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

Amendment No. 2 states:

To insert the following after "29th March, 2019":

"and declares a climate emergency."

I thank Deputy Hildegarde Naughton for the great job she did as Chairperson of the committee that produced this report. However, the starting point should be the other reports that are constantly being produced - probably on a daily basis. They include a report entitled, EU Overshoot Day: Living Beyond Nature's Limits, which will be published on 10 May 2019 and a report from Paul Price, a researcher in DCU, which I received this morning. Paul Price looks at what we need to do to rapidly make a transition to a fossil fuel-free society in Ireland. He bases his study on the current national energy and climate plan. I know it is difficult to see but what he is trying to show us with this graph that for our carbon emissions to be where they need to be, we need to be up here but we are down here. What this report plans to give us is in between the two. It falls short of what needs to be done. That is my starting point - not to be a naysayer but to say that we are not doing enough and are not moving rapidly enough at the scale and speed required to deal with the loss of species and biodiversity on the planet and to deal with our emissions.

These reports are interesting and I hope Members will look at them. They reference repeatedly what we need to do to reduce our emissions and to be optimistic about the scenarios we can have for the future. However, this report does not go far enough in that respect.

To paraphrase Greta Thunberg, these reports should make us panic. That is what she has said. We, as politicians, need to panic, and she is right. The stark realisation is that we are living through a mass species extinction - we heading towards the loss of 1 million species - and that we may now be committed to trends that place a question mark over the future of ourselves as a species, yet the official policy of the State is to effectively ignore these facts and proceed with plans and polices which, aside from the odd public relations release or spin, ignore these realities. I advise the Minister that we need to panic.

One would think in that context that I would welcome a report entitled, Climate Change: A Cross-Party Consensus for Action. The first comment I would make on it is that it is not a cross-party consensus. I have written to the Chairman of the committee and to the Minister today asking for that to be corrected. Two parties did not consensually adopt this report and that needs to be put on the record. I have also written asking for the record to be changed regarding an amendment I proposed that was accepted on a just transition for workers. Importantly, that amendment was altered not by us, and it was not what we voted on - to exclude peat workers from the possibility of the State taking care of the pensions and conditions of those workers. I wrote about that in the email I sent and I hope the Minister will strongly consider making those adjustments.

We contributed to and participated in this committee for months. We took it very seriously and in every chapter we suggested recommendations and polices that we believed could have an effect. In fairness, on many occasions, the committee listened to us and tried to adopt some of the positions on those issues, such as fuel poverty, the need to protect workers in industries affected, the kind of role the State should play in delivering renewables and the role of the fossil fuel industry in hampering and hindering the actions we need to take. Other issues it did not take on board included a proposal to work towards delivering free public transport in the future.

This report is too modest and too meek and it lacks the ambition that is needed in many areas. If this report has been produced ten or 20 years ago we might have considered it progress. Given what we now know and what scientists are alerting us to and screaming at us on a daily basis, the report is mild and a little outdated.

The key issue I have, aside from the aspirational nature rather than the concrete nature of the report, is the proposal on carbon tax, or as it is called in the report, "incentivising climate action". First, what is the tax on, who is it on and how do its supporters believe it will reduce our carbon emissions? Effectively the carbon tax, or the increase in it, is on the consumption of fossil fuel energy by ordinary people, that is, on their energy, transport and heating bills. It suggests that if these bills rise, it will incentivise ordinary people to turn away from their high-carbon use and adopt alternative, renewable sources of energy, transport and heating. It is true there are many good ideas and suggestions in the report but there is only one policy I am confident this Government and its successors will enact and that is the trajectory for raising carbon taxes on ordinary people.

We can dress this as we want but the ideology behind this proposal is that ordinary people’s personal behaviour and choices are the key to reducing carbon emissions. If they, we and all the people who may be following these proceedings change our behaviour, that will encourage the market and private entrepreneurs to provide the alternatives we need. That will not work and it is a dangerous illusion. The problem is not the personal behaviour of ordinary people; the problem is systemic, it is connected to the economic system under which we live, to the drive for profit and competition and the way the fossil fuel industry and the giant corporations attached to it are the heart of that system, the system of capitalism that has developed over the past 200 years.

We use fossil fuels because that is where the greatest profits, returns and largest investments are to be had. We have failed to reduce our emissions because of the opposition from the fossil fuel giants who denied the science and the link between fossil fuel use and climate change. These giant corporations have funded climate scepticism and climate deniers and have sought to delay and undermine those scientists who have been trying to raise awareness and they have bought and influenced governments which pursue policies that have meant society remains addicted to and continues to use fossil fuels and continues the extraction of oil, coal and gas.

Last year, almost 30 years after the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, report and decades after "An Inconvenient Truth" and after the scientists had begun screaming at governments, humanity emitted more CO₂than ever before in human history, not less, not the same but the greatest volume of CO₂from human industry, human consumption and other sources. That failure places a question mark over the future habitability of our planet. That failure has come after 30 years of failed market mechanisms that were introduced such as carbon trading, carbon offsets and dubious schemes and scams that provided a few windfall profits but failed to reduce or even address the global rate of CO₂ emissions. Carbon taxes on ordinary people are another market mechanism that will fail to reduce CO₂emissions.

The imposition of carbon tax seeks to suggest that the problem is individual choices and that tweaking market signals can achieve the historic and major task that we face.The market will not provide the solution because to a large extent, the free market is the source of the problem. It is a system based on endless growth, on endless need to accumulate for the sake of profits and to expand and create new markets to accumulate more.

The measures humanity need to take fly in the face of the very reason free market capitalism exists in the first place but it is not true that it means demanding sacrifices from ordinary people or lowering our living standards. Free and plentiful public transport, energy efficient homes, properly planned towns, villages and cities and a switch to State-run renewable energies, especially in offshore wind, are not a sacrifice for ordinary people but could be a major gain for people and the planet. The measures needed to bring the mass of people with us in tackling climate change are those I listed. What do carbon taxes say to those people? They say they are the problem, not Exxon Mobil, Shell or the giant corporations that continue to extract the fossil fuels.

We will increase heating and transport costs by not providing alternatives in public transport or renewable energy. That is a guaranteed way to alienate ordinary people, lose them in the battle and allow climate sceptics tell them it is all a hoax designed to make them pay more, while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I have constituents, as have all Members present, who face fuel poverty and cannot access the fuel allowance. Their bills will go up and they will be seriously asked to accept that we mean what we say when we talk about reducing our carbon emissions.

I want to conclude by appealing to the Green Party Deputies to remove the amendment they have placed before the House because what is says to us is that we must accept the report in full, when we clearly already have voted against it, in order to accept that we need to declare a climate emergency. Of course, we need to declare a climate emergency. The Bill I have struggled to get to Committee Stage, and hopefully it get there in June, is called the climate emergency measures Bill. We accept there is a climate emergency but we will not be bounced into accepting a carbon tax on ordinary people for all the reasons I have outlined.

See this speech in context