Professor Lisa Ryan:

I am a professor in energy economics. I am not a member of the Climate Change Advisory Council. I was brought in as an expert on the committee on carbon budgets. I would like to clap because some of these questions are extremely welcome, as Dr. Hanrahan and Professor Ó Gallachóir have said, in clarifying that it is very important that policy is informed by modelling and research. I totally agree with that. The carbon budget work we have done has formed the envelope of those carbon emissions that would form what Ireland needs to do to get to 2030. After that, it will be much more detailed. It is for the Department and the Minister to decide the individual policies that will then need to be implemented as part of the climate action plan, for example, to achieve those carbon budgets. We need models. I totally agree that one of the gaps, certainly in the big technology models, is society. Given the nature of models, it is very difficult to model everything. As the basis for this carbon budget work, therefore, we have had three main models that have best addressed the questions to which we were asked to respond. Society and economics formed less of a focus initially but, as we try to decide what these policies are and how we can implement them, we get into much more detail, such as distributive impacts across society. Then it is very important we have societal models. By their nature, they are often different kinds of models. They may be formed by surveys getting into the level of the individual. There will be winners and losers, as we all know, in this climate transition. It is about how we best protect the most vulnerable. However, that is not the question for here and now.

As part of the work on the carbon budgets, from a top-down perspective, in UCD we were asked to look at what expenditure is related to the different scenarios and where current employment is in Ireland. It was just a question of matching up and looking at where that current employment is, what kind of capital budgets will be required and whether there will be jobs involved in different sectors. We can see that employment will be created in many sectors. The question, following on from all this work, will be, as Ms King rightly said, how we can make sure, despite the fact that there will be job losses, that people will be helped to make that transition. That will be the next step. It is a very important question for society if we want to bring people along with us. Without people coming along with us, we definitely will not achieve any kind of transition. The way I see it, at least, is that the next step is the policy implementation of the council and its review.

It is all very well to set targets but now the really detailed work needs to begin as well on the implementation.