Professor John Sweeney:

The way the Bill is phrased currently, it would be an option for a Minister to backload a carbon budget. There may be very many reasons, apart from political ones, a Minister would seek to do this. It may well be, for example, that the State might feel the infrastructure necessary to achieve bigger reductions would take some time to come on stream. If that is done, to stay within the ten-year carbon budget, it would mean excessive reductions would be required in the next five years. In some cases that would be almost impossible to achieve without quite major dislocation to the economy. It would be very advisable for a Minister not to seek to divide the ten-year budget in the context of a very heavy loading down the road. It would be a very big mistake.

There is also the problem of the reporting lag, which the committee has not yet had a chance to consider. In 2020, we only have results for greenhouse gas emissions for 2018 and we therefore have approximately one year's lag in getting the necessary data. The Bill provides for the Minister, in setting new carbon budgets, to oscillate the carbon budget figures proposed between the Oireachtas, the Minister and the Government. It allows for a period of between four and six months. There is an issue in how we match the achievement of a carbon budget when we will not know whether it has been achieved for perhaps a year and a half after the carbon budget period.

It would be unwise, therefore, for Ministers to play with the figures to project a more lenient target in the first five-year budget than would otherwise be demanded by the ten-year period. This is an area that the Bill should tighten. It should be possible, for example, for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a provisional fifth year emissions projection, which would be used in the formulation of the next carbon budget. This would be essential if we are to avoid the kind of position where we would have a five-year carbon budget that would only be decided two and half years into the carbon budget, for example. It comes back to the question of making a stab at the first five-year budget as opposed to the second one. We need seriously to consider how to avoid falling into that trap.