Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

To pick up from where Deputy Bruton left off, I agree 100% with what he said. I have a fundamental issue with this Bill. I agree with the principle of the Bill but my fundamental difficultly is that we do not know how this will be measured, even though we are going to enact the legislation. We set the target for 2030 but we do not know how that will be measured over that period. Deputy Bruton is correct in terms of carbon sequestrations. It is left out of the European inventory, which is greatly frustrating. The Minister of State is correct, negotiations are ongoing at the moment which will decide how this will be reconciled. We must be more ambitious, but we are setting targets in stone without knowing how we will measure them. The CCAC has specifically highlighted this challenge. Under the UN climate mechanism and the EU reporting structures, agricultural emissions are calculated separately from the removal of sequestration associated with land use. The Minister of State put the point across well when he responded to me initially that the opportunity is there within agriculture to sequester carbon. However, the difficulty is that none of us knows how that will be measured in an Irish context, in a European context, because it is not measured now, or in an international context.

On the one hand we are setting overall targets, but we do know what the rules will be to achieve those targets. What I am trying to do with my amendments is to separate out that target for agriculture. We must have a plus and minus. The Minister of State is correct that agriculture is unique in that there is the plus and minus capacity within it. There is no doubt, and all of us agree, that land use and land use change are fundamentally important in terms of where we will be in agriculture in 2030. The progress made in transport and heating, or lack thereof, will have a direct impact on what we can and cannot do and how things will be counted in agriculture. That is a fundamental weakness in this Bill.