Professor Kevin Anderson:

This is the headline quantitative framing. Ireland's emissions per person from energy, and Ireland also has very high emissions per person from agriculture so this is taking the easier end of the story, are approximately 8.4 tonnes per person on a consumption basis. In the case of Africa as a whole, they are approximately 0.8 tonnes. One immediately sees a huge difference in those. The concept of common but differentiated responsibilities has remained in place since 1992, when it was first coined and put into place and which we all signed up to in virtually every international agreement, despite the fact that wealthy companies have repeatedly tried to weaken it. It is still there in Paris and in Glasgow. That requires us to make serious allowance.for the fact that we must not impose restrictions or reductions in emissions on poorer countries that will affect their development - certainly, they should be moving to and developing renewables as quickly as possible rather than fossil fuels - and assume they can simply do that overnight. They still do not have all those options for their transport where they are using lots of petrol and diesel.

We have to think about that. However, we have left it very late, and I would argue deliberately so much of the time. That is not helped by policymakers and academics, not including people here, who have underplayed the challenge for years.

We have left it so late now that we cannot fairly divide the budget. For example, Dr. Sivan Kartha has done some really interesting work on equity. He is now based in the United States but he is at the Stockholm Environment Institute. He has done much interesting work on equity. The work of Dr. Kartha, among others - Professor Julia Steinberger and others have made similar points - indicates that we have left it so late, we are in emissions debt. It is not that we have any emissions budget as actually, wealthy parts of the world do not have any carbon budget because we squandered that carbon budget quite a long time ago. We cannot live with that because it is not practically deliverable. We cannot switch off the lights now. We must recognise this and it is a good starting point to recognise that we are already taking away the emissions budget from the poorer parts of the world.

We can think about this in the context of the United Kingdom, although it would be slightly different for Ireland. We misused Ireland as well. The United Kingdom has taken people as slaves and taken these countries' minerals, often causing wars in countries because of boundaries being drawn. Now we are stealing their carbon budget. As Professor McMullin has stated, this is colonialism going on in a healthily well state in 2022. We do not like it and we like to think of ourselves as modern individuals in this respect but that is what we are still planning when it comes to our carbon budget. We are adding to our abuse of minerals, of which lithium is a good example, of course, and what we have done with their people in the past.

The concept of equity is absolutely key and it is not embedded well, as I understand it, within Ireland or other parts of the world. The latest data I can find are from 1992. We should not have signed those agreements and our policymakers signed them. We can go further back and look at the Brundtland report from 1987. That is the starting point but if you do that, as Sivan Kartha points out, we have no budget left.

The Senator made an absolutely key and really insightful comment on tipping points. This annoys me repeatedly. I do not like the language of "tipping points" but it is the common language for these sorts of non-linearities in the system. We are prepared to accept the risk of tipping points but when it comes to negative emission technologies and their risks, we embed them in models merrily. We will do anything we can in the models to increase the budget to make it easier for policymakers today but we will ignore the elements that make it harder. The IPCC has been party to this as well. The IPCC reports speak about tipping points in a paragraph somewhere behind the budgets but within its analysis, it will merrily include many negative emissions. In the academic realm we have been party to the making of things more politically palatable. The point is we should really be having much tighter budgets and we cannot even live with the budgets we have.

To put some brief perspective on this, I recently spoke with two of the leading scientists on Greenland. Greenland's melt is not in the IPCC report for sea level rise. The expansion is there but not the actual melt. In Greenland, there is empirical evidence of levels of melt that it was thought would occur under what is called a high emissions scenario, a representative concentration pathway, RCP, of 8.5. That is a very high emission future for decades to come and there is empirical evidence of that level of melt happening today. I spoke to two experts on Greenland, Dr. Jason Box and Dr. Twila Moon, and they and their colleagues think it very unlikely we will not see more than 1 m of sea level rise by the end of the century. It is possible it will be up to 2 m, and that will almost all be from Greenland. After the century we will see the melt coming from the Antarctic. This peer-reviewed science is not embedded in the IPCC reports. There is a suite of such tipping point matters that we are not taking account of because they make the question too politically challenging.