Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I start by doing something I should have done at the end of the meeting last week. I thank everybody for giving witness to the Bill and engaging with the committee on it. I thank the delegates who attended last week - Dr. Amanda Slevin, Professor John Sweeney, the representatives of IBEC and the Irish Offshore Operators Association - and all those who are present today. I am doing so at the start of the meeting because I will forget to do so towards the end of our engagement as I will have become so excited by the argument. I also thank the Chairman and Ms Anita Gibbons and her team.

They have been very co-operative and done a lot of work behind the scenes to make this happen.

The Taoiseach said quite recently that we were laggards in Europe in dealing with CO2 emissions and climate change and reaching the targets set for us in the Paris agreement. He also said the challenge posed by climate change was one of the greatest humanitarian challenges we would face in our lifetimes. I agree with him on both counts. It is welcome that today the Cabinet has given the green light to the Bill submitted by Deputy Thomas Pringle on fossil fuel divestment. That is a really good sign and I call on the Taoiseach and the Cabinet to do likewise in the case of this Bill and back it, as it would be another contribution by this country in the battle to stop the planet from overheating by more than 2 degees Celsius in the near future, something that will make the planet uninhabitable for many species. We are going through a very hot spell and lives have been lost in southern Quebec and Cyprus. Science tells us that we cannot take such events as examples of climate change and that the changes must be incremental for a number of years, but the fact is that we have witnessed the eight hottest years on record in the past 16 years. That is a sign that what was warned about at Kyoto over 26 years ago is happening and faster than we thought, both at Kyoto and Paris. The question of how we deal with fossil fuel emissions and burning carbon and emitting it into the air is fundamentally important.

I am aware that members of the public is watching and that it is often baffled by the science. They do not understand what 350 parts per million means, or what carbon exchange mechanisms are, but they do understand oil, gas and coal are dirty fuels that are causing a lot of problems on our planet and they want to know how we deal with them.

I welcome the delegates who will present to us. Mr. Greg Muttitt who will speak first as he has to catch a ferry back to Britain is from Oil Change International. We met him last year in Bonn at a conference and I was very impressed by the research the organisation had conducted. He will tackle the question of fossil fuels, in particular, whether gas is a clean transition fuel. The gas industry argues that it is, but he will take on the challenge. I also welcome Mr. Paul Allen from Zero Carbon Britain, an organisation which is looking at a model for how we should move forward to full use of renewable energy resources. It is a sensible model, one about which we should think and adopt, not just at this committee but across Parliament. There are representatives present from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, and Ervia, formerly Bord Gáis, which should make for an interesting debate.

I thank the environmentalist movement which has backed the Bill, given it its support and collected petitions. Some of its members are in the Visitors Gallery to hear the arguments and will meet the Chair later to urge her to push the Bill forward. I asked the committee to allow Mr. Muttitt and Mr. Allen to make their submissions and everybody, including other delegates, to ask questions and challenge them, rather than taking all four presentations together.