Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

My second questions flows on from that. I do not make the point out of any fear for the profits of corporations but because we need to stand up to the polluters and take action regardless of the effect on profit. Undoubtedly, ordinary citizens want to take action, that is reflected in the report of the Citizens' Assembly that we are discussing. However, a problem with the focus on carbon tax as the main way to deal with the problem is it is like a ship with a massive leak where someone is trying to plug the hole with their finger. It is completely inadequate. The logic is to encourage individuals to make better decisions but individuals do not make decisions in some abstract situation. In the case of a person who lives somewhere where there is no public transport and who works in Dublin city centre, the cost of petrol may increase but that does not mean there are any different choices available. One might go to a shop and buy vegetables. They may have come from another part of the world and may be unnecessarily covered by plastic, but these are not choices made by the person in the shop. The fundamental choices to create the world and the kind of decisions that are available to people are those decisions made by the corporations. A paper in Climatic Changesome years ago said that some 90 corporations were responsible for 63% of greenhouse gas emissions. Surely that is where one must look. That points to more serious things than carbon tax. It points to regulation, that is, keeping it in the ground, the need for economic planning, which implies public ownership, and interfering with private property rights, when one is talking about massive multinationals, by saying that our environment, society and our future are too important to be left to the whims of companies that make decisions based on profit and treat the environment as an externality.