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

This is an important opportunity to acknowledge the work of Deputy Hildegarde Naughton and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Action. I think the whole House has recognised that this is a really important subject. It has rightly been described as the greatest challenge facing humanity. I had the benefit of being at the conference in Poland where people from the youngest student to the oldest environmentalist commented on the scale of the challenge we face and the urgency with which we must address it. This country has seen some extraordinary changes in the past decade. One of the ways we have succeeded in making change is by using the Citizens' Assembly and the all-party Oireachtas committee approach as a way, not of getting full consensus, but of creating a significant degree of common ground on issues that present real difficulty to our community. We need to think outside the traditional ways we have thought. It is absolutely right that in what is probably the greatest challenge we face and the greatest set of changes we have to make as a community we have adopted the same approach. I acknowledge the work of the Citizens' Assembly that preceded the work of the Oireachtas committee because it exposes the Oireachtas to thinking from outside, which is very healthy, and has provoked our political system to sit down with everyone involved, with people from different backgrounds, to hear views that are challenging at times but yet try to find common ground between them so that we can meet obligations that are very important not only to us but to our global environment. That is what has been achieved by this report. I know it does not have full consensus but there is a great deal of common ground there and many very practical proposals.

Anyone who gets close to studying this issue, and I have to admit that it is only since I was appointed to this post that I have given it the level of attention it deserves, will see that we are approaching a tipping point in respect of climate deterioration and things will deteriorate very rapidly unless we move very swiftly. The window of opportunity to do that is fast closing. We come to that from the unenviable situation of being way off target. We will be approaching 2020 with the expectation that far from having reduced our emissions by 20% as was expected we will probably be down by only 1%. That is a massive disappointment. As the economy has started to recover the link between economic prosperity and carbon emissions has not been broken. Substantial increases in emissions, particularly in agriculture and industry, have accompanied the recovery.

A great urgency has entered this debate not only in this House but further afield as we saw in the protests by school students and the increasing urgency of demands for action from us and from other parliaments around the world. It is justified that a level of urgency be injected into this debate. When we speak of an emergency people often think of something unexpected that can be resolved through a sustained effort for a relatively short time. This is not an emergency of that sort. This is a much more challenging emergency in that we must change our behaviour in profound ways and do so on a sustained basis. Our targets for 2030 represent a 2% per annum reduction in emissions that we need to make. From 2030 to 2050 that will accelerate massively to deliver a 7% reduction per annum. This is going to be a sustained challenge for our communities, homes, ways of travel and working, to change those in such a way that we can meet the obligations.

There is a huge responsibility and Government must put together the whole of government system to respond effectively to this report from the Oireachtas committee and put us on a trajectory to hit our targets and achieve the sort of ambitions we want to set for 2050. The one asset of my period in government, which I hope will be of advantage to me in taking on this challenge, is that when we faced the employment crisis we had to enlist support across Government and we used the Office of the Taoiseach and the Department of which I was then Minister to get a level of ambition and co-ordination to meet the challenge. That experience is valuable and I will adopt the same approach of having very rigorous, well-defined targets with clear responsibility, tracking their impact and adapting each year as we go to ensure that we are achieving them.

The committee's work is really valuable in shaping our direction of travel. It has been very clear in its demand for a new approach to governance and to political accountability which is absolutely appropriate. It has dealt very effectively with renewable power, retrofitting, carbon pricing and many other individual sectors such as transport and agriculture which we cannot go into in the time available. Possibly the most important sections are those which recognise this is something very different from designing policy to be implemented. This involves community engagement and getting the confidence that there will be a just transition as we undertake difficult changes that will affect every home and individual. That will be an important part of it. This is not the sort of emergency where some individual or Minister is given emergency powers which set aside normal parliamentary procedures or accountability to do something for a short time. This is an emergency where we have to orchestrate our whole community to adopt a different way of dealing with issues. That will be really challenging. It will be important that we frame that debate, get action and do not divide communities into rural versus urban or farming versus others. There is a genuine risk of pitting one group against another instead of trying to find a way of bringing everyone together toward a shared goal and a sense of confidence that the burden will be shared fairly.

Our own process is well advanced. I started with a consultation which was very useful and several Deputies participated. I have had 11 interdepartmental teams considering very particular areas where there are opportunities to act effectively. We have designed a marginal abatement cost, MAC, curve, looking from the whole of economy point of view at the interventions we could make that would hit our targets and be cost-effective from the community point of view.

That starts to give one an idea of the areas that can make the biggest impact in the short run and at what point different technologies will start to impact. We must be prepared to see them take off and make a significant impact as we go along.

We have made some significant commitments already. We have committed, in response to the committee's request, to a target of 70% renewable power. We have introduced the climate action fund and its first allocation of money is to roll out an electric vehicle charging network so that we begin to see more people having the confidence to purchase electric vehicles. It is very significant that there has been a real surge this year in the number of people buying electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. We are also changing the rules on green procurement because Government as a purchaser of nearly €12 billion in goods is hugely powerful in terms of its capacity to influence the choices that are made throughout the supply chain.

I thank Deputy Hildegarde Naughton and the members of the Joint Committee on Climate Action, many of whom are here this evening, for the work they put into their report. I look forward to co-operating closely with them as we bring forward a Government response which will be renewable each year and will be based on the principle of open debate and feedback.

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