Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I believe our duty as a Government and as politicians is to make sure that we pass our planet on to our children and grandchildren in a better state than we found it and that means taking action on climate change and protecting the environment. We have taken a lot of action in recent years. For example, there is legislation working its way through the House at present to outlaw the use of microbeads and certain plastics. We passed legislation last year to prevent the Government and Government investment funds from investing in the hydrocarbon industry. We have taken measures to support renewable energy, to take coal off the grid by the end of the decade and to take peat off the grid. Other actions under way include the fact that from this summer, all new buses bought by Dublin Bus or Bus Éireann in our cities will be low-emission or no-emission vehicles. We are taking climate action both as an Oireachtas and as a Government.

On this particular issue, the Deputy has it wrong in terms of climate action, energy security and the economy. The truth is that we will need natural gas and oil as transition fuels for the foreseeable future, whether to fuel aircraft so that they can fly, to produce plastics necessary for medical devices or to power our towns, cities and industries when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Most people who are interested in climate science understand that natural gas is a transitional fuel and that we will need it as part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future if not for decades to come. The question is therefore, if we have our own natural gas, should we use it or should we import it? Of course, importing it as opposed to using our own in worse for the environment because the gas we might import from the United States is very often shale gas, which is much more damaging to the environment than our own natural gas from Corrib. Some of the gas we import from Russia or eastern Europe gets lost along the way, so it is actually worse for the environment to import gas from the US, Russia or Venezuela than to use our own gas. From a climate science point of view, the Deputy's proposal is wrong-headed. Second, there is the issue of energy security. Do we want to use the gas we have or would we prefer to import it from Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Russia and the Middle East?

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