Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

We no longer live in the world we think we do. In our mind’s eye, we still see ourselves in the relatively benign setting of the Holocene, a period of comparative stability in our climate, which cradled the advent of human civilisation.

When I was born, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere was 333 ppm. That was above pre-industrial levels, but consistent with a relatively constant global temperature range. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, in the United States, the CO₂concentration, measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, today stands at 411 ppm. The composition of Earth’s atmosphere has significantly altered in less than a human lifetime. The last time CO₂concentrations were at this level was some 3 million years ago, when the planet was two to three degrees warmer and sea-levels were 15 to 25 m higher. We no longer live in the world we think we do.

Anyone born after February 1985 will never have lived through a month of below average global temperatures. The five warmest years since 1880 have occurred since 2015. The Minister knows as well as I do, and better, the debate our party had on the issue of entering into Government. It says much about the Green Party that we could hold that discussion publicly, respectfully air and exchange contrary viewpoints and come to a decision on the future road of our movement.

On one hand, many of our members felt that the programme for Government, however good, did not go far enough in terms of systems change or climate justice. I can accept and understand the merits of those arguments and have an undiminished respect for those who made them. On the other hand, there are parties within Leinster House that thought it more politically opportune to wait in the wings, either to consolidate their electoral gains or to build in opposition.

There were others, however, and I count myself among them, mindful of those arguments, aware of the possibility of political fallout and the difficulty of the road ahead, who chose to back the brave decision to go into Government in a time of crisis, or perhaps I should say in a time of crises. For good reason, the health crisis posed by the Covid-19 pandemic is at the forefront of all our minds and I welcome the resilience and recovery plan published this week which lays out this State’s roadmap to living alongside Covid-19 in the short to mid term. Concurrently, we must deal with the resultant economic crisis and plan for an investment-led recovery, one that prioritises decent jobs and a Green New Deal. Beyond that, however, and I cannot say in the long term given the urgent need for radical action, are the twin spectres of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse.

Such is the scale of the climate crisis, that the President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, made one of the strongest statements on the issue in her State of the Union speech earlier this week. Bearing in mind all the challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, President Von der Leyen maintained that “There is no more urgent need for acceleration than when it comes to the future of our fragile planet.” She, like many of us, recognises that the status quowill not protect the future of our planet.

In facing up to these challenges, astoundingly complex and difficult in their nature, we must in the first instance be wary of those who offer us simplistic solutions. We live in an era of a new populism which offers easy and attractive answers or engages in deflection or whataboutery. We can hear those voices inside and outside the gates of Leinster House. By the same token, the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the myth at the heart of the neoliberal capitalist model: that the State is bad and the market can cure all ills. In fact, what we have seen in recent months is the power of the State to do good and to harness and focus collective action for the collective good.

Similarly, market forces, as currently constituted, are ill-equipped to deal with the climate emergency; a time horizon which does not extend beyond the next quarterly report cannot enable long-term action. Likewise, a balance sheet which erodes natural capital at the behest of short-term profit will, ultimately, serve to impoverish, not enrich. We see this nowhere more clearly than in California at present, where unparalleled wealth flows into tech companies while the wildfires rage around them.

We in the environmental movement have, in the past, also fallen into the trap of individualism. Now, we have come to a better understanding that we must act on the power of aggregated individual actions, but that must occur within systemic change. In tackling the climate emergency, we must leverage the full power of the State and its people to affect societal change and we must act in common purpose to the common good.

President Michael D. Higgins, then a Teachta Dála, when speaking to the Tom Johnson Summer School in 2009, referred to the rich utopian tradition of the Labour Party. He rightly noted the failure of a wage income in a traded economy to take account of the caring economy, of voluntary activity or of cultural activity. I hope this Government’s work on well-being indicators will help to address that problem. Our current system fails in the same way to account for environmental goods: the intrinsic value, for example, of biodiversity falls outside its reckoning unless we modify our language, couching it in forced terms like "ecosystem services". The President, in that speech at the Tom Johnson Summer School, then quoted Tom Moylan, who said that: “What is needed is a courageous embrace of the utopian project, not self-denying resignation but self-aware engagement.” These words ring truer today than ever before.

We must set in front of us this utopian vision, not one of some imagined past, but one of a reimagined future, one where we have learned to live within our planetary boundaries, where we have harnessed the twin powers of the State and our ever-developing technology to protect our most vulnerable, both at home and abroad, and where we truly value the rich tapestry of the natural world around us that has so nurtured our evolution as a species. We must set in front of us this utopian vision, because the contrary is coming into ever-sharper focus.

Another President, Barack Obama, said: "We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it." Our programme for Government, A Vision for Change, sets out a beginning to that journey. The hill is steep and the way is long, but I am proud that our party has taken the brave decision to set out on that path. The urgency of the task to hand demands it.

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