Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

France and Costa Rica are attempting to do the same. If the three of us managed to ban further extraction of fossil fuels, it would make a great contribution. The science tells us that 80% of the already recognised and known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground if we are to tackle climate change. To go digging for more would be an absolute catastrophe and would tie us in for another 40 or 50 years to fossil fuel addiction across Europe.

I want to raise one other issue which has been brought to our attention repeatedly by the NGOs who are fighting the good fight to try to get us all to wake up and realise that a race for the future is going on here. Others have spoken about them and they include the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition and Trócaire. We are now in the process of building two large liquified natural gas terminals in the west and the south to act as conduits for fracked gas from North America, possibly the Alberta tar sands. It could end up being stored here and then piped over to the rest of Europe. This would see the largest remaining reserve of carbon dioxide on the planet being brought to the markets and the economies of western Europe. It is madness. It is absolute insanity. It treats natural gas as some kind of a transitional gas.

Interestingly, I had this conversation with the Minister, Deputy Naughten, recently and he acknowledged that the gas companies try to present themselves as green. They say gas is green and that we should use it because it is lovely. We get the same sense from the advertising and encouragement to use natural gas of the companies that run it in this country. There is nothing green about it. It is a fossil fuel and the use of it and the infrastructure that we are building around the coast will lock us in for another 30, 40 or 50 years to a continued reliance on carbon dioxide, when what we need to be doing is keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

I think it was Deputy Fitzmaurice, although it may have been one of the Sinn Féin Deputies, who spoke about paying farmers not to grow any more beef. That is also completely inaccurate. The biggest beef farmers in this country, the likes of Goodman and Bruton, are the ones that are pushing for the major export deals with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Middle East. We are growing more cattle now to export live to those countries. These countries never ate beef or dairy and had a much healthier diet than we do, but they are now being encouraged to take this on and we are growing that beef here, adding to our emissions.

Our experience in Bonn was very interesting. I thought I would find it a cynical exercise but I learned hugely from it. I learned that, despite the emergency of thousands of companies which have original and inventive ways of dealing with and promoting renewable energy and of extracting from air, sea, wind and, in particular, solar power, there were many companies that were prepared to work with others and to sell and promote their products to tackle the question of climate chaos. However, the problem is that the elephant in the room was never mentioned. It was not mentioned at our interparliamentary meeting and it was not mentioned when the question was discussed with the people at stands. The elephant in the room is the giant corporations of Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and all of the giant fossil fuel corporations across the globe who wield the power and have the money. They control whole economies and countries and wield the power and, I believe, really influence what happens in this State.

We have a crucial role in fighting climate change by achieving that one small measure of keeping liquified natural gas in the ground. Similar to being the first to promote a vote on gay marriage, we can be the first to promote the banning of further exploration. We could stop those liquified natural gas terminals being built and promoted on our coast. We could revolutionise the unrolling of renewables, making sure that communities and micro-projects were encouraged to buy into the grid and put those projects and communities, and not big business, at the heart of our revolution. The market is the problem and not the solution.

In dealing with climate change, the Minister for Transport Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, who I am looking directly at now, in his role as Minister with responsibility for transport, has to recognise that competition in the market for running buses and trains will not deal with the problem. We need public transport to be just that - public - and for it to be run in the public interest and not in the interests of private companies who will compete with each other and tender for routes. Rather than pumping all our resources into building more motorways, we should be increasing the level of our PSO services and have a fully funded, growing and ever better public transport system that will take cars off the road.

I admit that kind of spending would be a lot. However, today we discussed at length the question of PESCO. I will repeat it just for the sake of driving myself mad if not the everyone else. Overnight we can join a defence force in Europe that brings us from spending €900 million on our defence budget to between €3 billion and €4 billion. Overnight we seem to be able to do it. We have no problem signing up to it. It is being shoved down the throats of Deputies in this Dáil that this is the only way to go and we have to have it in. Where do we find that kind of money to spend on weapons of war, destruction and death? Instead could we spend it on something positive for the planet such as renewable energies or bringing public transport up to scratch to take cars off the road. That sort of mechanism will not happen because the market will not allow it. We should listen to the slogan of those who marched in Bonn at the climate change conference: "System Change, Not Climate Change." They also advocated, and I believe it is absolutely true, that capitalism is completely incompatible with climate justice.

To come to my proposal, the Citizens' Assembly, as it did with the eighth amendment, has done an amazing job in its consideration of climate change. Stop Climate Chaos Coalition stated that its 13 recommendations on the State's action on climate change included common sense, practical proposals that address many of the areas raised by the coalition. It continued that, most important, the recommendations indicate that the Irish public is prepared to back immediate and strong action to tackle climate change and that the Government now, given the Citizens' Assembly recommendations, has the political mandate to implement new and effective policies urgently and ensure the weaknesses of the national mitigation plan are overcome.

My proposal is that we do the same with the 13 recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly as we did with its 13 recommendations on the eighth amendment. I propose that we establish a special committee to consider them. It should be an all-party, cross-party Oireachtas committee that would meet in special sessions over a number of months, take each recommendation seriously, call and examine witnesses, ask who else would like to attend and begin to draw up a serious plan that we can implement. Too often, climate change is the last thing we talk about, or it is spoken about on the Thursday night graveyard shift. Alternatively, we are told we cannot talk about the mitigation plan until after the reports are published. I seriously propose that we set up a special Oireachtas committee to consider the outcome of the Citizens' Assembly deliberations on climate chaos.

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