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

The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Deputy Bruton, is not a climate denier but Donald Trump is. With regard to renewable energy, President Trump frequently asks what we should do when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. Addressing the Energy Ireland 2019 conference this morning, the Minister referred to the inefficiency of renewable energies right now. I argue that the key issue is not nature, technology or engineering but a political issue. This comes to the fore when one reads the Government climate plan, which starts by targeting ordinary people as being the problem and "those inflicting the damage". It states:

... those inflicting the damage do not pay the cost of the damage they inflict. This is the rationale for charging a carbon price for carbon emissions which reflects the growing damage that they are inflicting. This serves to discourage emissions and to make carbon abatement more profitable.

As such, ordinary people are at fault, rather than the fossil fuel and plastics industries or global food corporations. The targeting of ordinary people in the Government's plan is a massive mistake. It targets people as if their behavioural choices are responsible for the melting of permafrost in the Himalayas, as reported in the newspapers this morning; the shocking scenes we saw in the media recently of huskies running knee-deep through water in an area that should be covered in snow; the possibility that tens of thousands of people will die in India in the worst heatwave the region has ever experienced; or for the inevitability of increased weather extremities here and around the planet.

This plan the Minister has brought in to deal with climate chaos is not a serious one. It does not even acknowledge that there is an emergency. It does not take seriously dozens of reports and repeated warnings coming at us every week.

Never one to waste a good crisis the Minister is using an opportunity to give business wide open access to our natural resources and to plans that they can make to dominate the agenda in this country. An interesting story in The Irish Timeson 8 April last told us that Amazon had bought up the output from an entire wind farm in Donegal. It had been objected to for some time but this is in the Minister's plan. He said yesterday that data centres are popping up around the place but his plan aims to encourage and attract more of them. EirGrid told us that data centres will use up to one third of our national potential for electricity production. Those data centres can then create corporate power purchasing agreements to buy up the energy from privatised wind farms and that is exactly what is happening. In five years' time I have no doubt we will be sitting here saying we failed to reach our emission targets but Amazon will not have failed, nor will Apple or whoever else gets to build the data centres and use our water and natural resources. Sun, wind and wave are our natural resources. Just as in the past when Fianna Fáil privatised our oil and gas, it looks as if Fine Gael is about to privatise the natural resources and renewables that go with them.

Another interesting report went under the radar when the Minister launched his. In the same week, Coillte and the ESB announced plans to set up a new company to build wind farms on 50 sites owned by Coillte - in other words, owned by the people because they are State lands. It might seem like a good start for the State to take a leading role, but once it has set them up and built them, it will sell them off to private companies.

This is a blueprint for the massive privatisation and sell-off of renewable energy throughout the country. Already we can see companies licking their lips and queueing up to get in on the act. The Minister also said today that the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development (Amendment) (Climate Emergency Measures) Bill 2018 was premature. What does the Minister mean by that? When will it be mature? Will it be mature when the level of carbon in the atmosphere is at 500 parts per million instead of 416 parts as it is now? Will it be mature when the temperatures rise 3^oC or 4^oC above what they should be? Will the Minister please explain what is mature and what is premature about stopping the extraction of fossil fuels?

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