Professor Kevin Anderson:

It is interesting looking at the budgets that we are talking about here. I just do not recognise them. I recognise that it is politically appropriate. Every country claims that there is a climate emergency, we must do something and comes up with a budget, then the budget blows away any reasonable budget that comes out of the science. Ireland's budgets look like that to me. The budgets in the first period are way above the total budget that Ireland should be having to deliver the 1.5°C or 2°C reduction. They are tougher than business as usual but they are completely out of touch with the science unless one wants to rely on future generations sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere. Just look at the aviation emissions alone. They are 4 million tonnes a year, roughly. Say the committee on climate change pathway for the UK was followed, if it stayed roughly constant for the next 30 years, with a growth in efficiency improvements, it would still take out the total 1.5°C budget for Ireland. Aviation alone would blow the complete budget for 1.5°C for Ireland. The rest of society would have nothing to spend on budgets from today. In fact, since 1 January this year. We are working in the realm of political niceties and the physics does not care. Once one starts to play that out, one ends up with a completely different world.

I bring the question of equity back to equity within our country. We talk about what we can deliver but we never think about the distribution within our societies. Some 70% of aviation in the UK is carried out by 15% of the population. Most emissions do not come from most people. Most people in Ireland will, by definition, be below-average emitters. What we have to do, if we are serious about these issues, is to recognise that emissions align very closely to income and therefore one's policies have to be tailored towards people on higher incomes. Once one does that, it opens up a whole portfolio of policies behind the ones that we are prepared to think about. However, in no country are we taking equity seriously either internationally or within our own countries. Hence our policies are all ------