Catherine Martin (Dublin Rathdown, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

While I appreciate that the capital plan features a number of measures to tackle climate change and deal with environmental sustainability, regrettably, environment is still considered a "selected driver" of long-term public investment requirements. The importance of climate change within the Government's capital plan is currently considered as only requiring intervention in respect of energy efficiency, renewable energy and flood prevention, despite the fact that both the Climate Change Advisory Council set up under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 and the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, have advised that what is needed is "a major societal and economic transformation".

The Environmental Protection Agency today delivered the catastrophic news that we will fail to meet our 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and that we are completely off target for our low-carbon transition by 2050 set out in the climate change Act. While this is first and foremost an environmental disaster, it also has the potential to be an economic one which would have a major impact on our fiscal sustainability. How is the Minister's Department preparing for the possibility of up to more than €5 billion in fines if we do not hit our emissions targets, a possibility which seems all the more real after today's news? Failure to meet these targets will have a serious impact on the economy and must be accounted for in the public purse. Where will the Minister find this money?

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