Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are, and five minutes is very limited time, so I will try to be brief and perhaps just refer to matters that were not referred to in the committee yesterday.

The emissions figures for 2017 have been published and, overall, show a slight reduction in carbon emissions. The areas that drove this reduction were energy, which is down 6.9%, residential, which is down 5%, and transport, which is down 2.4%. It is acknowledged, however, that a good deal of the reduction in transport was the result of transport tourism, whereby petrol and diesel are purchased elsewhere. The areas where there emissions continue to increase are agriculture, which is up 2.9%, industry and manufacturing, which is up 3.4%, and public services, which is up 6.7%. This is disappointing. It is a fairly familiar story and follows the pattern of last year and the year before last. The underlying difficulty is that we have not succeeded in breaking the connection between carbon emissions and economic growth. Overall, as we look to 2020, the prediction is that we will effectively be 95% off target and will only achieve a 1% reduction by 2020. There is, therefore, a need to step up massively our commitment in this area.

As the House will be aware, the national mitigation plan was published in July 2017 and sets out the signposts of the direction of travel. The national development plan went into much more detail and set out detailed projects, with €30 billion provided for sustainable transport and climate action. The plan has a very strong pipeline of projects, but this transition plan shows that even with this, we will be 47 million tonnes off target. Of this figure, the national development plan will meet 27 million tonnes, so there still is a very substantial amount of work to be done. For this reason, I will develop a whole-of-Government strategy. I have the agreement of Cabinet to come back to Government early in the new year with such a strategy and I will seek to have it implemented on the same basis as we implemented the Action Plan for Jobs. There will be oversight from my Department but also the support of the Taoiseach and the Cabinet committee to ensure actions committed to are timelined and delivered.

That has been an area, or at least an approach, that has been successful where the co-ordination of a number of Departments is being sought, especially where line businesses may draw their eyes elsewhere. It is crucial that we deliver on our climate change commitments on a cross-government basis. The national mitigation plan sets out 20 actions that have not been delivered within the timescale envisaged. There are 22 actions which are complete and 14 which are entirely new commitments, while many of the others are on track. On the 20 actions that have not been delivered, it is mainly because they have been delayed. If we had time, I could go through them in detail. They have mostly been delayed by a short time, are partially complete or, for example, in the case of carbon tax, where there was to be an examination of its impact, we have the report from the Economic and Social Research Institute. From the point of view of the Oireachtas, therefore, we have the material to deliver that action. There are, however, some actions that are at the evolutionary stage of their development. We will need to inject an impetus not just into all of these 20 areas but also way beyond them.

The report, usefully, also shows some of the new things that are developing and worthy of note by the Oireachtas. They include the €3 billion green bond that was raised, the higher biofuel blend, in which I know Deputy Stanley is interested, the carbon price evaluation by the ESRI which has been published and the new ambition for renewables - that 55% of our power will come from renewables by 2030. Today, the figure stands at about 30%. Good progress has been achieved on the emissions trading system, ETS, in other words, the cap and trade element, which is of relevance to the big power users. Our target is to be down by 37% in 2020. It has been a success.

The report also points to the new renewable heat scheme that will be starting with subsidies of 30%. I refer also to the new heat pump grant that was introduced for households in September last year and the new excellence in energy efficiency design, EXEED, programme for the commercial and industrial sectors, in which it has been piloted at 24 locations.

There were very important environmental regulations for near zero energy buildings and renovations. The first compressed natural gas station was also reported, as well as ongoing planting of forestry. It is a good compendium, but we are clearly at the start of a project to which we need to ramp up our commitment radically.

This week I was in Katowice where the climate action conference was held. It was organised by the United Nations and the message was very stark. The window to act to prevent catastrophic complications for the globe is closing rapidly. On the positive side, most of the technologies we need to apply to meet our commitments are available. It is a question of finding the policy tools and funding mechanisms to allow them to happen. It is a major challenge but one that, if we work together across the House, we can meet.

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