Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

He also neglected to mention that while Ireland remains a member of the Paris Agreement, we are not taking action to fulfil the commitments we have made under it. In line with the European effort-sharing directives arising out of the Paris Agreement, Ireland is committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% on 2005 levels by 2030. The proposal also includes flexibilities related to the transfer of emissions trading system, ETS, allowances and inclusion of land use, land use change and forestry credits. The inclusion of these flexibilities in the draft proposals may ultimately reduce our Ireland's non-ETS 2030 targets to 20.4%

This is an attainable target and represents a moderate increase on our 2030 targets. However, given that we are on track to reduce our carbon emissions by just 4% to 6% on 2005 levels by 2030, this is unlikely to transpire if we continue with the status quo. While I acknowledge many might welcome a 2°, 4° or even 10° increase in Ireland's average temperature, I cannot overstate how devastating temperature increases will be. We have already induced significant climatic change. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous heat.

Further increases will have a devastating impact on how we lead our lives. Even if we meet the Paris goals of 2° warming, which is challenging in and of itself, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will experience almost annual heat waves which have the potential to take lives. It is worth noting that the combined populations of these two cities is close to 26 million people, so we can only imagine the potential for destruction and displacement. At 4° warming, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. The impact on food production is likely to be catastrophic. Many estimates suggest that for most staple cereal crops, such as wheat, rice and other crops that account for almost 90% of the world's dietary intake, there will be a 10% decline in yields for every 1° increase in temperature. In the face of a growing global population, that has frightening implications for global hunger and geopolitics. Some scientists, for example, have linked the Arab Spring of 2010 to a Russian wheat failure caused by an unprecedented summer heatwave.

Many of us in the Chamber are already aware of the potential consequences of our inaction. The real question is, therefore, what we need to do to cut Ireland's emissions. From a European perspective, Ireland has a unique greenhouse gas emissions profile, one which is relatively heavily weighted towards agriculture due to the lack of heavy industry within our overall economy. From a climate perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Ireland is among the most carbon-efficient food producers in the world and the sector has made an admirable effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1990, agricultural emissions have reduced by 9.7% in Ireland, while other areas such as transport have increased emissions by 120%. The flexibility awarded to us under the land use, land use change, and forestry components of the European effort-sharing reflects this.

There are also opportunities for Ireland to achieve win-win outcomes in meeting our reduction targets. For example, only 11% of our land is forested compared with 33% across the EU, and afforestation has a high potential for helping us to meet our emissions targets. Even the forests planted since 1990 absorb a massive 18% of Irish agricultural annual greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, economic returns from forestry are strongly competitive compared with other land uses and could pay a high dividends in terms of regional development and employment.

In contrast to agriculture, however, other sectors have been considerably less ambitious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Home heating now accounts for almost 10% of Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions and 27% of our overall energy use, placing us as the nation with the third highest emissions per capita in the residential sector. We are still reliant on oil, coal and peat to heat our homes, despite there being much cheaper, more convenient and effective ways to do so. Fuel poverty is estimated to affect anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 health households. We have all heard stories of mothers having to choose between heating their homes or feeding their children and pensioners who spend all day in a library to save on heating. There is no need for this. Retrofitting should be directly targeted at these homes.

While we have had some good programmes in the past, they have not been extended to the extent they should have been. They were not ambitious enough and we did not put enough money into them. Sadly, we will pay fines with money that could have been used to improve our housing stock had we planned a little better. While the Minister boasts about the funding that is allocated to the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, for the purposes of various energy schemes, the reality is that between 2011 and 2017 there was a 70% decline in the number of homes which were retrofitted. It is still very difficult for individual homeowners to access affordable financing to retrofit deeply their homes and we still have no scheme for the rental sector, which comprises almost 500,000 homes across the country.

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We need to wise up and create a new green deal agency that would create low cost financing and expert advice to people seeking to deep retrofit their homes. The time has passed to concentrate exclusively on lagging jackets and attic insulation. In order to meet our 2050 targets, Ms Marion Jammet of the Irish Green Building Council estimates we will have to bring 75% of our homes up to A2 BER ratings.

The other big elephant in the room is transport and I am pleased the Minister with that responsibility is here to listen at least to the contributions. As the economy recovers, Ireland's transport emissions are once again rising. They now represent approximately 20% of Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions, meaning there has been a 13% increase in the past four years. By 2020, transport is likely to account for 30% of Ireland's emissions. As with home heating, the technologies to reduce transport emissions are already there and have a significant amount of co-benefits. In 2008, we committed to 10% of the national fleet being electric by 2020. Clearly, Fine Gael could not handle the pressure of this and the target was subsequently revised down to having 50,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2020. Even this unambitious target now seems farcical. As we approach 2018, there are still only approximately 2,000 electric vehicles on Irish roads.

This is pathetic, and again, while the Government likes to claim it is invested in getting electric vehicles on the road, the policies suggest otherwise. There are still only 70 fast chargers in Ireland and while I appreciate the Minister has indicated there will be more, this means the Government expects road users to spend up to eight hours refuelling their cars on the side of the road or in a filling station. Even where chargers are provided, electric vehicle owners often find they are blocked by a standard petrol or diesel car or, even worse, that the electric vehicle was clamped while they use the charging point.

I raised the matter of benefit-in-kind before with the Minister and he indicated it would run for three years. I went back to my office to check the Finance Act, as passed, and it only provides for a year. The Minister has indicated he is favourably disposed to the longer term but to get people to invest in electric vehicles, particularly the corporate sector and people using them, certainty is required. Certainty would be provided if the law provided the benefit to extend for three years. It is in the Act that the measure is only for a year, albeit open to review. I hope the Minister for Finance does so but, sadly, people I might try to encourage to purchase electric vehicles have said there is no guarantee about benefit-in-kind. If it had been put in the Finance Act, at least we would have some certainty. It is a disappointment and unfortunate that nobody was able to convince the Minister for Finance or his officials of the benefit of that.

Charging infrastructure aside, we are not doing enough to incentivise people to purchase electric vehicles. When one looks to Norway, a leader when it comes to electric vehicles, we see a range of soft incentives, such as free parking, permission to use bus lanes and reduced motor tolls for electric vehicle users. I have proposed the elimination of those altogether for such vehicles and I know the Minister has made some proposals in recent days on this. None of these is currently in place in Ireland when we must really front-load this activity. We must make it a no-brainer for people in order to get to that critical level of 50,000 vehicles. We need to show initiative. I was in Amsterdam at a conference over the weekend and taxis there using the airport or certain parts of central districts must be electric vehicles. Such initiatives could force the commercial side to move on this.

On a public transport level, there is a similar level of apathy within the Government. Currently, where public transport infrastructure exists, it runs on fossil fuels, making us an outlier among our European peers. This is not for want of trying within the public transport system. Last year, when Dublin Bus made an application to trial hybrid buses, it was rejected by the National Transport Authority. I do not know if the Minister was aware of that. On a broader level, we continue to under-invest in public transport infrastructure. Per capita, Ireland spends only a third of what cities such as London or Manchester do on public transport. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult and inconvenient to commute between our regions and within our cities, something that is harming our overall economy and its competitiveness. Both IBEC and Dublin Chamber of Commerce are just two of the bodies that have highlighted the negative impacts this is having on Ireland as a foreign direct investment destination.

All this is to highlight not only the dangers that Ireland is unleashing as a result of our failure to deal with climate change but also to emphasise the opportunities we are missing. We are not only throwing away the chance to build a brighter future for our grandchildren but we are harming our own economic growth, jeopardising the livelihoods of our own agricultural communities, ruining our own quality of life by sitting in and between congested cities and inducing lung issues by burning dirty fossil fuels.

I urge the Ministers and the rest of this Government to heed what I and other contributors tonight will say, as well as the advice of countless non-governmental organisations and people who are very well qualified in this area. We must finally get real about climate change.

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