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

Who else supports carbon taxes? Big oil: ExxonMobil in the US lobbies in favour of a carbon tax. It does that because it knows that carbon taxes are not effective, because they want to deflect from the kind of green new deal programmes that have been put forward by AOC and others in the US and because they want to discredit the environmental movement. They want to associate it, not with a green new deal and socialist policies that transform people's lives for the better while tackling climate change, but with making people's lives harder.

The agenda of big oil is to hang on to the trillions of dollars of wealth that they have on their accounts, which if humanity is to survive in a way that we recognise, has to become worthless or much of it must become worthless because they cannot take the oil out of the ground. They are trying to avoid those things and they support a carbon tax for that reason. Carbon tax will not work from the perspective of addressing climate change. I have given the example of Norway earlier and I could also give the example of British Columbia where carbon taxes and a recession combined brought a maximum of a 2% reduction in carbon emissions. It is estimated to do what we need to do with carbon taxes would take 110 years. We do not have 110 years, we have ten years. Market mechanisms will not deliver the change that we need. The only way we can deliver that change in the timeframe we have is through state intervention, public ownership and planning.

Finally, I make the obvious point of how regressive are these charges. In ten years time, we are talking about a carbon tax alone of €250 for a tank of heating oil. The demand for these carbon-based products is inelastic because people do not have alternatives. If someone is living somewhere where he or she does not have public transport and does not have the money to buy a new car, the person cannot avoid it and the tax simply sits on top of them. It avoids what needs to be done.

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