Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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Yes. I thank the witnesses for their presentations and their work. I also mention the presence of representatives from Friends of the Earth, who similarly have obviously been doing a lot of work on this. They have not been invited due to an oversight which we attempted to resolve earlier but were unable to due to various rules about privilege. Hopefully we will not make that mistake in the future if we are all back and re-elected to this committee.

I will start with a question which is partly an assessment of COP28 and then look forward to COP29. Obviously, there were positives in COP28 - for example, in some of the language around pointing towards a phase-down of fossil fuels in energy systems - but I felt that some of that analysis was overblown and greenwashed. When you get into the meat of it in Article 28, there is stuff about unabated coal power as opposed to even just coal, never mind the rest of the fossil fuels, and there are references to technologies. All of this points to something substantially less than what the science indicates we need, which is a rapid phase-out of all fossil fuels, We should not rely on the magic of future technology, which allows us to put off the radical changes we need now. How do the witnesses feel things are shaping up in terms of COP29? Friends of the Earth has pointed out that the Presidency's action agenda does not include any mention of phasing out coal, oil and gas, which is obviously worrying. How do they see the prospects of getting substantially stronger language into the final outcome?