Dr. Thomas Muinzer:

I will take one of the questions that is easily dealt with, namely, the composition of the advisory council. A range of criteria is set out in the legislation about the sorts of people who would be appropriate to have a seat on the council. It seems a relatively conventional list. I need to juxtapose it with the criteria set out in the UK Act but I have nothing to imply that it is strongly dissimilar. These committees tend to emphasise the utility of economists and that is fine. Deputy Devlin mentioned youth and community input. I think that could be a very useful development and one that should be considered. Hopefully, this is not too predictable but given the legal considerations at issue when it comes to a committee like that, including with reference to taking cognisance of Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, and EU law that is sketched out within the Bill and of which the advisory committee must be cognisant, a lawyer or lawyers would be a useful addition to the committees. The UK Committee on Climate Change falls through the same hole in the floor slightly. It has under-emphasised and slightly devalued the role of lawyers in its committees and the legislation does that. I made the point to the UK committee several times that this is something that can be usefully improved and others have done likewise. Recently, a solicitor was brought on to the adaptation sub-committee so that is progress of a kind.

I will make a general point about language. It is difficult from a lawyerly perspective to discuss the language problems meaningfully in the abstract. It is easier to work through the text but, of course, we do not have time to do so. A useful touchstone would be if we juxtapose the original section 3(1) regarding the national transition objective with the 2050 objective. Section 3(1) is displacing that. We see that we are moving from phrasing that "for the purposes of enabling the State to pursue and achieve the transition to" and so on and so forth to a new construction in which "the State shall pursue". Obviously, when one drops the word "achieve", that raises alarm bells in a lawyer. It is a softening. "Pursue" is a verb. It means to follow something or to try to catch it and is relatively soft in comparison with the previous construction. The legislation is peppered with that slightly soft legal language. To give a concrete example, section 4(2)(a) of the principal Act points out that when updating the climate action plan, the Minister "shall take account of the carbon budget programme". Again, language like "take account of" would be rather soft legalese. It is slightly different to actually needing to adhere to it so I strongly recommend stress testing the legislation for that type of phraseology and strengthening it in line with a UK-style approach.