Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

In Baku recently, no one was talking about the quantum of the NCQG. To a certain extent, you must agree in order to make negotiations work. It is not just about that core figure.

In so many ways, it is about the architecture around it - in adaptation, mitigation, Article 6, transparency and so on. That will only come towards the end of the negotiations when people get down to talking quantums. One of the reasons the European Union emphasises layers is that it is about broadening the base. In that instance, it is not just about those countries that are able to do so, which may have changed significantly in the past 30 years; it is also about other sources of finance. An example of where it would come from came up this week in a meeting of the G20 finance ministers in Brazil. They have proposed a billionaires tax. My understanding is that this tax on wealth above a certain amount has the potential to raise €250 billion a year. They argue that it would give a substantial financial flow that may help with climate transition.

My departmental office developed some position papers in recent years on how we see investments from fossil fuels switching into clean energy. The IEA has done some good research on that. I mentioned some of those figures earlier. The expectation on a business-by-use model is that even by the end of this decade, there would still be €800 billion a year going into fossil fuel development, including extraction, exploration, and so on. To meet our climate targets, we know that it must halve. One of the questions is how we could use that €400 billion or how we could regulate globally or internationally to incentivise so that the switch takes place. The sum of €400 billion is not small in the scale of what we are talking about. That obligation and applying the polluter-pays principle that the industries that are the source of the problem, or the use of the materials that is the source of the problem, can become the source of the solution. It has been interesting to ask those questions in my own engagement with fossil fuel companies and countries. How come they are still going to be investing so much money given what we know?

Then we come to very difficult and challenging negotiation issues, which are centrally important. I refer to the questions that the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance or the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative are asking. If we are to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, how do we support those countries that might wish to do that in a way that makes it viable? This is not small change that we are talking about. It is not a small issue.

All of these issues will not be resolved in Baku, but we must keep them in mind, especially when it comes to developing countries that have just discovered large quantities of gas or oil. When we say: "Sorry, you're too late. You can't use it.", they have a valid justice question: "How come everyone else built up their countries on the back of it?" How we keep the fossil fuels in the ground is as important an issue as how we finance the clean.