Professor Barry McMullin:

I thank the Deputy for his question, to which I have a couple of responses. First, I am not a politician but I do not remotely underestimate the difficulties and challenges of that role in society and I commend all members of this committee on their engagement with these issues. I cannot do their job because I do not have the requisite skills and do not pretend to have them. Nothing that I am saying here is intended to suggest that I have the answer to these political challenges and members are just not taking it up.

On the climate council, I want to emphasise that for my part, while I have presented certain points of disagreement with what the council has done, that is in part because the council was bound by things that the committee is not bound by and in part because I agree with Dr. Jackson that it may have been mistaken in its understanding or reading of the legal requirements on its actions. Those are honest, scientific disagreements; they are not me suggesting that the council was derelict in its duty or that the individual members of the carbon budgets committee, who had a very difficult job, were derelict in their duty in any way. Those are honest, scientific disagreements about the appropriate approach but it is my responsibility to share my views with this committee. That is the question I was asked to comment on and it is my responsibility to be honest about that and to present those points to this committee accordingly.

The question about realism is really important. The Deputy asked, perhaps rhetorically, whether the suggestion that we might need to ration fossil fuel use or nitrogen use to reliably deliver on the carbon budgets proposed by the council, never mind the lower carbon budgets that I have advocated, was realistic for a small, open economy. Where is the realism here? I am an engineer. What is real to me is the physics of the climate system and it does not bend. It just does not bend. It does not care about what we regard as realism. It does not care about what we regard as our hard-earned status of high living standards relative to other people in the world today. It does not care about any of that. It does not care about whether politics is hard; it just does not care. It is completely independent of all of those things. That, to me, is what is real.

While I absolutely do not underestimate the difficulty in this whatsoever, what is fungible or potentially changeable is societal understanding of these issues. As I said, we have the example of the pandemic, or one could go back to the so-called Emergency in the 1940s, or the Second World War as the rest of the world refers to it. In an emergency situation, if it is explained and communicated appropriately and if the response is handled in a way that is as fair as possible to all concerned, then it is possible for societies to rally around that, to engage with the measures and look forward to the time when they get through it successfully, having undertaken those measures sooner rather than later. It is important for people to understand that delaying the measures does not make the challenge go away but just delays things and exacerbates the scale of the challenge to be faced later on. This is not solely the responsibility of politicians, by any means, but they do have a particular role to play. Neither is it solely the responsibility of academics but they also have a role to play. We all have a role to play in this but ultimately it requires societal commitment to bring it about. The first step in gaining societal commitment is to communicate the physical reality and the physical scale of the challenge. Downplaying it does not help. Downplaying the urgency does not help. Pretending that we have a choice between making emissions reductions now and making the same reductions in five years is not helpful because that is not the same thing. Making the same emissions reductions in five years will not have the same effect as making them today. It has much more effect to make those emissions reductions today. The first step is communicating honestly the scale and urgency of our predicament. That requires political leadership. Of course it is politically risky but the times in which we now find ourselves call for that scale of political leadership. It may fail, of course, but the people of Ireland deserve to be asked the questions, at least. They deserve a conversation that talks about hard choices like rationing, about the significant and unpalatable economic effects in the short term and about the fact that our future is completely tied up with the actions of much bigger countries. Our ability to influence those much bigger countries is absolutely critical to our future. If we, as a small country that is not even a fossil fuel extractor cannot take this on, with the relative wealth that we have in a global sense - albeit that such wealth is not evenly distributed within our society - then the idea that we are going to persuade the bigger countries on whom we are completely reliant to take comparable action, is clearly unrealistic, to use the Deputy's word. None of this is easy or palatable. I have concrete disagreements with the council's recommendations, which I have given the academic grounds for and that is the best I can do. I am only trying to offer this committee the benefit of that but members will have to assess what they do with it themselves.