Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 December 2020

Select Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Renewable Energy Directive: Motions

Photo of Eamon RyanEamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O'Rourke, and he is right that this is a fine. It is a structure, as I said, which has been designed to be a deterrent and a way of enforcing the targets so that people have something to fear and avoid.

That is the reason we would aim for it. The Deputy is right. With those added complications the fine does not just go into a bunker, so to speak. It is deployed in a way that is beneficial to the wider environment but there are no two ways about it. There is no Orwellian mixing-up of language here. This is not good. This is not what we want to be doing.

In terms of other states, Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands were mentioned earlier. France and Poland as well, I understand, are in a similar position. I presume some of them may be close to their targets. As I said, it is a 2020 target so in terms of those states reaching their targets, whether they will be there or thereabouts remains to be seen. Other states may be included but they are the ones I see.

As to whether that 12% target was fair and reasonable, there are different views on that. If I recall correctly, that was in 2009 or 2010 - I am advised it was 2007 or 2008, in the run-in to the end of the decade. Some people would argue that Ireland's was too stringent. One may see this as a burden but I believe the moving away from fossil fuels is an economic benefit. It creates benefits in terms of employment and balance of payments as well as environmental benefits. It develops the local economy. Having an ambitious target, therefore, is a good incentive. It is not punitive. We are going to have to stop burning fossil fuels anyway. The sooner we do it the better we will become at it and the more economic savings we will make from it.

If I was to give one reason we have not been good at this it would be that within our wide public, administrative and other systems, for too long we have looked at this as a cost and a burden to be avoided rather than as a necessity and an opportunity to be attained. One could apply that to the energy efficiency target and the overall climate emissions target. I could look at specific examples. There is a further target in terms of our public buildings. I recall being in this committee room a year or two ago when the Office of Public Works, OPW, witnesses were asking why it was that on that target, where one would think we would have full control in terms of the efficiency in our public buildings, we will not meet it. It is because in a succession of policy decisions it was seen as a sunk cost or a wasted burden and therefore to be avoided. We did all the behavioural energy efficiency measures in terms of the public use of buildings, and achieved a fair bit by doing that, but we reached the limit of what was possible in that regard and did not spend the money on the building fabric. What Deputy Whitmore said is true. If we were spending this €50 million, my preference would be to spend it on the 5,000 solar panels, water heating systems and so on in our schools to help us meet our renewable heat target. However, that philosophical perspective of how those targets impinge on us has been one of the real difficulties.

With regard to the target, unfortunately, this is complicated. In terms of the Government's target of a 7% reduction in emissions per annum, with a 51% reduction over the decade, that target was based on science. It was based on taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report and saying that that is what we need to do over the next ten years. For us, the target was best done on the basis of when will be the first year, starting from early this summer. It was a 2018 target because those were the first statistics we had in terms of where we are and we had to start from somewhere. Unfortunately, there were further variations in that. The European Union tends to set its targets from 2005. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, and the Chairman can correct me if I am wrong, sets its target year from 1990. To make it even more complicated, the UNFCCC includes land use policy and land use changes, although the rules on that are evolving and need a good deal of tightening. The European Union does not include many of those but in the middle part of this decade need to start to include that, or even sooner depending on political decision-making. It is a horrifically complicated variety of different targets.

The reason I said that that 55% target is a positive development, which was welcomed yesterday at the Council meeting, is because it signifies a significant increase in ambition from the 30% original outcome. There were even further complications in that with the target within the emissions trading system, ETS, and non-ETS sectors. We have had many targets deployed in a variety of ways and it will require many countries to significantly scale up their ambition.

Many countries are further along than Ireland. Having failed to meet our 2020 targets, we are a good 20% behind where we should be now. For us to meet a 51% target or anything like it is an incredibly more ambitious target than that of almost all other European countries because most other countries are starting off having already achieved a 20%, 25%, 30% or 40% reduction. It is akin to going into a 55 m sprint race when the other teams have a 20 yd start on us. That is the scale of the problem. The ambition we are setting is very significant. That is appropriate because this is the new economy. Other economies will be looking to get what the Danes and others have done from being first mover advantage of having the economic capability in heating, transport and energy systems that they then sell to the rest of the world. We should aim to do the same.

In that regard, I accept and agree that the slow pace of the development of wind farm guidelines has been a real failing for both those communities that are concerned about wind farms and those people involved in the industry. It suits no one’s interests. I had hoped we would have them agreed by the end of this year. That looks unlikely now but I commit to presenting them very early in the new year because as several Deputies said, we need to start acting more quickly.

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