Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this motion. First, I would like the motion to be more specific. It suggests we should set a target for a reduction in CO2 emissions, but what should that target be? The European Union has taken an honourable lead in this area and in international negotiations and has put forward a target of a 30% cut below 1990 levels by 2020. It has decided on this target because its scientists, and ours, show we are in severe danger of crossing a tipping point in the global climate where a number of events could occur and create a catastrophic runaway climatic effect which would threaten the viability of humankind on the planet. They recognise and realise that now is the time to stop us going over the tipping points where we would see the likes of the Siberian tundra melting and methane being released into the atmosphere, which would have a catastrophic effect, or the Amazon rainforest dying back due to climate changes. They tell us that to stop this happening we must keep temperatures below a 2o increase. In order to do that, we need to cut our emissions by approximately 30%. We must try to get below 1990 levels by 2020.

The Minister's strategy report tries to wriggle out of all sorts of obligations and suggests we might only need a 2% cut because perhaps America and China would not join in and, therefore, we would not have an international solution. It also suggests the European Union will again see Ireland as the poor man of Europe and give us the same soft deal we got the last time. In my mind, none of this is relevant because the 30% cut is only a start. We need to go beyond that in the next decade and make a similar reduction again. Let us examine the Minister's fantasy situation where we would only have to make the level of cuts to bring us 2% below 1990 levels. The reality is the Government's energy agency predicts our emissions from energy will increase by 30% in that period on the basis of current practice, but there is nothing from the Government showing us how it will reverse it.

If we are to achieve the target and stop climate change as part of a global international reaction, we will have to wake up and be honest about the challenge ahead of us in that regard. This is not a small or easy challenge. It makes sense to accept the challenge. We know that in the same timeframe global oil production is due to peak and following that there will be a 2% to 3% reduction each year in availability of oil globally. We can only imagine the price increases that will correspond to that. By some strange coincidence, we need to make cuts by roughly 2% to 3% per year on the amount of fossil fuels we are burning. However, currently our use is increasing by 2% to 3% per year, and by 7% in transport. Turning the country around from a 2% to 3% increase per year to a reduction of 2% to 3% per year is the biggest political challenge the State will ever face.

Globally, it is the biggest challenge mankind has ever faced. The challenge is to maintain our civilization and maintain people in the life to which they are accustomed and to keep them alive. We need to start being honest with the people and ourselves as to the scale of the challenge. We must start by setting a target. We must not just say we will set a target, but agree on that target. This is not a party political issue, but one for the future of mankind. Whether one is left or right, Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, it does not matter.

What must we do to achieve the target. Bio-fuels alone will not do it. They will help us and we can use waste products and give farming a boost, but we cannot replicate the amount of liquid oil we currently burn with bio-fuels. The petrol we currently use is a bio-fuel. One hundred million years ago, small bio-planktons in warm seas died, fell to bottom and were covered in sand, cooked and turned into oil. The oil we used in 1997 was the equivalent of some 420 years of bio-fuel growth that had accumulated over the millennia.

We can never replicate that store from our bio-fuel stocks. They will be useful and will provide a vital strategic oil asset, but they will not solve the problem. We need radical and utterly different transport in future if we are to meet those targets. Parties opposite and elsewhere say that this is in some way mad, strange, impractical or uneconomic. If they are serious about climate change and want to discuss it, they must talk about serious changes in the transport system because that is one area in which we can make reductions. That leads to a more civil society which works.

We need to be honest. If other parties here are going to don green clothing they should be specific rather than saying, as in the Government's strategy paper, that there are measures planned that have yet to be quantified, such as the sustainable transport action plan. Why is it not quantified and set out? Is it simply set out until after the election as a vague promise that means nothing?

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