Mr. Paul Price:

Deputy Whitmore was pointing to Government failure. We see that in transport. I have correlated Irish transport emissions with the Irish economy and noted they follow each other very well. That is a problem because it indicates no policy has been effective in Ireland in reducing transport emissions. Therefore, one has to do something along the lines of what Dr. Hannah Daly was talking about yesterday in respect of a low-energy demand scenario. That was really pointing at the fact that we have to focus on limiting fossil fuel vehicles. We must not just say we are going to have electric vehicles because we must target fossil fuel vehicles.

We actually have a really good example of how a limit drives efficiency. We assume that efficiency measures somehow result in emissions reductions, but that is the wrong way around. Most of the good examples we have show that the imposition of a limit effectively creates a rationing situation that the market can sort out. In Ireland, we had this until the end of the milk quota. The milk quota went in 2010 but up until then we had a milk quota that was effectively a quota on nitrogen. As Professor Sweeney pointed out, having that quota is important because that is what is driving agricultural emissions. What we saw over the period in question is that the number of cattle reduced because we had the quota. Efficiency was rewarded in the agriculture sector and we produced the same amount of milk with lower emissions and fewer cows. This is a good example of what really works. A Government imposed limit really works in rewarding efficiency. There were social paybacks, as members know. The efficient farmers paid for quota and there was a redistribution. There was a distributive system. Unfortunately, of course, getting rid of the milk quota made all of this disappear, and purely economic considerations came into play. What we have had is massive growth in milk production and massive growth in methane, nitrous oxide and nitrogen pollution. It is really about setting limits.