Professor John Sweeney:

If I can just add to what Senator Higgins was saying about tipping points, it combines with the issue of fairness. A number of years ago, I sat in a small grass-roofed hut in rural Malawi where the whole village came to express their concerns about their harvest. I spoke to the village elder who asked what was going wrong there. He said they used to be able to go out and plant their crops in the spring and the rains would come and there would be something to feed the village with in the autumn. Now he said the rains do not come. What happens in the autumn? They go out to harvest their crops, the rains have retreated early and the village is starving. I was asked who was causing this and I really felt ashamed. In a sense, I had to tell him that our per capita emissions in Ireland were 10.7 tonnes per person while those in Malawi were 0.9 tonnes per person. This is where the element of fairness has to come into our deliberations today. We cannot ignore the fact that we are grabbing a disproportionate share of the future and dwindling carbon budget to satisfy our political imperatives and economic needs. The tipping points have already arrived in many parts of the developing world and we cannot ignore that.