Ms Louise Fitzgerald:

I am speaking not only as an Irish Research Council-funded scholar based at the UCD school of politics and international relations but also as someone who cannot remember a time when I was not faced with fear, anxiety and a deep sense of sadness about the current ecological and climate breakdown, which is already causing pain for millions of people around the world. This is why I have dedicated the last four years of my life to researching how we can develop effective and successful policies to deal with our climate and sustainable development challenges. My presentation is based on cutting-edge research within political science as well as dozens of research interviews I have conducted in Germany in an attempt to understand the factors that have helped to underpin the success of Germany's historic energy transition. I am looking at the factors that help to create policy that is politically and socially acceptable. This is really the Holy Grail. I hope to demonstrate how we can make stringent policy without facing electoral penalties.

I will mention a few insights and factors that have the potential to help us in our work. The first of them underpins what has been said about the importance of citizen-centred energy and green industrial supports. The key causal mechanism here is something called coalition building, which is essentially about the development of policy that seeks specifically to build coalitions of support for a green policy that allows policy measures to be ratcheted up over time. The provision of direct industrial incentives to support the growth of particular green industries, such as renewables, is an effective way to build these new coalitions. This has been borne out in the case of Germany, where it was a main driver of the energy transition. The expansion of green industrial supports gave citizens access to the energy grid. A payment for the energy fed into the grid supported the development of citizen-centred and community-centred renewable energies. This solidified the societal acceptance of energy transitions, which is a key factor in determining our success as we go forward.

A second insight is that carbon-pricing approaches can face significant barriers to effective implementation. An understanding of the dynamics of the political landscape is necessary in this context. Carbon pricing incentivises regulatory losers, those who are going to lose out as a result of certain policies, to organise politically to prevent such policies from being implemented, thereby rendering measures difficult to implement and making them no more than marginally effective in the short and medium term. It can be costly and time-consuming to tweak proposed instruments in order that they can be implemented in any form. The EU emissions trading system and its related offset schemes have faced significant challenges. Research indicates that switching to green industrial supports and focusing on such supports as well as on citizen-centred energy faces fewer political barriers and is more conducive to effective and sustainable policymaking.

Clear action on decarbonisation can have a powerful signalling effect and can create a facilitative framework. Conversely, any moves to build new fossil fuel infrastructure can have lock-in impacts that undermine and derail sustainability transitions. It is important to note that natural gas infrastructure projects that are planned within the EU's list of projects of common interest, including the planned Shannon liquified natural gas terminal, categorically impede our ability to decarbonise in a timely manner. Alternatively, research has started to show that supply side policies, such as bans and moratoriums, have significant economic and political advantages compared with demand side policies. The political advantages of such an approach include superior potential to mobilise public support, including within fossil fuel industries, as well as low administrative and transactional costs.

The EU can provide a framework for developing effective and just pathways to sustainable development and successful climate action. Countries as small as Ireland can have a substantial impact within this framework. Much of the work that is being done now involves the development of new norms of behaviour. This has a powerful contagion effect. We have an opportunity to implement a dynamic policy for effective climate action and sustainable development, but the window is closing fast. Climate and ecological breakdown are hitting us faster than was ever predicted. On our current path, a safe planet for human life will disappear before today's children reach the age of those we are addressing this morning.

No financial argument makes any sense when faced with these facts, regardless of whether it is hedged in terms of budget speak, bureaucratic processes, profits or vested interests. The survival of all of us and all of those we care about is directly threatened by climate change. This is not political. It is a scientific fact that is based on science, physics and the laws of nature. All Members of the Oireachtas will face important decisions in the coming weeks and months. I want them to understand that everything they care about will be touched by climate and ecological breakdown. They need to think about that and act from a place of love when they are making decisions. Young people are asking politicians to give them a chance to live a dignified life and to have a safe world in which to live. We are asking them to let us hope. This is not about us versus them or young people versus politicians. That is old thinking. This is about the shared fate of all of us who are interconnected on this planet. We are in this together for better or for worse, so let us make it better.