Professor Peter Thorne:

It is really important to make key that scientifically the aim is to reduce the emissions. We should be chasing a reduction in emissions. There are many promising technologies and approaches produced by Teagasc that can and should be deployed widely across agriculture. They will get us a considerable distance. There are also promising approaches, including feed additives and others. There may be opportunities down the road but we cannot wait. If we are interested in limiting climate harm, we cannot wait on future promises of a solution that gets us zero methane emissions and promises that we can emit CO2. An even bigger one is that lots of people are saying that we can emit CO2 and do massive carbon capture and storage down the line. It is unproven at scale and it is uncertain whether it would be economical to do. We need to look at the technological solutions but we also need to get real about the fact that we cannot wait. Nuclear fusion has always been 30 years in the future and it is still 30 years in the future. We cannot wait on magic bullets. We have to get real about the fact that climate action is required. If we want to keep warming to below 2oC and strive to go below 1.5oC, we have really difficult choices to make in the immediate term but we should keep developing and trying to find solutions that enable some of the very hard choices to be avoided.