Mr. Paul Price:

As the Deputy says, I am not a politician and the situation we are in is very difficult for politicians. It is immensely problematic but from the science side of things, scientists have been talking about this for a long time. They have been saying that we need to cut emissions of all of the main greenhouse gases in every sector. The AR5 report from the IPCC in 2014 talks about substantial and sustained emissions reductions. That was the guidance from science but that has not happened. The science was saying that if we do not do this, we will face having to implement abrupt solutions. Politicians are now saying to scientists that we face abrupt solutions and asking us what is our vision. Our vision was ignored and we now face more abrupt solutions involving higher costs. We would not be in the situation of having to pay dairy farmers to retire if we had followed that IPCC advice. Right now, we are in a situation of abrupt solutions because of that journey.

Scientists can only say what they say; it is up to politicians and leaders in communities to say what we actually face. When our negotiators came back from these UN climate change conferences, they should have been on the television explaining what needed to happen. That communication did not happen, however,. We need to see a high level of communication of where we are and the urgency of what we are about or what we need to be about if we are going to align our actions with our commitments. Our commitment is to align our actions with achieving the Paris goals equitably. That is our commitment, but we have gone in the opposite direction in agriculture. Even in the area of energy, emissions have stayed the same. As the Deputy stated, it is about balancing agricultural sector reductions and land-use emissions reductions against reductions in the energy sector, but all of those things have to go down and very quickly. That is what the CCAC is saying with its carbon budgets. If one looks at the council's core scenarios, it is saying just what I am saying; it is saying that we have to cut emissions in all sectors, quite seriously, by 2030.

The work that Dr. Hannah Daly at UCC has done demonstrates that in the four scenarios, if we only reduce agricultural emissions by the lesser amount, we will have to do much more on the energy side. As the Deputy says, we have to balance these out. Methane reduction has a huge impact. In that context, it would be better to be reducing our methane emissions. The most recent thing that has happened is the increase in dairy, on top of beef. Dairy cows are much more emissions intense and the land they are on has been hugely intensified. That is not a sensible system and that is how we have ended up in this situation, where we have to cut beef cattle and reduce family farms much more in order to allow for that dairy increase. That is the situation we are in, but scientists have been saying this for a long time. Attention was not paid to them and now we face higher costs because of that delay.