Professor John Sweeney:

The next meeting of the conference of parties to the UNFCCC will take place in Poland in December. The sole purpose of this meeting is to fix a rule book for the Paris Agreement. It has become quite clear that countries have made pledges which are, to some extent, aspirational but which now need to be tied down with a common methodology. Hopefully the conference will agree a common rule book with which all parties will be required to comply.

In the lead-up to that, the European Union has been very active over the summer months in positioning Europe to resume, hopefully, a position of leadership in respect of this problem. Two quite important directives have been passed - one on renewable energy and one on energy of efficiency - both of which call for reductions or improvements of the order of 32%. Coupled with that is the 2030 effort-sharing decision, as we used to call it, to which Ireland was party.

As a result of all of this, the positioning of Europe internationally is such that there is a probability that at Katowice in December Europe will make a new pitch for a higher and more ambitious target of probably approximately 45%.

In fact, 14 countries have called for stronger EU climate action over the past few months. Sadly, Ireland was not in a position to join those 14 countries calling for stronger EU climate action, which is a source of regret.

What we are now seeing is that the net is tightening around the kind of pledges we made in the past, which were almost in spirit rather than in practice, and we have seen in the Irish case that we failed to deliver on those. With the next stage of European policies bringing together those three strands of energy, efficiency of renewable energy and emissions, there is now a requirement on countries to produce an integrated - that is the important word - climate and energy plan, a draft of which has to be produced by the end of December. There is a template for that in circulation which countries will be required to adhere to, and that template will stop countries making aspirational claims which may not be delivered on. It means that we in Ireland will have to come clean on what we are going to do, how we are going to do it, what our targets will be and how we will comply with annual limit values commencing in the early 2020s. Failure to comply with those will have automatic penalties, which are built in. Of necessity, this will mean hard choices have to be made and, of course, it is the job of this committee to make those hard choices. Politics is about setting priorities, and I believe the priorities that are set will have to be set within that envelope. Of course, that envelope will extend beyond 2030 up to 2050.

The indications are that decarbonisation of the global economy cannot wait until 2050 if we are to avoid the dangerous climate change scenario. The IPCC will publish in the next few weeks an important report on the 1.5° Celsius issue with regard to what are our chances and what steps we need to take to comply with the Paris objective of doing everything we can to avoid a 1.5° Celsius warming. I can tell the committee now, without breaking any confidence, that it will say it is going to be extremely difficult unless we accelerate the rate of decarbonisation of all economies, especially the economies in the developing world, but also that we take more stringent steps in the developed world, where we have a historical responsibility to bear the burden of immediate short-term reductions. The current consensus is that 2050 is too far away and that 2040 will be the required target for decarbonisation. To do that, we will have to go on an accelerating trend of emissions reductions.

For us in Ireland, effectively, the longer we put off making those hard choices, the steeper the fall off the cliff will be in the next ten to 20 years. If we want to have any kind of equity with the next generation, or any kind of phased adjustment to decarbonisation, those hard choices have to be made now. This committee is in the very important position of being able to make those hard choices. They are unpopular choices, which will cause disruption and a great deal of angst in some sectors. That is why we will have to try to take them in an orderly and in an equitable way, as Mr. Stanley-Smith said, in order to protect vulnerable people and vulnerable assets, where possible, by a reallocation of resources.

To answer the question, the time for procrastination is gone. The signs are that we are now seeing a climate change system which is changing more quickly than we thought. We are getting much more confident about attribution of human activities to individual extreme events. We know of the heatwave this summer and we can attribute a probability that this will occur twice as often in the future, and the study that said this was carried out in July before we had the drought. We are facing a situation where extreme events are going to become more frequent, and the cost of coping and adapting will become even greater as we move through the timescales.