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

There were no small questions there. My sense from the European Council meeting last week was not that my colleagues were optimistic - I would not say that - but the outlook was not as bleak as it was three or four months ago. There have been a couple of initiatives. The US is to increase its declared climate finance contribution, although I do not know if it is all finalised and we have not necessarily got to the target of $100 billion yet. However, that gave cause for hope. The commitment by the Chinese Government not to fund coal-fired power stations outside China was critical. The EU has been able to deliver its Fit for 55 package. We are, as I said, going into the COP26 meeting with the clear indication that this green economic transition is where we are going. Those three large players all have reason to double down.

There are still a large number of other countries where it is less clear what their contribution will be and that is why the meeting in Glasgow will be diplomatically important. We will see how much collaboration is possible and hope that the rule book around transparency, carbon markets and so on is developed. I am not as pessimistic as I was a few months ago but there is no cause for mad optimism either. We will see what happens in the next two weeks.

The Deputy asked about carbon taxation. I think he is right. What we are doing in this country is seen by other countries as an interesting model because we have hypothecated. Two budgets in a row have provided 30% of climate funding to social welfare protection, 55% to retrofitting and 15% to agriculture. The second and third percentages have significant just transition biases within them, as it were, aimed at small farming, sports schemes and the retrofitting of social housing. That means we are now an interesting case. Our ambition is stitched into law, goes up every year and gives certainty. It is a good working example but it is not the only tool available. We need a regulatory tool to commit to stopping the production of combustion engine vehicles by 2035, although I would rather commit to that by 2030. That is an example of other measures that can be devised.

Our planning system is critical in terms of how we allocate road space. That does not cost money in many instances but is a political planning decision that will help us reduce our transport emissions. It is not the only solution. There is a lot of international interest in what we are doing as an example of how a country can redistribute income from carbon taxation to give it a socially progressive outcome.

The Deputy also mentioned CO2 and methane, and he is right that methane is a particularly virulent greenhouse gas. As I think Professor Peter Thorne told this committee, backed up by the IPCC representatives who presented to the committee during the preceding Oireachtas, methane only has a life cycle of 12 to 14 years but it oxydises in the upper atmosphere. It converts to carbon dioxide in the very area we do not want greenhouse gases. That is a particularly difficult problem and in an effort to address it, the Deputy will know there has been a recent development in that the EU and US are to launch the global methane pledge which targets a 30% global reduction in methane by 2030. One of the interesting aspects of that is that, as part of the pledge, those countries are looking to use the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, which was established under the Obama Administration, to manage methane and look at protocols around managing methane. The first area to be addressed is the issue of fossil methane, particularly that released by gas systems, fracked gas systems where there is significant leakage. There is an enormous amount of wasteful leakage of methane through our international gas system. That is the first and most immediate area in need of attention and one in which protocols are more advanced.

When it comes to land use, biogenic methane is much more complex because there is a range of different sources. It arises from rice paddies in a natural anaerobic system. How that is regulated is going to be one of the most important issues, not only for the upcoming COP meeting but also for the one in Egypt next year and at subsequent meetings. Our scientific community is going to have a key role. It is an opportunity for us to promote the necessary type of climate resilient agriculture at the same time. Irish family farming stands to gain from this because there are real differences in environmental outcomes. Let us say a system has a factory lot of 20,000 cattle, as some systems would have, and a pastoral, small farm system. It is not just the emissions protocols we are looking at. We should also be looking at air quality, water quality and the social outcomes of different types of systems. Those elements will have to make up part of the consideration of the methane protocols that will evolve in the coming few years.