Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I will quickly respond to some of what has been said. To address Deputy Stanley's comments, the Bill is linked to CO2 levels. It states that the Minister shall not issue any further licences for exploration and development as long as the parts per million of carbon are over the safe level of 350 which the figure on which science has settled. If we managed to get that number down, we could explore for and use fossil fuels. However, once that threshold has been exceeded, trying to extract more fossil fuels flies in the face of scientific logic. That is what we are attempting to do.

There have been accusations of putting the cart before the house. I would put it the other way around. We must force the State to consider the possibility of investment in renewables and other countries must do the same. I had an interesting meeting this week with ESB Networks. The company spoke about the amount of energy that goes onto the grid when the winds are high and we have storms, which we are having increasingly. There is a dynamic possibility that can be explored and exploited further and we are ignoring it.

I will visit my sister in Copenhagen over Christmas. There is nothing but wind farms in the seas off Denmark, yet wind levels in Denmark are not even a fraction of what we have here. We are an island nation on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and we are not taking this issue seriously. This is the problem.

The Joint Committee on Climate Action last week heard from witnesses from Marine and Renewable Energy Ireland, MaREI, that the potential to invest in tidal and wave energy is enormous but no real effort is being made to provide the resources to do that and very little thought is being given to it. We must stop exploring and stop pretending that we, as a small nation, can continue to extract fossil fuels and at the same time have an impact on climate change because we cannot. It has to end and if we were to become a world leader, instead of a laggard, we would change our recently acquired reputation for the better by saying we have ended the issuing of further exploration licences.

I have acquired a legal opinion. No doubt Senator McDowell and others in the committee room are much better equipped to argue legal stuff, but my legal opinion is from the Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisor, OPLA. It states there is a very slight chance that the State will be liable for preventing the further issuing of licences. There is a small chance in the case of those who already have leases. I do not know from where the costings given to us by the Oireachtas Library and Research Service came, but we certainly did not look for them. Perhaps Deputy Lowry looked for them. They do not take account of the savings the State would make if we were to attempt to reduce our CO2 emissions by implementing this policy. We would actually save money. It is obvious to say, but there is no security, although we all go on about energy security. However, there is no security for any person or animal or biodiversity on the planet if we hurtle towards a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius.