Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 18:

In page 97, after line 32, to insert the following: “Report on carbon tax

40.Within 6 months of the passing of this Act, the Minister shall produce a report on the carbon tax, fuel poverty and income inequality.”.

Our opposition to the carbon tax is well known. It is not necessary when opposing an unjust, regressive and counterproductive tax to suggest that climate change is not a serious and urgent problem.

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It is an urgent problem. It is an emergency. We have a short timeframe to address that emergency before we do irreversible damage to climate, to biodiversity and to the conditions which sustain human existence on this planet. There is no question but that we need to address it.

The problem is the carbon tax will not address it. First, we have a carbon tax and it has done nothing - less than nothing - to reduce CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions continue to rise. Ireland is failing spectacularly in meeting its targets, is facing hundreds of millions of euro of fines as a result and is trying to buy its way out of its emission reduction targets through the carbon trading system. The carbon trading system itself is another example of how trying to put a price on pollution is not the way to address it. The big idea ten years ago was that with carbon trading one can buy one's way out of the problem. Of course, that became an area for speculation and for the big polluters to buy the right to pollute more from poorer countries which emitted less. It is completely counterproductive.

It is also counterproductive from the point of view of trying to win over the majority of ordinary people to support the fight for radical climate action and I ask the Government to consider this. If we are to make this change we need to have everybody on board. They must feel they have a stake in taking radical climate action and that they will not be punished for the crimes of polluting corporations and Government failure to address CO2 emissions. We know 70% of global emissions come from a few hundred companies. In fact, governments resist efforts to tax those corporations and use some of the enormous profits they generate from polluting industries, such as the fossil fuel industries, to redirect revenues into making the necessary transition. Instead of doing that, we punish the people who are not responsible and potentially alienate them from the battle to address the climate emergency.

This amendment I have put forward particularly asks the Government to look at the issue of fuel poverty. It is estimated that 400,000 households or 28% of the population in this country are living in fuel poverty. The majority of those people are living in G-rated homes, in other words, poorly insulated homes, and are already suffering from poor insulation. They do not want to have to spend large sums heating their homes. They must do so because their homes are badly insulated. A very significant portion of them can do nothing about it because they live in private rented accommodation. They cannot do it. The landlord has to do it. Alternatively, they live in public rented accommodation - local authority homes - and they cannot do it. In fact, I spend quite a lot of my time making representations to the local authority asking on behalf of local authority tenants if it will insulate their homes and the local authority says it has not got the money to do it. By the way, and here is an interesting twist, in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, in the budget recently passed by the new coalition of Fianna Fáil, the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Labour Party and Independents, they have cut the retrofit budget. They totally slashed it in their first budget. What already was a snail's pace of retrofitting of local authority homes will be slashed entirely. It is shocking. It is disgraceful that they would do it. It is unbelievable that the Greens would do it. It is also shocking that the Government would allow them to do it given that we need to ramp up dramatically the retrofit of homes.

We need to dramatically ramp up the grants to address the fact that 760,000 of the people in this country - one in six - live in poverty. How the hell are they supposed to retrofit their homes to insulate them, which would be of benefit to them? They would not be against the idea. They would be very much in favour of it because it would reduce their energy bills and would make their homes warmer. However, they are not being given the resources to do it. Now we will punish them for that fact with a carbon tax. We will punish them for that fact by taking public service obligation bus routes out of their areas in many cases with the BusConnects plans, by the reduction in subsidies, for example the public service obligation subsidies, to Dublin Bus from €87 million a decade ago to €50 million, and by us having fewer buses in the Dublin Bus fleet than we had ten years ago. Already, people who depend on public transport who do not use private cars will now be doubly punished. They have already got poorer public transport service and now they will be punished again with a carbon tax and possibly with higher fares. Public transport fares in this country are some of the highest in Europe and they have gone up by 80% in the past ten years. We continue to allow bus fares to go up when we should be reducing or abolishing fares and increasing the subsidies. There are many more areas I could go into.

For rural Ireland, what is necessary is to give a sustainable living and payments to our farmers to enable them to move to forms of agriculture that are sustainable and do not emit so much CO2. Our rural colleagues are correct to be concerned about these matters because they have to be guaranteed investment and schemes that will make it possible, and not be punished for making a necessary transition.

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