Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I admire the Minister's optimism but as we know the reality is that for decades carbon capture and storage has been proposed as the silver bullet solution for cutting carbon emissions. Despite billions of dollars in funding and years of research there are no carbon capture storage, CSS, plants anywhere in the world that effectively capture and store carbon. Relying on a hope that it will do so in the future is a fundamental mistake. My question to the Minister is whether his refined and changed Bill that he is about to publish will take that into account and cut out the over-reliance on these negative emissions technologies as a way forward because they are not in existence to a scale where they will work. They have been touted by the fossil fuel industry and there is no evidence anywhere in the world that they will help us reduce our carbon emissions. Obviously, some things do help us do that, such as plants and trees and re-wetting bogs but the false reliance on this technology that does not exist has to be removed from the new Bill. Otherwise, it is not a functioning Bill to deal with the climate catastrophe.

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