Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

In his address to the United Nations climate change meeting in September, the Taoiseach spoke about the need for a collective global response and about the need for corporations to take responsibility, to define objectives and to take action. He also spoke about the need for sustainability. The Taoiseach is correct that a global response is needed urgently considering the imminent threat of rapid rises in global warming rates, the huge environmental damage to ecosystems this will do and the huge impact it can have on weather patterns, sea levels and so on, which can have devastating effects on coastal communities, many of which are in a highly vulnerable condition. In respect of this critical issue of climate change, did or does the Taoiseach reflect at all on the fundamental conflict that exists between a world economic system that on the one hand is driven by powerful corporations with the maximisation of private profit and super-profits as their key aim and how on the other hand, this threatens the climate by virtue of the cost-cutting emissions put in by those corporations and their disregard for the vulnerability, needs and horrific poverty of hundreds of millions of people?

Is the Taoiseach aware of the world-famous Canadian author and activist, Naomi Klein, and her recently published book on climate change and its catastrophic effects, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate? She states the world has not "done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because these things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism", which is the reigning ideology. She states further that greed, "fully liberated by lax regulation and monitoring", is hugely at the source of the types of pollution and emissions that cause global warming. Is the Taoiseach aware of the report some time ago in the journal, Climatic Change, which stated that a mere 90 companies worldwide have produced 63% of the accumulated global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 and 2010? Moreover, it states that nearly 30% of those emissions were belched out by the top 20 companies and that half of the estimated emissions occurred in the past 25 years. Is this not a really alarming picture regarding the causes of climate change?

How does the Taoiseach envisage this issue being resolved worldwide when one has this fundamental conflict between what is causing change and the fact that governments in Europe and all over the world are in the pockets of those same corporations, if not corruptly then through ideologically sharing the same ideas? In addition, as can be seen in Europe for example, there is the huge lobbying power of these massive corporations, which have ready access to the European Commission and to Ministers and Prime Ministers from every Government throughout the European Union. What hope is there of a radical challenge to the activities of these corporations and the profit maximisation that is militating against serious measures being taken to cut emissions radically in the interests of humanity and of the future of our environment and ecosystems?

Does it not make a mockery of ordinary people throughout the world how even climate change is being turned into yet another type of global market situation in which the emissions trading scheme essentially has major corporations buying the right to pollute? Is this not quite an obscene development? What is the Taoiseach's view this regard? What practical steps does the Taoiseach believe should be taken and spelled out to people here and internationally to challenge this established situation which, unless it is challenged and changed, will continue to wreak further havoc?

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