Professor Hannah Daly:

To add to what Professor Ó Gallachóir said, there are three areas I suggest focusing on in the climate action plan, not necessarily looking at new mitigation measures but accelerating the ones in place.

In the energy system, which is my area of expertise, the measures largely are renewables, solar, wind and the grid, which bring approximately one third of the emission savings in the energy system, electrifying transport and heating in industry, which brings another large proportion, and then efficiency. Bringing forward and accelerating the clean energy deployment targets are essential.

The second area is to concentrate not just on deploying additional clean energy measures but to explicitly cut fossil fuel demand. The climate action plan does not actually set out pathways for fossil fuel consumption that are consistent with carbon budgets. Carbon budgets are really fossil fuel budgets for the energy systems that work for agriculture and therefore, to know whether we are on track, we need to know much fossil fuel we have, that is, the budget of oil, gas, coal and peat. As Mr. Ó Gallachóir said, while electric vehicle sales are growing, so are fossil fuel car sales and therefore, petrol and diesel sales are not falling.

The third area that needs to be looked at in more detail is demand reduction, which includes a focus on data centres. The indirect drivers of our high energy demand growth, including our spatial settlement patterns, are the infrastructure that drives demand, inefficiency in our homes and broader consumption patterns, including data centres, aligned with our industry.