Mr. Seán McCabe:

I thank the committee for giving TASC the opportunity to address it this morning. I echo Dr. Capozza's point in that what lies ahead of us will not be easy, but it may not necessarily be as difficult as we believe. It could be very beneficial. This statement is intended to complement a briefing document I circulated, whose points we can pick up on in discussion afterwards.

The message I would like to deliver today is quite simple: climate action should not be considered a budgetary burden. It is quite the opposite. Climate action should be viewed as an unparalleled opportunity to build shared prosperity across the Island of Ireland. If we get this right and if we plan a successful post-pandemic recovery built upon shared and inclusive climate action, we will allow communities all over the country to unlock their potential and uplift their horizons. New opportunities for work will allow communities to hold on to young people who have returned home over the past year. The clubs and facilities closed long before the pandemic due to outward migration and a lack of numbers will reopen. Local businesses will prosper while issues of connectivity and substandard rural transport will be swept aside.

If we get it right, the workers and the farmers, those of us who are understandably most worried that climate action will be bad for their livelihood, community or way of life, will have their fears allayed. They will see that their perspectives and knowledge are valued in designing the transition. With their leadership, existing systems that are causing genuine harm will be dismantled in favour of a fairer, shared and sustainable prosperity.

None of this will happen by accident, however. It will need to be carefully planned and State led. Significant resources will be required. In the first instance, it will be expensive, but the cost of inaction is incalculable. Inaction, or insufficient or poorly planned action, will lead to catastrophe. It is hard to overstate the precarity of our situation. Inaction will devastate our communities. It will claw at the fabric of our democracy, and it will bring hunger. This is already happening in that there are already men and women around the world who are warning us that they no longer know when to plant and harvest their crops because of the chaos of seasons fundamentally altered by a warming planet.

The fodder crisis of 2018 gave us some sense of what is ahead. That harsh winter and wet summer cost Irish farmers more than €500 million in feed costs, not to mention the damage done to mental health and the well-being of families due to the stress of that crisis. Potentially, we are only two decades, maybe less, away from such a crisis recurring every year or so. This does not have to be our fate. There exists a remarkable opportunity to undertake transformative climate action in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic response has brought with it rising public indebtedness due to the response measures, borrowing costs remain exceptionally low. We should recognise this as the opportunity that it is. We should use favourable financing conditions to finance debt for climate action at rates close to zero. There is no evidence that borrowing at a rate of zero is a drag on the economy. On the contrary, evidence shows that borrowings can generate growth if invested well. The need for meaningful climate action gives us plenty to invest in.

The most recent stability programme update shows the burden of servicing our debt is set to fall in the coming years. Despite the fallout from Covid, service payments are set to fall to 1.3% of GNI* by 2025, lower than at any other period in the history of the State. The current global financing conditions provide an unprecedented opportunity to address long-standing environmental challenges. The climate crisis is one of those challenges. It requires State-led green industrial and innovation policy supported by unprecedented capital investment. Given the scale of the climate crisis, a State-led investment approach should now be prioritised over any efforts to reduce or eliminate the current deficit.

This State-led approach should design a just transition, predicated on putting the productive assets of climate action and its supply chains into the control of communities so they can lead their own development. This would be truly transformative. It can be done by adopting a community wealth-building approach to climate action. Now is the time to give communities ownership of the new climate economy, to give them windmills and solar farms so that they can use the substantial returns to develop community centres and sports clubs and to create new co-operatives for retrofitting or the roll-out of agroforestry so that the jobs become more than a pay cheque. Climate co-operatives will build a new identity and become a new chapter in the story of place across the island. It is time to use climate action to democratise local economies and distribute power more fairly between the local and the national, the producer, the consumer and the middleman, and to allow communities to meaningfully access the benefits of climate action and then witness the social value it will return.

We must use climate action to tackle poverty. This starts by ensuring that climate action does not further impoverish people or widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The cost of climate action, including the cost of retrofitting, and the cost of the switch to renewable energy or a carbon tax should not fall on those who can least afford it. It is essential that we poverty-proof all climate policies.

While the burden of payment for climate action should not fall on those who can least afford it, the conversation about whether the State can afford to take climate action needs to end. Across the world, multinational corporations are transforming their business models as they recognise that the benefits of climate action are greater than ever before. As they mobilise, the cost of inaction continues to mount. That cost is more than the cost of the damage done by climate action. It is also a cost of missed opportunity. If we delay or get bogged down in quarrelling about minor expenses, we will miss the bigger transformative picture. The potential for climate action to tackle inequality and bring prosperity to communities across the island will be sold off to a primed private sector and we will be paying a premium to buy back the wind and sunlight.

I thank committee members for their time and look forward to answering their questions.