Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

This is the last batch of amendments on what should have been an historic item of legislation for Irish society but which is, unfortunately, a bitter disappointment. We are launching a last-ditch effort to make it a bit better than it is and all of these amendments are designed to work with legislation, such as the Scottish Act on which we based many of them. That would have brought about real commitments to nationally-binding emissions targets. The Minister has repeatedly stated over the past day and a half that we do not need to have this at all and it is a complete and utter irrelevancy as we are all right - we are covered by our legislation because European targets already bind us. However, we are already not going to meet those targets.

The Minister's faith in the EU and UN for setting targets is misguided. The 2030 agreements are widely considered to be a climbdown that will make keeping us within the threshold of between 2° and 3° very difficult, if not impossible. There are already reports that the COP21 Paris talks are being infiltrated by dirty energy lobbying groups who have done their best to undermine international agreements. At the COP19 Warsaw meeting oil and gas companies, which are obviously key players in causing climate change, actually sponsored some of the talks while the President in Poland co-organised a counter-summit with the coal industry. The UN has itself proactively worked to bring business, including fossil fuel industries, into the talks and these big businesses have done all they can to block progress, from undermining the science to proposing pie-in-the-sky technological fixes or straightforward public relations spins such as the idea of clean coal. Everything is being done to ensure they keep profiting regardless of the consequences for the climate. It is true that some of the more far-sighted administrators of capitalism, such as those who spoke at the banking meetings, have seen that this is damaging and destructive to everybody but lobbying is interfering with what people are trying to do.

The Irish Timesreported recently on a challenge by An Taisce over a planning approval for a €65 million road-widening scheme on the N86 between Tralee and Dingle. Its core argument was that an environmental impact study should have been carried out on the project. There was also a report that found that cuts to bus services would leave areas without any bus services at all. We are building roads without any consideration of the environmental impact while cutting bus services and failing to properly invest in rail. The NRA is allowed to do whatever it likes, whatever the consequences in terms of transport emissions, and we are continuing to give corporate welfare subsidies in the form of oil and gas fields as a present to fossil fuel companies. We have to see the Bill in this context.

We are saying we are going to do things, in a waffly way and without much content, but in reality the Government policy is to do the opposite. An indictment of this is our attitude to public transport, which is completely regrettable. We undermine rail transport and the delivery of metro lite all around the garden to the airport will not get us back on track in that area. We have not had any serious rail delivery nor have we had wave energy, offshore wind farms or geothermal stations, all of which we need if we are to seriously address climate change. Not only do we need the political will to invest in renewable energy as a core part of Ireland's public infrastructure, it is also critical to our collective survival on earth. We need the political establishment to stand up a bit more to the fossil fuel giants that are happily burning away, regardless of the consequences to ourselves or future generations just as long as profits can be made. This is all indicative of why we need emission reduction targets. It is not just because we cannot trust the international process, which is currently being undermined by lobbyists. The neoliberal policies implemented by this Government are having a negative impact and binding national targets which are independently assessed on a regular basis are the only hope we have of forcing the arm of the parties that comprise the Government and that support policies of austerity to ensure they give a damn about issues that go beyond one election term to another.

We need nationally binding targets but we also need to look beyond that to what we do next. This Government, like its predecessor, has been incredibly subservient to the unelected powers in Brussels and Frankfurt, enthusiastically embracing neoliberalism, privatisation, undermining public transport and so on. All these issues contribute to climate change. We, therefore, need more than targets - we need a new type of politics in Ireland, which has the foresight to put the good of society as the first benchmark rather than the profits of those who proclaim the benefits of the free market. What free market, private individual will spend money on smart grids, light rail, citywide composting systems, building retrofits, visionary transit systems, and urban redesigns to stop us from spending half or our lives in traffic jams? Private industry will not deliver the type of infrastructure that is necessary if we are to tackle climate change. Ms Naomi Klein stated:

The private sector is ill-suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments. If the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.

She gave examples from Paris where air pollution meant that the city banned cars for a day and so on. We should have a free public transport system in reality to encourage people out of their cars. The Government is doing the opposite. The cost of transport has increased by more than 60% in the past five years, services are being cut, the rural train system of almost a century ago has been utterly decimated and initiatives that were put forward in the public good have been consumed by for-profit businesses. That is damaging for everybody.

These amendments are important in salvaging something from the Bill. The Government has allowed Ireland to be used as a laboratory in some ways whereby it is experimenting with treating the population as a national resource to be mined for cash, with wealth transferred from the many to the few and this just cannot go on. Neoliberalism cannot tackle climate change. We need a new way of doing things.

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