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

It will be very difficult to do justice to the many contributions in the space of five minutes. I will start with Deputy Lawless. He criticised Government for what he described as reviews. The last thing the climate action plan should be described as is a review. This is the first time we have had a plan. We have set up an implementation group centrally within the Department of the Taoiseach. We have adopted targets and committed to a climate Bill, the heads of which will be discussed by the Joint Committee on Communications, Climate Action and the Environment during this session. We have 183 action points in that plan and each of them is timelined. People will be given a chance to evaluate how we are doing, not only in terms of climate emissions but also in delivering the actions. No doubt we will not hit all the targets because they are ambitious.

Deputy Cullinane is not here but he stated that by measuring the lifetime cost of different potential technologies, we were relying on market forces. That is not the case. Using evaluation of how much different technologies cost and how they impact on the climate is independent of what measures we introduce to affect them, be they incentives or regulations. I am not sure what he was driving at there. I was a bit confused by his contribution because he emphasised the urgency of the action but he wanted to defer any action until a lot of other issues were resolved for example until Brazil had resolved its problems. We do not have the luxury of deferring action. We have to take action now and sequence it as best we can.

5 o’clock

Deputy Sherlock stated the Joint Committee on Climate Action wanted the climate Bill to be enacted in 2019. I am seeking to deliver the heads of the Bill to the committee to enable pre-legislative scrutiny this year. He raised the question of whether we can deliver more quickly on the targets. If we can, that is great, but at least we have set out clear timelines. People in each public body are now accountable for delivering them, although I do not suggest we will meet them all. He suggested that no rational person would invest in an electric vehicle without sufficient chargers being available but this year more than 8,000 people are expected to buy either plug-in hybrid vehicles or battery electric vehicles. By the end of the year, we will have rolled out 2,500 private chargers and we have committed to providing 1,600 public chargers. We are committing, therefore, to delivering on the measures.

Deputy Paul Murphy stated we should listen to scientists and I fully agree with him in that regard. Deputy Bríd Smith, on the other hand, took issue with the scientists who tell us gas will be a clean transition fuel and that we need to recognise we will require gas in the transition phase. I did not hear one suggestion from either Deputy as to what initiatives they are in favour of to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide, other than getting rid of capitalism-----

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