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

Catastrophic climate change is coming closer. No longer is it just killing people and destroying people's lives in the very poorest countries in the world but we can see, not for the first time, that it is striking home, like the Australian fires, in terms of what is happening in the west coast of the US, in California, in particular. In a way, it encapsulates the nature of the problem we face whereby the impact of climate change is creating ideal conditions for those fires to get out of control. Capitalism and private profit, however, is playing its role in helping that along, with the role of the energy company, a private, for-profit company, which basically did not do the repairs it was required to do because it treated that as an externality, like the way nature is treated as externality by capitalism, preferring to emphasise its dividends for shareholders.

Another set of fires that are devastating and provide a terrifying glimpse of the negative feedback loops we can see is the fires at the Arctic Circle, which are bigger than ever. In this season, there have been 35% more carbon emissions because there is a huge amount of peat under the ice, which perhaps has been burning for weeks or months, the ice melts and these explosive wildfires take place resulting in a huge amount of carbon emissions. The science is very clear. This is a runaway train and it will get faster and faster as a consequence of the carbon emissions.

The bottom-line point is clear. We do not have time for tinkering around the edges of this system. I will vote and fight for every reform but the only way we will avoid the kind of climate catastrophe that is not far ahead of us is by a complete transformation of the nature of our society and our economy. That can only be done on the basis of taking on the big polluters and, above all, the big fossil fuel companies and telling them that what are currently trillions of euro and dollars of assets on their balance sheets are now worthless because they will not be burning that oil and gas. In my opinion, that will only be done on the basis of democratic public ownership and planning for our planet and for people. I believe that can be done in a way that improves people's lives dramatically.

In a way, the negative elements of the waste action plan encapsulate for me the problem with the approach of the Green Party and of this Government.

If we accept so much in society as given, and if we take the nature of production, distribution, ownership and the economy as given, whereby we deal with the end product, we are left tinkering around the edges. Moreover, it often involves, or has a tendency to involve, hitting ordinary people. That is negative in and of itself but has the second negative effect of turning people off the kind of action we need.

There are progressive elements in the waste action plan, including the deposit-and-return scheme, the idea of making sure all goods will be recyclable and the banning of single-use plastic items. These measures are mostly required under EU directives but I welcome them. Obviously, the negative commentary focused on fast fashion. It was implied that there would be a tax on fast fashion or cheap clothing and it was reported that there would be a ban on multi-pack items. For me, this encapsulates the problem. The Green Party could have a whole range of good policies on the environment but the ones that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would let it implement would be the ones that hit ordinary people and do not have much genuine impact. They would say that those are fine. We have to deal with the issues of fast fashion and major waste in agribusiness, supermarkets and so on but we will not achieve this by dealing with the endpoint. We need to deal with them by dealing with the system. We also need to deal with them by dealing with inbuilt obsolescence, which is a real part of capitalism, the objective being to keep unnecessary production and consumption going to generate profit. We need to deal with the cultural obsolescence that comes from the advertising industry, which tells people they need the latest season's fashion, for example. We need to take on the advertising industry, which involves an incredible waste of resources and creates artificial demand and, therefore, additional waste. The only way to address this is to get to the root of the problem, which means tackling capitalism.

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