Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Our house is on fire. The house next door, to our left, is on fire and the house to our right is on fire - in fact, all the houses in the estate are on fire. We have a plan from the Government to deal with that fire which fundamentally says that if the others start to try to put the fires out in their houses, we will try to put out some of the fire in our house by 2050. That is what the plan represents. For those who say we should give it a guarded welcome, because at least they are talking about trying to put out some of the fire in some of the house by 2050, the point is that our house and all of the homes will be burnt down by that time. Every week we see on the news the haunting image of the polar bears in Norilsk in Northern Siberia forced further south than they have come for 40 years because of the devastation of their sea ice habitat and forced to forage for food on land. We see the story of the permafrost in the Arctic which has thawed 70 years earlier than expected. Then comes this approach, which is completely inadequate because it is trapped within this capitalist system based on production for profit. The attitude to the target for 2050 is exactly parallel to the attitude to dealing with Ireland's status as a corporate tax haven and a race to the bottom in corporate tax rates.

The Government says, correctly, that this is an international problem which needs to be dealt with globally but it uses that as an excuse to hold off on any action until it happens elsewhere. The target of 2050 is completely inadequate. We need a zero carbon economy by 2030. One of the areas that shows most clearly how the Government is completely trapped in this model of organising society and the economy is transparent. The most ambitious thing it can think of is not to change the model of how people get around, not to challenge the model of individual car usage but to double the number of electric vehicles on the road to 1 million. It is not the answer. If the Minister considered all the problems that come with electric vehicles, the carbon intensive nature of their production, the environmental impact of the mining for the rare earths that go into them, the huge labour and human rights abuses and the child labour in the extraction of those rare earths, he would see this is not the answer. Shifting to public transport on a massive scale is the answer. It is the one thing that the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, ruled out on the day of the plan's launch, saying the Government was definitely not going to go down the free public transport route. Why not? One hundred cities around the world have gone that way. We need significant further investment and to make it free to change the model of how people get around.

The same is true of carbon taxes. All the Government can envisage is taxing ordinary people, regressive taxation that will have no substantial impact on emissions. It will do nothing about the 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988. The idea that we allow society continue to be run in their interests and that they get to treat nature as an externality they do not have to take care of does not make any sense unless the Government is unwilling to break from that capitalist system. They should be taken into public ownership and planned democratically for people and for the planet.

This is true too of agriculture. The Government acknowledges that agriculture is our biggest emitting sector but it has no plan or target to reduce the herd. The herd needs to be substantially reduced. That is unavoidable if the Government is to tackle emissions from Ireland. That can be done only by challenging the drive for private profit by public ownership of the major agri-corporations and by assisting small farmers to ensure they have no loss of income but can move to a sustainable model of agriculture investment in afforestation and so on.

The only conclusion to draw from this is that a government that is committed to the rule of capitalism and profit is not going to deal with this issue. It will continue to block measures such as the Prohibition of Fossil Fuels (Keep it in the Ground) Bill 2017 because they challenge the interests of big oil. The same will come up every single time we attempt to do what is necessary. The movement has to continue to be built. It has to grow, it has to be armed with eco-socialist policies and, ultimately, fight for a socialist government with eco-socialist policies. The next big step towards that will be on Friday, 20 September, which is the next day of climate strike action by school students, but the trade unions need to follow their lead, put their weight and power into action and have action from below to demand change.

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