Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

I will say a couple of words on the civil society role and where there are opportunities there. Before I do that, I wish to come back to the question raised regarding the drawbridge, which is an interesting question for the European Union. The US is doing more than pulling up the drawbridge. It is deluding itself of a great past it is going to go back to that is not in any definition sustainable. It is swearing off all forms of renewable energy and going back to a fossil-fuelled past, and that seems to be the proposal. I saw today that the great big beautiful Bill Trump has proposed includes the US postal service getting rid of all the electric vehicles and destroying the charging infrastructure it has at a cost of €1.5 billion just because they do not like that stuff. This proposal is slightly delusional or fantastic in several ways. However, the technology is winning out. The Stone Age did not end because of a lack of stones and the steam age did not end because of something similar. Renewables such as wind and solar are now cheaper than gas and nuclear energy. Texas is the biggest renewable state in the US for those reasons; it can make money from it.

Whatever Trump and his Administration do now may delay things but it will not ultimately stop the transition. The question is whether it will make it so slow that it does not contain climate breakdown. When it comes to climate breakdown, there is no drawbridge that will save Florida or New York from the rising sea levels or storms. I do not want to be too polemical but it is delusion. Denial was also mentioned earlier. It is denial of the reality they face for some backward-looking fantasy, all because the US has a lot of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, China, which does not have a lot of fossil fuels, is, despite the narratives you hear, powering ahead with electrification, moving electricity to renewables and moving transport to electric vehicles. We do not hear these stories but it is moving quite fast in that direction. This leaves Europe in an interesting place. We do not have fossil fuels and we are trying to get off them from our near neighbours like Russia. Are we going to buy more fossil fuels from the US and Middle East or are we going to follow a more - I am not sure we want to call it this - Chinese model of getting the heck off fossil fuels and using renewables as fast as possible because that is what will make us more resilient? If our choice is between buying other people's expensive, dirty fuels from volatile areas or developing our own indigenous European solar and wind and interconnecting in Europe, one of those makes a lot more strategic sense for both resilience, autonomy and economics as well as sustainability. That is the choice Europe will face for the next few years, including during the Irish Presidency.