Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This particular Bill, as presently drafted, is anti-climate, anti-democratic, anti-Irish and anti-poor. Do not get me wrong, climate change must be addressed and I believe we need a new climate law to make it happen in urban and rural areas in Ireland. I was Ireland's first Minister with responsibility for the climate and did not have the legal tools available to me to bring about the type of sustainable change that was needed. For example, after a long and protracted battle, I secured a Cabinet decision in January 2018 not to purchase any new fossil fuel buses for public transport. Disappointingly, the very first double-decker electric vehicle will not be on the streets of Dublin until January 2023, a full five years after I secured that commitment.

I envy the current Minister in the way he can push things along, but in the rush to get things done, our economy, especially our rural economy, is being needlessly sacrificed when there are alternative approaches which should be taken to achieve the same goal. While the climate Bill provides the framework for the delivery, it does not provide the mechanism to achieve it. As presently constituted, it will decimate our economy, particularly our rural economy, and do little in return to achieve our global goal of reducing emissions because the primary focus will not change. My big fear is the focus will remain on upfront costs, which is an incentive to do little and leave it all to the agricultural sector, with the easy option being an overall reduction in the national herd which could, ultimately, be anti-climate.

The current system of calculating climate emissions discriminates against a food exporter such as Ireland. Even though 90% of our beef is exported, Ireland is penalised for being the most carbon efficient beef exporter within the European Union because the rules state responsibility is on the producer, rather than the consumer. Relatively carbon efficient beef production in Ireland can, therefore, be replaced throughout the Union with beef that is 35 times worse from an environmental perspective coming from the Amazon basin. That is okay, according to the climate mathematicians, but not our atmosphere. Unless we completely change the approach to calculating agricultural emissions, we will decimate the industry here in Ireland while also destroying our atmosphere for generations to come. This is a lose-lose situation unless we look again at the maths behind the climate targets.

This Bill is anti-democratic. If enacted, this Bill will legislate Dáil Éireann out of existence on all climate-related matters. That is undemocratic and must be opposed outright. Section 9 states the carbon budget for the following five years is to be laid before Dáil Éireann for approval but Deputies have no ability to amend or alter the proposals.

If Dáil Éireann rejects the five-year carbon budget then the Minister will, within 60 days, bring in his or her own five-year carbon budget without any need to consult with the Dáil or to seek its approval. Furthermore, Dáil Éireann has no role or input into the individual five-year sectoral emission caps for agriculture, transport, home heating, etc. This is akin to a law being passed to the effect that the Minister for Finance can present a full five-year taxation budget to the Dáil without any detail of how he or she intends to spend the money collected. If the Dáil rejects it, the Government can bring in any taxation measure it likes within 60 days and the Dáil has no say whatsoever. On top of that, the Minister for Finance can decide how much funding is to be allocated to each Department for the following five years and Deputies have no role in considering whether it is appropriate or not. They did not even go to that extreme in Stalinist Russia.

The Bill is also anti-Irish because the climate rule book has been developed by industrialised countries, so the tools that are being used by our EU colleagues to address the climate problem are based on the bulk of emissions coming from industry, cities and intensive agriculture. In Ireland, 37% of the population live in rural areas. We have just two cities with a population of more than 100,000, namely, Dublin and Cork. Whichever way one looks at it, the climate challenges in Ireland are all about land use, in particular dispersed land use. We have extensive agricultural practices, isolated rural communities reliant on cars, a large number of small towns and the disproportionate scale of Dublin to the rest of the country. I could go on. Our climate challenges are the polar opposites of our European colleagues, yet the EU climate rules are designed to address EU challenges rather than Irish challenges. This inbuilt industrialised-country bias is everywhere, from the environmental zealots who shoot down any alternative approach, right through to the Climate Change Advisory Council, which under this law will set our domestic climate targets. The Bill seeks to enshrine into law this EU bias and Irish climate bias. That is the reason the Bill is anti-Irish.

The Bill is also against the poor. As a result of the pandemic, families' heating bills have gone up dramatically, compounded by increased carbon taxes, but not just because people are spending more time at home. It is because families that are struggling to pay electricity bills are subsidising the supply of electricity into data centres operated by multinational, multibillion euro companies and the level of subsidy is set to increase dramatically with our ambitious renewable energy targets. It is immoral that people who are struggling to pay electricity bills are subsidising the cost of electricity going into data centres, many of which have been constructed on a speculative basis. I argued vehemently against such an approach in Cabinet. This is reflected in the Government policy statement on data centres issued in 2018. However, this particular element of the commitment in that policy statement has yet to be implemented. We need data centres to pay for their own costs in terms of the electricity infrastructure that is being put in place to meet their growing energy demands and in respect of the generation of green electricity. This cost should never be put on the backs of struggling families across this country.

The Bill refers to protecting "the attractiveness of the State for investment", which is commendable. However, there is no mention of fuel poverty anywhere in the Bill. In this Bill, families are forgotten. That is not the only place where families have been forgotten. Approximately 7,000 families that are reliant on social welfare are waiting for approval to have their homes retrofitted under the warmer homes scheme. Disappointingly, the Minister announced that there are changes coming to the scheme "to better target those most in need". In other words, quite a number of those 7,000 people, who are in energy poverty and who are reliant on social welfare, will now be excluded from the scheme due to the proposed revision. That is wrong. We have seen a 9% increase in residential carbon emissions during the 2020 lockdown; we have also seen a dramatic fall-off in the retrofitting of homes, which commenced in 2019 and collapsed in 2020. In the past two and a half years we have failed to meet the targets that have been set for the deep retrofitting of homes and, sadly, if we continue to fail to achieve the targets the agriculture sector will be the one left carrying the can.

See this speech in context