Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 4 November 2020

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

General Scheme of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2020: Discussion (Resumed)

Photo of Bríd SmithBríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance)
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I have a couple of questions.

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I want to ask either of the speakers from NESC about the question of a just transition. NESC's description is that a just transition must be equitable and participative in both the process and the outcome at national, regional and local levels. I have two questions. First, would NESC consider what just transition steps have been taken with Bord na Móna as fitting with that model NESC has outlined? Second, NESC looked at a case study in Scotland which took a national focus rather than a regional one. Has NESC looked at any case studies that do not focus on the national or regional level but on the industry-specific level? This is related to the case of Bord na Móna again. Has NESC looked, for example, at studies that examined the closure of the coal industry in Spain or in the Ruhr valley for a just transition model that might help us to apply it to the closure of the peat industry here?

I have a question for Professor Anderson as well. If he can, I ask Professor Anderson to expand on his work on why carbon sequestration and storage is not a good model to work on in order to achieve emissions targets? He has given us information on this in the previous committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment. Could Professor Anderson go into that briefly? An important part of our Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill is the reliance on carbon sequestration and storage going into the future.