Professor Kevin Anderson:

That is a huge challenge but I will have a go at it. First, it is important to stand back and think that from the viewpoint of poorer communities in more vulnerable parts of the world or indeed, from our own children's future or that of future generations, given the overwhelming scientific evidence we have had for two to three decades now, they may look at our regime and say that we are despotic. We have to reflect on this from different stances than necessarily our own.

More parochially, the legal framework is that we need to have a carbon budget framing. Personally, we have to get at it at some point in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, process. At a national level, we need to be setting these up, as I laid out previously. As to what that would look like for Ireland, Ireland could look at what its budget should be to make its contribution to the Paris Agreement. I would argue it is something in the region of 300 million tonnes. Then the argument is how that is divided out within Ireland. I am familiar with this from within the UK because we have done some of this work already where we have said that the concept of subsidiarity here might be really important. We have looked at producing carbon budgets for regions. We have done the same in Sweden as well, for regional governments and for local governments, saying that this is what their carbon budget would look like and looking at what areas of powers they have to influence emissions. They are much more attuned to the local requirements of their societies than, for example, in the UK, Westminster would be. There is some merit in downscaling from a national carbon budget to a regional carbon budget, recognising there are big boundary issues when one tries to do that.

Another way to think about this is that a carbon budget, whatever language we might like to use to avoid this, is a rationing issue. We have to live within a certain carbon budget if we are to avoid certain temperatures and, therefore, we have to ration out that carbon budget. Once we are prepared to acknowledge that and not shy away from the concept of rationing, that helps us much more in thinking about what that legal framework might look like. Could there be fee and dividend, whereby there is a very high carbon tax but, in fact, the money from that carbon tax is distributed back to the society evenly? Therefore, the high emitters, such as me, would pay a huge amount of carbon tax, but that would be distributed evenly, for instance, across people in Ireland. Could there be personal carbon allowances for domestic use of energy and for transport energy, for instance? Should there be frequent flyer levies that really impact people who fly very regularly? In fact, it would simply stop people flying very regularly, but it would not stop people flying once a year on holiday perhaps. We have to tailor those policies on the understanding that this is a rationing issue.

I am involved in the Scottish citizens' assembly, which starts this weekend. I am one of the evidence leads for that. It is important to recognise that most of the people in our society are not the real high emitters. They are not the problem. Probably, many of their emissions can be dealt with structurally and through technologies, etc. It is the high emitters among us who will have to change our behaviours significantly and the legislation, ultimately, will have to impose changes on us. The problem is, of course, we are the legislators, the academics, the journalists and the barristers. We are the people who make the policy framework and we require the foxes to guard the chicken coop.