Dr. Yamina Saheb:

I did not want to push for Ireland to join the French position, because I am a French citizen, but I am delighted to hear that is being thought about in the Irish Parliament. It is not just France and Spain. France was the first country to send a letter that was made public, and it was followed by Spain. Poland, however, is also pushing for the withdrawal, as is Greece. One of the Baltic states has also adopted this position, as has one of the Nordic states.

We already have at least six countries and, to my knowledge, the French Government is trying to build, with the Spanish Government, a coalition of countries that may join the idea of a collective withdrawal. Given the climate emergency situation and given we cannot amend the treaty in such a way that we remove the protection of fossil fuels, I think collective withdrawal is an option we should look at more carefully. The French letter asked the Commission to assess the implications of collective withdrawal. To my knowledge, this kind of assessment has not been published by the European Commission, so if Ireland could join in again asking the Commission to do this assessment, that would be good.

Are we going to make the transition more costly if we stay in the treaty? This is obvious. We will have more cases. In 2018, I first said we will have cases like the one in the Netherlands, or the German case where they signed an agreement to avoid the ISDS case and that agreement was for several billion euro of taxpayers’ money. At that time, people could not understand that it was going to happen because only a few people were able to understand the IPCC report and the implications of the 1.5°C target for our countries. There is no doubt that by staying in the treaty, the cost will be extremely high for us. Even when countries win - Spain, for example, won a few cases - they have to pay for the legal costs, and it is quite costly. This money should go to the transition. It should go to support energy-poor people in our countries. I do not see, as a citizen, why our taxpayers should pay the polluters to stop polluting. Basically, it is as if someone who commits crime in our country is paid to stop committing crime. This is what we are doing rather than doing anything against the crime. Actually, climate change is crime. It is not yet recognised as ecocide but that will come in the future. People are already dying because of climate change, and we already have some cases in the EU after what happened this summer, and we expect to have more cases. We will see following the IPCC report, especially report No. 2 this coming February, that the climate risks are extremely high.