Professor Kevin Anderson:

I thank the committee for inviting me to this hearing. I am a professor in energy and climate change at the University of Manchester and I have worked on climate issues for some 30 years. Prior to that, I spent ten years working in the petrochemical industry as a design engineer for offshore oil and gas platforms.

I will start with a bit of political background so we can remind ourselves what we have committed to. In Glasgow at the COP26 in November, the Taoiseach made a very clear statement:

Unless we act now, we will not keep the possibility of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees alive. ... As political leaders, it is our responsibility to put the necessary policies in place. Ireland is ready to play its part.

That is the context of the commitment Ireland has made and it is similar for all wealthy countries.

I want to provide a bit of flavour on the quantitative background which it is important to consider when developing analysis for Ireland. If we look at Ireland’s emissions and if we consider we have had the global banking crisis and the Covid pandemic, Ireland's emissions in 2020 were the same as they were in 1990. In fact, if we factor in a slight increase in aviation and shipping emissions, they are higher, and if we factor in the rise in emissions in agriculture, they are higher again. Therefore, Ireland has fundamentally failed to reduce its emissions since 1990. Ireland has territorial emissions of carbon dioxide per capitathat are around 17% higher than the average for the EU-27. A typical Irish citizen has a total carbon footprint 27% higher than a Chinese citizen, 75% above the global norm and ten times that of a typical African person. Ireland's GDP per capita, measured in purchasing power parity, PPP, puts it as the world's third richest nation. It has a PPP per capita value over twice that for the average EU person, more than five times the global average and 16 times that of a typical African. The population density of Ireland is very low at about 70 people per square kilometre, which is considerably lower than the EU average. It has a very long coastline, an extremely favourable wind regime and high tidal ranges. Overall, Ireland is disproportionately well served for developing renewable energy.

Against that background, I have made my analysis, which is more detailed than the text I sent to the committee but I will summarise it now. First, I want to make clear that my analysis takes the Taoiseach's and Ireland's commitments towards 1.5°C but also 2°C at face value. My analysis is based on the science and the numbers. I eschew political sensibilities and legal niceties and I am not constrained by some ephemeral tenets of the current economic status quo. All of that gets parked and I do the analysis based on the commitments, the numbers and the science.

I focus here on energy use and supply, which is my area of expertise. I recognise that agricultural emissions are particularly important for Ireland and other countries such as New Zealand. Agricultural emissions are a key part of understanding how much space we have for energy. They are not my area of expertise and others have spoken about them, but they are key. I will focus here on energy and the carbon budgets only, and I am using the numbers for the carbon budgets based on the IPCC’s sixth assessment report, AR6, which is the latest set of data that we have from the IPCC. I am using two headline budgets for the submission I made to this hearing. To simplify, one is for a good chance of 1.5°C of warming and the other is for a good chance of 2°C of warming, and the details are in the text. It is also worth pointing out that there is a huge difference between 1.5°C and 2°C. Both of these are disastrous for many people but, at 2°C, the impacts are considerably greater than they are at 1.5°C, and they will be felt initially by poor and climate vulnerable communities around the world, typically low emitters and typically people of colour. It will also, of course, be felt within a decade or so by our own children and grandchildren. I then updated the AR6 budgets, which are from 2020, to 2022, which is where we are now, and I estimate from that, as a simple bit of arithmetic using the latest emissions, that the global carbon budget we have now is for a good chance of about 270 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide at 1.5°C or a good chance of about 680 billion tonnes at 2°C, which is much less onerous.

I take at face value Ireland being a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, and the international protocols since the UNFCCC in 1992, and the whole concept of common but differentiated responsibility. I assume that Ireland was being honest when it said it wanted to give some additional emissions space for the development of poorer parts of the world. If it does that, then the repercussions for the wealthy parts of the world, Ireland included, are severe. If Ireland has taken this into account, then the carbon budget for Ireland from now, the start of 2022, and across this century is about 120 million tonnes of carbon dioxide for a good chance of 1.5°C to about 300 million tonnes for a good chance of 2°C. Let us just think of some of the numbers we heard earlier in the context of this 120 million tonnes to 300 million tonnes. This covers, say, 2022 to the end of the century and is for all energy carbon dioxide, including aviation and shipping. If Ireland does not want to include aviation and shipping, it has to take an additional amount of that budget away.

If Ireland was to carry on at its current level of emissions, which, from an energy point of view, is roughly 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent plus, as Professor McMullin pointed out earlier, about 4 million tonnes of aviation and shipping on top of that, then that is somewhere between three and eight years of current emissions before it exceeds the fair budget for Ireland for 1.5°C to 2°C. To repeat, that is three to eight years of current emissions, and Ireland shows no sign of its emissions coming down at the moment. If, after this meeting, Ireland goes away and implements policies immediately and it is a straight line to zero emissions, that means Ireland has to be at zero emissions by 2029 for a good chance of 1.5°C and by 2038 for a good chance of 2°C.

Another way of thinking of it is by looking at the reduction rates. If Ireland was to start now at a set reduction rate, for 1.5°C it would have to reduce emissions at about 30% every single year. It sounds impossible but it should have started in 1990 and we have failed for 30 years. For 2°C, the rate is much lower - about 12% per annum - but we have to remember that includes aviation and shipping. All of this, of course, requires fundamental change in agricultural practices in Ireland, in particular given the current requirements for beef and dairy.

There is no easy way out of this dilemma that rich countries are now facing and that we have got ourselves into. We are here precisely because, for 30 years, we have been unprepared to face the climate challenge with honesty and integrity. That brings us to the point we are at now because physics does not care about our political niceties; it only cares about molecules and greenhouse gas emissions. Wealthy nations now have a choice whether to succeed or fail but that depends on this idea of honesty and integrity.

This analysis is different to some of the others the committee will hear, principally for two reasons. The first is that virtually all other analyses rely on future generations removing huge quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using carbon dioxide removal techniques and technologies that are highly speculative. There are a few pilot schemes, most of them still in the imagination of academics, yet we are relying on these in virtually all analyses and passing the burden to future generations to suck our carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. I argue that is irresponsible and it passes a huge burden onto future generations in terms of the risks of much larger levels of climate impact. While we should research those technologies and deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria, we should not rely on them, which we are currently doing in all of our analyses because we want to make something that is more politically palatable.

The second part is that we are completely ignoring our commitments on international equity. Even under the scenarios I am showing the committee, the cumulative emissions per person per year are still greater for rich countries than they are for poor countries. There is no fair way of dividing the budget any more; there is just the least unfair way of doing it. Even this disproportionately affects the poor parts of the world. Those are the two reasons my analysis is different because it does not include any political expediency.

In summary, Ireland is an extremely wealthy nation, with a highly educated population and very favourable renewable energy potential. Moreover, it has a low population density. It should be siting renewable supply with ease because that is very unproblematic for Ireland compared with most other nations. Despite Ireland’s unique financial and geographical position - it also incredibly wealthy - to lead the world in renewable energy development, according to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, only 11% of its gross energy consumption is actually renewable. This means, to put it more simply, that 90% of Ireland’s total energy consumption is unsustainable, according to 2020 data. It is worth reiterating that Ireland’s failure to deliver any reduction in net emissions since 1990, despite its favourable financial position and geography, suggests that climate change has received no serious political attention thus far.

The unprecedented carbon budget challenges Ireland faces today stem, in part, from its own choice to, in effect, ignore three decades of clear scientific analysis and advice. Each year, this failure to heed the science continues, so the mitigation challenges will increase. Ultimately, the physics of climate change will always beat any ephemeral economics or political niceties that ignore it, with the subsequent climate impacts we are knowingly bequeathing to Ireland’s future and to more vulnerable communities elsewhere. We have to remember that we are a world behind this. It is about impacts. People are living today with the impacts of Ireland's and the UK's choices. We are passing that burden on to our children. I thank committee members for listening.