Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

On the issue of carbon tax, Deputy Stanley's good question on how one ensures any rise in that tax is not regressive in practice, and Deputy Eamon Ryan's question on how we prevent it from being the only thing we do, I am much taken by Mr. Curtin's proposal that we ramp it up and use the income constructively but I am very aware of the risk Deputy Eamon Ryan alerted us to, namely, that it might be the only thing the Government does and that it will stand back after doing it. My experience is that while it is a useful signal, people actually respond to the subsidies and a congestion charge, for example, rather than a road tax or an increase in diesel charges. They responded to the plastic bag tax. They respond to initiatives that are smaller and more tangible.

I accept Mr. Curtin's analysis that every scheme gains more traction if there is a basic price of carbon underlying it than is higher than we have now. The debate on progressive and regressive measures is very important, however. It is worth remembering that when the carbon tax was introduced in budget 2010, VAT was reduced at the same time. The Government did not make much of that but it was a case of one regressive indirect tax being increased and one being reduced, roughly to the same annual level. There was not much communication or championing of that as a revenue-neutral way of avoiding socially regressive impacts. I agree that if we were to proceed in this regard now, we would have to be careful about the people in lower income tax brackets and, potentially, those outside the tax net altogether.

We should ring-fence some of the money and not just say we will do so. It was said in 2010 but, with the recession, it was not done. It has to be ring-fenced. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and the Department of Finance do not like hypothecation but we need to ring-fence the money for some sort of transition fund.

There is a radical proposal, floated in the United States, to give some of the money back as part of a tax and dividend system. If one takes all the tax in and gives it all back per capitaas a direct dividend, in practice lower-income households do not use as much of the windfall because they have lower overall pollution even though they spend a higher proportion of their income on polluting activities. They would actually get a cash transfer from the state. It becomes more than equitable and has a progressive impact. It is certainly worth considering. Perhaps half could be done by dividend and half by putting money in a ring-fenced fund. I am not sure we should be reducing our taxes right now given where we are in the economic cycle.

On the issue of binding sectoral targets, I have never been of the opinion, throughout the eight years of the climate law campaign, that we needed to have such targets in law. I believe we would be okay with a system more like that in the United Kingdom, where what is legally binding is the overall envelope for a five-year period. We currently have no domestic legally binding target. Our political target, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, is underwritten by the law but not actually in the law. In the United Kingdom, one has to come before the Parliament every five years with a carbon budget not just for the next five years but for the next 20 years. This results in a political, democratic negotiation on what departments and sectors are to receive in the budget. It might be difficult to put the sectoral number into law but if one puts the carbon budget number into law through a revised climate Bill, it is really powerful. It has worked in the United Kingdom to induce a debate not on whether we act but how we share the effort between the various sectors.

On the energy mix, I was asked about electric vehicles.

I was searching for the numbers there, and I have found them. Based on figures from 2016, even with the current mix, an electric vehicle will average about 70 g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, whereas with a combustion engine the average output was 118 g per kilometre in 2016. Even now, it is much better to use an electric vehicle that is charged by plugging in. Obviously that will get better the more we decarbonise the grid, which of course we must do.

Absolutely, I think the Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill 2016 and the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development (Climate Emergency Measures) Bill 2017 are hugely significant, as much for their symbolic value and their message about where Ireland is going-----