Professor Kevin Anderson:

I am keen to comment on that. Some really interesting work has gone on over several years. It was done initially by Chancel and Piketty and later by Carter and Julia Steinberger. It looks at who the emitters are. We have to remind ourselves that many people in Ireland, perhaps even the majority of people in Ireland, are relatively low emitters. Most emissions come from a relatively small suite of our societies. At a global level, 50% of emissions come from 10% of the emitters and 70% of emissions come from 20% of emitters. In highly unequal societies like the UK, USA and, to some degree, Ireland the emissions will be greatly skewed to a small proportion of the population. For many people in Ireland it is not about having significant change imposed upon them. It is about having those changes imposed upon the high emitters. These are people like myself, the mobile elite, who like to think we are green and clean. However, when we need to look at our carbon footprint and ask where we live, how big our houses are, whether we have a second home, whether we drive and fly much and whether we eat more exotic foods and more packaged food. Do we have large fridges and freezers? We consume far more because our incomes are far higher. The science has made clear that this is the group where the majority of the emissions derive from. Seeing all Irish people in the same light misunderstands where or who we must tailor the policies towards.

That plays back into the just transition. If we are genuinely trying to deliver on Paris, then we are talking about a Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR,-type scenario or something like the Marshall plan. It is a new deal or Marshall plan framework. That is the way we need to look at this. Such a future is awash with jobs, from retrofitting to changing the transport infrastructure and a significant roll-out of renewable energy. There are vast numbers of jobs in these areas. At the moment we are looking at piecemeal ad hocbolt-ons to business as usual. That will not resolve the climate change challenge. It is an equity issue about the asymmetric distribution of emissions among the population. We need to recognise that what we are talking about is a new deal. It involves an FDR framing of the scale of the challenge.