Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is an important debate, on one level, although we are not going to resolve it here. Deputy Naughten is pointing up a serious issue that is going to arise. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, in its Ag Climatise policy, is envisaging a mitigation of 15% in the agricultural sector. If agriculture accounts for 15% of an overall 51% reduction, that means a 70% reduction is required in transport and building. That is probably beyond our reach.

The Deputy rightly said that if one was looking only at cost, one would say that herd reduction is the cheapest way to achieve reductions. We are going to have to find difficult ways to deal with the very high costs. To offer context, in the 2019 climate plan in which I was involved, we included marginal abatement costs in the transport and building sectors that cost over €250 per tonne in order to go from a 40% or 45% reduction to a 70% reduction. Those costs would soar. I can see why Deputy Naughten is thinking that this will not happen and that the requirement to reduce emissions will fall back on the agriculture sector.

On the other hand, the issue for agriculture is to look at how it can abate carbon. If in other sectors such as building and transport, we are envisaging paying, say, €500 a tonne for carbon abatement, can agriculture start to be farmers of carbon as well as producers of food? I do not agree with Deputy Naughten that we can simply say the agricultural committee should decide that because the transport lobbies will then come before the transport committee, the agricultural lobbies will come before the agricultural committee and we will not move forward. However, we need to find a way in which the potential losers as a result of transport abatements running at €500 or €600 per tonne can compensate people who could manage carbon, either through sequestration, carrying fewer cattle per acre, draining lands, wetting lands or the many things we know are out there. We need to find ways in which those policy tools can be evolved. There is a little bit of a vacuum in how those policy tools are going to be evolved. We are all in favour of dialogue and we will have that dialogue but we need to have an intense discussion about how those policy tools are going to be evolved. That has not happened to date. There is no doubt that if the climate council is expected to meet the target of 51% reductions, it will face the dilemma that if agriculture is targeting 15% reductions, transport must target reductions of 70%. The council will have to consider whether that can be done. We will have an intense debate before the autumn, whenever this legislation comes back, and I do not think we have thought through at a political level how this is to be resolved.

I do not agree with Deputy Naughten that the way to resolve it is to stick agriculture into the agricultural committee, transport into the transport committee and wait to see what comes out the other end. I do not think that would achieve the obligations on which we all know we have to deliver. Finding a way of working our way towards policy tools is the challenge for us, as politicians. Deputy Naughten has enormous experience and we need to listen to people like him because they can help us to evolve these policy responses. This is a genuine issue and we must find a common language to discuss it.

The risk, signs of which can be seen already, is that sectors will talk their own language and mount their own defences around the ramparts of their sectors. For example, the transport sector is saying we cannot ban combustion engines from 2030 and that it would be heresy but if we are to extend the ambition beyond what is in the existing plan, that seems like a no brainer to me. It must happen along with other things outlined by the committee in its report this week. I do not think Deputy Naughten's proposal to put it into sectoral committees will achieve the cross-silo debate we need.