forward in such a timeframe at how it will replace its tax revenue base from excise duties on diesel and petrol and VRT? How do we start to plan for that phase out or how could we encourage or accelerate it by adjusting our tax system? There is an impetus there that we want to maintain given that it is not an insignificant chunk of our revenue base. No finance Minister will want to undermine his long-term viability. Has Professor Morgenroth or anyone else done any work on excise duties or tax changes on petrol and diesel as part of a long-term strategy rather than a short-term reaction to variations in diesel prices?

My next question is a broader more philosophical one. I am on the Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment and we recently had officials in who are looking at the next iteration of our evolving response. We have to formulate a policy document on climate and energy for the European Union by the end of the year along with a mitigation plan, the national planning framework and so on. My understanding of the comments they made before the committee is that they are looking at tax now as one of the next main policy instruments in how we reduce emissions. Given some of the analysis he has done does Professor Morgenroth have any advice on the effects of the 98 or so possible fiscal instruments that might affect climate policy? Are there any recommendations in terms of what the Government's approach should be?

In the past I have been in favour of the introduction of carbon taxes, among others. Does Professor Morgenroth agree that to a certain extent the difficulty with using tax measures is that an over-reliance on them as a policy instrument brings the risk that by their nature they tend to bring marginal change? They can act as a nudge in a certain direction when a lot of the decisions we will have to make in the climate change area relate to systemic change, for example, an end to the extraction of peat or the creation of a national land use plan, changes to CAP supports or changes to the transport budget. They are all policy decisions that require a system change, as it were, rather than relying on marginal tax signals so that one gets a marginal change over time. They will not deliver the sort of systemic change we need for the scale of emissions reductions that are required. Does Professor Morgenroth have any thoughts on that last broad philosophical point on how we use tax measures for environmental gain?