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

Deputy Barry will not be here but I am sharing with Deputy Murphy. I want to start by saying something the Minister may not believe or his party may not believe. I can honestly say that those of us in People Before Profit had hoped we would welcome the Bill and engage in the debate on the basis of support for the Bill that would begin to tackle the greatest issue of our time and the biggest threat to our people and planet. We genuinely hoped to support it along with the school strikers, the children who stood outside the Dáil on the Fridays For Future demonstrations, the activists in Extinction Rebellion, those we have been campaigning with to end the extraction of fossil fuel, fracked gas and LNG and the hundreds of thousands of people who have looked at the science and understood what we are facing. The idea was that with this one tranche of legislation we would have some hope that at least at the highest levels of the State the process of reacting and taking the necessary steps would at last have begun.

I wondered how it might be possible that a Government dominated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could deliver on such a meaningful measure. I wondered how those in government at the highest level of the State might try every trick in the book, procedurally in the Dáil, legally in the courts, media spin and spin merchants and in their unashamed prioritising of economic and business arguments to stop meaningful measures like the climate emergency Bill. I wondered how these forces in society and government could be combatted by the Green Party.

Since the stakes are so high we genuinely hoped that the acceleration of CO2 in the atmosphere and Covid-19 shutting down large sections of the economy might change things yet the volumes of carbon in the atmosphere were at 420 ppm and not at the 350 ppm safety level that science recommends. This is the highest known on record.

Like thousands of others, we had hoped, watching record temperatures broken, seeing the wildfires and droughts, understanding what has happened globally to our most vulnerable, poorest and least resilient on the planet and watching as these events get more extreme, common and devastating, that would result in this Bill setting out to start dealing with that in this country. We hoped or understood that this could happen to the poorest people in Ireland who will suffer the most from what is coming down the tracks. They are targeted by carbon taxes and lectured about their personal choices when they are the least responsible and least able to alter their personal behaviour. For selfish reasons I had hoped that in ten or 15 years when we looked back at the volume of emissions and saw that this Bill did not deliver or even begin to address the core issues, there would be no sense in me or anyone else in the House saying "I told you so" because to be proven right on such an issue is not exactly a happy place to be. It would be a disaster for the world and the people in it.

We stand 100% with the climate campaigners, school strikers and the movement. This Bill is not fit for the scale of the crisis we face. It is not a good first step and it does not justify the participation of the Minister's party in a neoliberal Government that has turned its back on so many groups in our society in the past year.

This failure is quantitatively different from the disaster of the Minister's previous participation in government. It is not something that will be forgiven in ten years or forgotten by a new generation. This is why the Green Party were given a second chance by many at the last election. They forgot about bank bailouts, austerity measures and the betrayal of the most vulnerable. However, there will be no fig leaf in future to justify the failure to deliver on climate change.

Why will this Bill not deliver? It will fail at every basic level because it is not adequate to deal with the task we face. Goals of net zero or carbon neutral by 2050 are not putting us on the road to Paris. They are not putting us on the road to anywhere. Kevin Anderson, the climate scientist, and others have pointed out that being concerned chiefly with the targets or putting in higher targets or articulating higher ambitions is not what is required. If one starts off aiming for a target that is not what is needed, then one's chances of success are pretty limited. One does not get to Paris by walking west to begin with.

Net zero is a con and a con that the global climate movement has already called out. It is a con because it sets out the idea that the main task is not to actually cut fossil fuel use, but to use some form of inventive accounting to calculate sinks and other measures to balance the emissions, while also lighting a candle to the patron saint of climate and hoping that somewhere, somehow, somebody invents something that can capture and store fossil fuels that we know we will continue to use.

I want to argue that the reasons given by the Minister for the failure to address the issues of liquefied natural gases, LNGs, and fracked gas in this Bill are not ones I accept. It is not good enough to say this is only about governance and is not the place to insert bans on LNGs and yet we are still being told that on Committee Stage the Minister will deal with the issue of oil and gas exploration. That is extraordinary and highly unusual for an issue of such importance. If I accept him at his word, then it raises the issue that if he intends to amend the petroleum and minerals Act on Committee Stage, why does he not amend the Planning and Development Act, to insert there loudly and clearly that we will ban LNG development

I raise the question Professor Sweeney and others have raised with the Minister by letter in regard to the wording around the carbon budgets and what that wording actually means and will deliver. In theory this wording could mean that the Government will fail utterly to reduce CO2 levels between now and 2029 and yet it would still not technically be failing to comply with the provisions of this legislation. While I think this issue is key, something that also pervades the entire Bill is a vagueness and get-out clauses are peppered throughout every section of it. There is a deeper and more vulnerable issue, however, that goes to the heart of the problems with the Bill.

When one enshrines in legislation a list of items that a Minister, a council or a Government must have regard to when formulating policy around climate change, and when many of these items are clearly contradictory and prioritise other concerns apart from climate, one is setting out one's stall to fail and is signalling well in advance one's excuses to do just that. Aside from peppering the Bill with phrases such as "insofar as practicable" we also have a list of priorities to be considered first, such as the need to deliver the best possible value for money; the attractiveness of the State for investment and the long-term competitiveness of the economy; the role of behavioural changes on the part of individuals; and the special economic and social role of agriculture, particularly in respect of biogenic methane.

To take the attractiveness of the State for investment, what on earth is that doing in a Bill that pretends to deal with catastrophic climate change? Does the Minister's party or anyone in government actually believe there is not a fundamental clash between the priorities of global capitalism and stopping climate chaos? We currently have plans to build hundreds of data centres around this country that will consume vast quantities of our renewable energy, a vast proportion of which we had hoped to use to replace the fossil fuel industry. Does the Minister really think banning the development of data centres is a step that would not meet with serious ire from companies like Amazon or Google? That is why these things are not included in the Bill but rather we will go on and on doing what we usually do as part of climate change.

Does the Minister really that banning oil and gas exploration or the importation of LNGs will go down well with investors in Shell, BP or General Motors, or the vast industrial complex tied intimately into the fossil fuel industry? We cannot use the State's attractiveness to investors to prioritise its competitiveness when deciding climate policy because dealing with the drivers of climate change means challenging those very priorities and challenging the drive for profits and the need for constant and wasteful production and competition.

What would a climate Bill that aimed to be compliant with Paris and that saw the reality as a crisis and as something that Naomi Klein said must change everything look like? It would amount to a green new eco-socialist deal and would herald and plan for a revolution in things like free public transport, with an ambition that would make BusConnects look like child’s play. Within a year we would be providing free and frequent public transport in our cities but also in rural towns and villages.

It would take on the beef barons on whose behalf our agricultural policy has been framed. Yes, that means a reduction in the herd but, more importantly, it would mean freeing our farming community from the grip of the big agribusiness that has been responsible for the slow strangulation of our farming communities and family farms. It would mean a rebirth of rural communities based on horticulture and make farming both sustainable for our environment and for workers farmers at its heart. It would mean setting out how we will harvest renewable energy in the interests of the people in the State and how we would do so by investing in solar and offshore energy, through a State company, delivered in a planned and rational way based on the need to cut CO2 and not on the investment decisions of private interests.

There are obvious dangers when we fail in this area. We all know what the science is saying but there is another danger. We saw a bit of it in this House today and I want to address that. The dangers of climate denial are not limited to Trump or the far right conspiracy theorists. There is a deep kick-back from the industries affected and at the heart of the climate crisis that is not always outright denial but is often a policy that demands "not here, not now, and not just yet" or that it is not practical or cost effective and that it would damage the economy. At a fundamental level, this Bill gives cover to that and the corollary of admitting or suggesting that we cannot tackle the huge vested interests of business and corporations that are driving climate crisis or worse suggesting that there is no contradiction between climate justice and the action of those very vested interests will breed scepticism. It will seek to confirm to ordinary people that the big industries do not have to make any sacrifices, but that ordinary people do. We will give people carbon taxes for using petrol or diesel but not free public transport. We will punish people if they heat their homes with oil or coal, but we will not fund the retrofitting of people's homes. We will bombard people with ads that demand they change their personal behaviour. Those ads will be from the banks that have evicted people or the banks that were bailed out by the people in the past and were responsible for the economic collapse. They will be from the big car manufacturers and oil companies whose profits are based on the climate crisis. The danger is that that hypocrisy will be seen by ordinary people and it will make it easier for those other voices to whisper or often shout, as they did in this House today, that this is all a con and that we do not need to make any changes. If all the Green Party has to offer is carbon taxes for ordinary people and a windfall for corporations, then we will see a resurgence of climate denial at the very moment when we need greater action and more ambition.

We will be proposing amendments to the Bill. We will be trying to change the language and will be pointing out that the targets are not sufficient and that there is a need to ban LNGs outright, and not just the licensing of future fossil fuel extraction but to deal with the current licences which run until 2035.

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