Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

To return to Deputy Ryan's comments on how targets might change and the role of the committee, I agree with everything said by Professor Sweeney. To bring it back to the work of the committee, the existing EU objective for 2050 is 80% to 95% in all emissions reduction compared to 1990.

If I remember correctly the fifth assessment report, AR5, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this means Europe's share would give us a 50:50 chance of staying below 2°. The target adopted in 2014 by the Irish Government in the national policy position on climate action was the lower 80% target. Carbon neutrality means net zero. In mathematical terms, never mind how it is achieved, that means the whole economy of Ireland would reduce 1990 levels by 80% by 2050. The very next year, in 2015, we adopted the Energy White Paper, which has a target for all CO2 emissions, encompassing everything bar agriculture, of 80% to 95%. That is State policy in the White Paper. This echoes the EU objective. If everyone in Europe does this it will give us a 50:50 chance of staying below 2°. At the same time as the White Paper was adopted the Paris Agreement was adopted. This sets a much more challenging climate temperature target. It states 2° is too dangerous and that we need to be well below 2°, ideally as close to 1.5° as possible. All existing targets have to be revised in the context of the Paris Agreement. They will all get more challenging.

Essentially, Ireland faces a net 80% reduction target by 2050. There might be talk of a global net 0% by 2050. As Professor Sweeney said, it will be at least net 0% in Europe by 2040, which is only 22 years away. From 1998 to 2020 will only have been 22 years. That is a short time to get to net 0% emissions if we are to do our fair share under the Paris Agreement.

While it is worth being cognisant of that fact, when Ireland is so far off track in reaching our existing targets according to all independent assessments, the committee's focus should be on what measures to take. I have suggested putting the cap into law. In the production of the national mitigation plan, every Department kept its cards close to its chest and offered as little as possible. There was no legal backstop, to borrow a phrase, to force us to share out the emissions within a limit.

More important than any given target for 2050 in the law is the five-year budgeting process. Although I do not like using the analogy of the troika, we really had to stick to our budget limit for five years or more. All negotiations were on how to divvy that up, what the priorities were - in this case, the priority is pollution - and where the greatest savings could be made. When making such decisions, we should bear in mind the economics of what is the most efficient, but also issues of fairness, justice and protection of the weakest. All of this would happen underneath a hard limit on emissions rather than an aspirational target that does not require action.

I will make a related point, as what I have just said sounds negative. As Professor Sweeney stated, we face disruption in taking climate action but, as Ms Sharkey mentioned, we face disruption and change regardless of what happens next or whether we like it. The only question is whether to take hold of the situation and manage the change so that we make the most of the innovations and possibilities of the transition or sit back and hope that someone will solve the problem for us, in which case we are much more likely to face the sort of abrupt adjustment we got when the bubble burst ten years ago and Lehman Brothers collapsed. We do not want the latter. We want the managed, just and prosperous transition, which we can get by taking action now.