Mr. Ian Talbot:

Since the publication of the 2019 Climate Action Plan, Chambers Ireland has been calling on the Government to integrate carbon budgeting into the decision-making process of all State agencies. If we are to be serious about our 51% reduction targets, and our net zero aspirations for 2050, the State has to incorporate the carbon impact of its actions and its policies into its decision matrices or else the long-term climate costs will continue to be deferred against short-term fiscal incentives. Our 2018 greenhouse gas emissions, upon which our 2030 targets are based, mean that we must be emitting no more than 33.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by the end of this decade. Collectively, the State, through its wide range of agencies, is the primary player when it comes to those emissions. The State is the largest energy consumer in the country, but even more importantly, its decisions shape the environment that the rest of us, the business community and the public, navigate in our daily lives. Nationally, our track record to date on emissions reductions has been extremely poor, with our benchmark 2018 emissions being almost 10% higher than our 1990 levels. Our emissions in 2022 will be still higher than they were in 1990.

Chambers Ireland is generally supportive of the carbon budgeting proposal that was published by the Climate Change Advisory Council. Carbon budgeting is a useful tool for ensuring appropriate public policymaking because ultimately, it is the activities of the State that bind us to our current behaviour and limit the range of our potential activities. However, if instead of being a mechanism to direct State policy a carbon budget is used as a mechanism for allocating emissions between different sectors in society, it will do no more than act as a multiplier on the existing carbon taxes. If we in the business community and all of us in wider society are to be able to transition to less polluting alternative energy sources, we need the State to have laid the groundwork to ensure that those alternatives are available. There is little point in trying to send out market signals through the price mechanism if more environmentally sustainable substitutes are not available.

Under successive Governments, the State’s response to greenhouse gas emissions and the climate crisis in general has been characterised by inactivity. Inaction on the CO2 emissions consequences of policies are just as damaging to our environment as actions that actively pollute. When communities are planned without integrated public transport networks and active transport links, the State relies on people using cars to fill the gap where those services ought to be. When housing estates are built with no pedestrian access to shops and schools, that is the State locking in decades of transport-associated CO2 emissions in the future. Inactivity has caused the long delay in creating regulatory and planning certainty for offshore renewable energy. While we greatly welcome the recent passing of the Maritime Area Planning Bill, the problem should not have taken 15 years to progress.

This has prevented us from developing a clean offshore wind energy industry to the extent we would like.

A lack of action has also locked in decades of fossil fuel emissions. The main benefit to introducing budgeting is that it will no longer allow administrations to defer actions as the rolling five-year budgets require immediate action. To this end, budgeting needs to become a key element of both the planning process and the planning programmes of the Government. This decade will see an enormous investment in the built fabric of our country between the national development plan infrastructure and the hundreds of thousands of housing units we so desperately need. A huge amount of additional carbon dioxide will be released during construction, even as we attempt to curtail emissions.

An effective carbon budgeting mechanism should accelerate the delivery of projects that decrease our carbon dioxide consumption. It should incentivise us to take the bigger, harder actions first and, in the long run, take the impactful action immediately. It will afford us more options and greater flexibility as time progresses and our timelines to net zero are inevitably brought forward.

The 300,000 housing units that will be built over the next few years as part of Housing for All will, in general, stand for 100 years. Their location and the services available to them within a 15-minute walk will determine what a century of emissions will look like. Given that our members are based in cities and towns across Ireland, we found it heartening that the CCAC has a sense that, regarding transport, liveable cities are the easy bit. However, if making city and town centres attractive places to live and work is the easy part, the vast majority of people are going to be shocked by the enormity of the task we have ahead of us. Even very small movements towards reactivating vacant and underutilised property are happening at a pace that suggests we will not have made much ground by 2030. The prioritisation of various transport projects echoes this, and the lack of urgency regarding offshore renewable energy speaks to a lack of coherence in the overall approach to the decarbonisation of our society. Chambers Ireland hopes carbon budgets will be the tool that will finally spur us into action.