Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that climate change is a clear and present danger. Though it may seem abstract and far away at times, climate change increasingly brings reality home to everyone's lives, with heavy rainfall, storms and floods causing distress and dislocation in people's lives. In her book, This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein points out that the natural world and the economic system are on a collision course and one of them is going to have to change utterly and that either we change the priorities of capitalism, that is, profit and competition, or the natural world may no longer be able to sustain the planet as a place to live for humanity and animal and plant kingdoms. This addiction to expanding profits is not sustainable, even in the short term. Put simply, capitalism is polluting and poisoning our planet in the interests of big business and the wealth of the super rich.

What does this mean for Ireland? Is our priority the rich and powerful or the interests of the people who live here? Combatting climate change requires reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we release through human activities. In construction, reducing our expenditure on heating by improving insulation reduces both carbon emissions and heating bills. New designs for houses with better insulation and heating systems, known as passive houses, can reduce bills to under €200 a year for the average house. However, the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has instead demanded that local authorities delete all references to passive houses in their development plans. Incredibly, at the request of the Construction Industry Federation and the building lobby, the Minister, Deputy Kelly, gutted proposals to make the passive house the standard in all newly built homes. Instead of human needs and interests, profits and the market were put first.

In transport, the National Transport Authority has also focused on promoting competition rather than increasing public transport's capacity to cater for the massive shift we need away from cars and onto buses, trams and trains. Policy seems more geared towards facilitating giant transport multinationals such as Transdev and Arriva than on our transport needs or environment. Piecemeal investments in housing and transport will not deliver the kind of change needed to cut carbon emissions. What is needed is a national transport and housing strategy that provides both high quality service and low emissions.

In Ireland, agriculture accounts for 29% of all emissions but after the excuses given by the Taoiseach at the Paris climate conference in December it seems that big business and the beef barons were calling the shots. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, "Overall it is evident...that Ireland is not on track towards decarbonising the economy...and will face steep challenges...unless further policies and measures are put in place."

People Before Profit believes that we should massively increase our forests, nationalise all of the State's gas and oil fields, ban fracking and use all of the State's natural resources to switch the economy to a carbon neutral basis as soon as practically possibly. We support the taxing of corporate profits to fund the switch to renewable forms of energy generation and investing in wave, solar and wind power generation. Out of consideration for those who will inherit the earth, it is imperative that we leave it as we found it. I believe it is not the presence of human beings on the earth that is causing grave harm to our beautiful planet but the system that has put profits before people and profits before the environment. Until we challenge the system, there is a stopwatch on all of us and our time is running out.

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