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

I welcome those in the Visitors Gallery and it is good to see so many people there. I congratulate my comrade, Deputy Bríd Smith, on this very good Bill. I believe it is a good combination of red and green and it is a measure that puts down a marker for this country and other countries that the over-reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable. Even though it is a limited measure in terms of climate change and the environment, it sends out the right message on any future exploration in this country. Fossil fuels are the past and renewable energies are the future. There can be no doubt that human activity driven by the profit system and capitalism has had and is having a detrimental effect on people, the climate and wildlife. We talk about the environment but, in the same vein, we have to talk about why the environment is being slowly destroyed. The elephant in the room starts with a C - it is capitalism. Capitalism destroys the planet constantly. Those who do not believe in climate change are in denial. What capitalism is doing to the earth is a clear and present danger.

The deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, Kevin Anderson, states that in order to deliver on the 2° Celsius climate warning target agreed at the UN conference in Paris almost three years ago, radical and rapid cuts in consumption among the world's richest consumers, who are the biggest polluters, and a re-ordering of economic priorities are necessary. I could go through a list of environmentalists, academics and politicians who constantly give the same narrative.

There are others in the House who will probably disagree, but capitalism is the clear and present danger. It is why we have climate change and are at the point of climate catastrophe. In order to make that transformation, we must transform the society we live in and the economic system that perpetrates those crimes. For the good of everyone who lives on this planet, we must address these issues. This Bill goes some way to doing that but we must change the system overall.

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