Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of our witnesses for attending. I have lots of questions but will leave some of them for the second round. I want to focus on two core issues. The first is the core considerations in the development of the carbon budgets and specifically the question of climate justice. To be frank, I was a little disappointed with the climate justice aspect, which there is an obligation to consider. In the technical document, there is very limited consideration of it. The most recent briefing document we received states that "an appropriate contribution" to the Paris Agreement is an appropriate response to international climate justice and yet, in the technical report on carbon budgets, the advisory council says that it is not the job of the council to determine what Ireland's contribution should be to the global effort. The document states:

Any such determination has implicit or explicit implications around climate justice, historical responsibility, equity and equality. It is not the job of the Council or the Carbon Budget Committee to make such value judgements.

However, considering equity is one of the obligations under the law. Indeed, considering the issue of equity is core and considering climate justice is one of the key obligations under the Act, I am particularly concerned about a set of assumptions that seem to have been made in relation to the question of fair share and so forth. Article 4.1 of the Paris Agreement refers explicitly to the fact that the 1.5°C limit has to be achieved in a manner consistent with equity. It also refers to common but differentiated responsibilities. There was really good input from Mr. Price and Mr. Smith, who put forward very good ideas on how to approach equity and deciding what a fair share would be. Mr. Smith set out six different scenarios in terms of how we can approach that but none of those scenarios seems to have been taken on board. Instead, there is this new proposed Paris test, which the technical document says is the approach being taken. This approach is to consider what the temperature outcome would be if every country in the world had the same starting point as Ireland and reduced emissions at the same speed and by the same amount. That is just factually not true and I am really worried about a factual mistruth being part of the modelling. Again, how much weighting we want to give to historical responsibility, to respective capacity or to the cumulative of the future is a political decision but the facts-----