Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I hear agreement in the House. We would need to be blind not to see that climate change is now arriving at a speed and scale we cannot ignore. March was the 11th record month in a row for temperatures, which were about 1.3° Celsius above the 1952 to 1980 average. Fort McMurray in Canada was today evacuated because wildfires started a month early. The melting of the Greenland ice sheets started at an incredible scale a month earlier than usual, and with it a large body of cold water in the north-west Atlantic, the one cold spot in this record year for heat.

Storm Frank, on 30 December, broke all records in terms of what one would expect in reaching the North Pole. A cold body of air should not allow such a cyclone to reach the North Pole. On 30 December there was a heatwave at the North Pole and temperatures were 35° Celsius above what the expected temperature. It was above freezing in the North Pole on 30 December. Some 80% of the Great Barrier Reef north of Cairns was severely bleached during its summer, which is our winter. Part of that is countered by the El Niño effect, but the vast majority of it happens because of what science tells us is abundantly clear and true.

It is for that reason that a deal was signed in Paris which, for the first time, brought real consensus to an international agreement. We have to act on this. We have to take dramatic action that involves everyone and changes everything. We hear agreement in the House that climate change is an issue about which we should be doing something, but the reality is that we are not doing anything. We are not leading as a country or reacting to the scale of the crisis in the manner one would expect.

The Minister is correct. It is shocking that the Trinity agreement contains not a single mention of this strategic issue and there is no intention on the part of the parties involved to say that they will be good at dealing with the issue because that will be good for Ireland as well as our responsibilities in the wider world. However, I call into question decisions made during the Minister's time in office in the previous Government when we went ahead with incineration as if burning waste for the next 40 years was the right thing to do in a climate change world.

I understand that in every argument between the Minister, Deputy Kelly, and the former Minister, Alex White, there was staunch opposition in the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government to any further development of our renewable supplies, a weakening of the building standards and a White Paper that failed utterly to set the scale of ambition required to address climate change seriously. We cannot be serious about climate change if we are proposing to make the changes the paper proposed in 2100. Expecting our grandchildren and great-grandchildren to step up to the plate will be too late.

It is clear what we need to do. We need a completely fossil-free energy system within three or four decades. We need to change our transport, energy and heating systems in order that they are fossil free and we can play our part. We need to be brave. My colleagues on the left said they would change the system and nationalise oil reserves. We cannot touch the oil reserves in the Irish Atlantic because we know four fifths of fossil fuels have to stay in the ground. We need to step up to the plate and say that Ireland recognises the reality in the storms that are coming our way and can hear it in the fires, droughts and other extreme weather events that are happening in the rest of the world.

If we are not willing to step up to the plate in terms of that level of commitment, we will be followers and will miss out on the industrial and social revolution that will come to those countries that do provide a lead. We can and should provide a lead. It is in our interest as a country to do so, but we are not doing that. The ESRI has told us not to do anything and to wait ten or 20 years, as has the ESB. Most manifestos have nice references to things such as ocean energy. I am in favour of that, but we know that it is a 20- to 30-year 20:1 bet. We need to act now on a large scale and work on four areas.

In electricity, where there is real potential, we can achieve 100% renewable energy from our own energy system. It is doable and will be cheaper, more secure, cleaner and better for our health because it does not pollute the air. We need to switch on solar power on our roofs first in order that people own energy. We need to continue with onshore wind. It is so cheap that we would be mad not to do so, but it needs to be community-owned. There is no reason we should not set an objective whereby we all own our power by the middle of this century. As we change windmills, systems evolve and develop and the technology improves, we can have energy that is 100% community-owned within three decades. It is now technologically possible to do so.

We need to go offshore. Doing so is more expensive but we need to connect with our neighbours in the UK and France. In so doing we can balance the entire system. It is a much more competitive and secure approach and we have a comparative advantage. This is all doable if we have the political will.

At the same time we need to use the technology companies that are here to learn how to balance systems in order that electricity is used efficiently. Electricity will be the fuel of the future in a climate change world. We will use it in our transport and heating systems, as well as to power lights, mobile phones and everything else.

Being good at the new technological skill of balancing demand and variable supply is what we as a country can excel at. It will put us at the centre of a new industrial revolution. There is no reason for us to turn that down. It would be the equivalent of Birmingham in the middle of the 18th century saying it did not want to participate in the Industrial Revolution. Why would we do that when we have everything in place to lead and be good at this?

We need deal with heat. We need to turn off the 1 million central heating systems throughout the country. We cannot keep burning fossil fuels. We need to help our people by insulating buildings and installing new electric heat pump systems, which help to balance power supplies, using our own fuels rather than fuel from the Middle East or Russia. This is doable.

Other Deputies referred to electric vehicles. To change our transport system will take a little bit of political commitment. We need to create the right environment because electric cars are starting to arrive on our roads. It has taken five years longer than we thought about five or six years ago, but it is happening. Every car company in the world is investing in this technology. Why not be a place that welcomes such vehicles and use that approach as a balancing system with variable electricity supply? That is the advantage of choosing an electric vehicle.

If we are serious, the scale of investment has to change and climate change has to be addressed in the final agreement and documents for the programme for Government. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland said if we are to meet our 2020 targets, let alone reach the 2030 ones, we need a threefold increase in investment in retrofitting buildings and a fivefold increase in investment in the alternative transport system.

The programme for Government documents with which we have been presented suggest we are great because we will spend €100 million on green energy, but that is a minute fraction of what we need to spend if we are serious and want to show that we can lead.

The advantage is that it would also help to address some of the problems in cities which do not work because of the car-based system we have. This makes sense, not just from an environmental perspective but economically and socially as well.

Last but not least, the farming system is not exempt. If we exempt it, it will account by 2020 for at least 50% of our non-ETS emissions, those emissions outside the big industry trading system. If agricultural emissions increase because of our other plans then we will have a fundamental problem. We will have to consider what other way we can contribute. Will we say to the rest of the world following the Paris agreement that it should count Ireland out? What would that say about us as a country? How would we feel about that? What sense of moral authority would we have if we were to take such an approach? It makes no sense because, as we heard in the previous debate, our agriculture system needs to change anyway. The current system is not working for the 70,000 suckler farmers to whom Deputy Danny Healy-Rae referred. They are not making any money out of the current system. We can get a better system which pays farmers better.

It is not as if we should hold on to the status quo. That might work for the big companies and the balance of payments, for example, when we ship cattle all over the world. The Minister spoke earlier about possible live exports to Turkey. Turkey will be bloody hot in the coming months and those cattle would have a tough time on any voyage. We need to change. We need to think about how we could use our land differently and how we can protect our land. How can Bord na Mona put advertisements in the newspapers with a hare on the cover, as I saw today? The implication is that we are great for nature and we are looking after nature. We are not. We are burning bogs in a way that is utterly reprehensible and should not be allowed. That has to stop if we are serious about tackling climate change.

See this speech in context