Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the Green Party on bringing the Bill to this point. In saying that, the revised Bill is a great disappointment. To assess it, one must ask two core questions. First, if the legislation is implemented in full and all the targets in it are achieved, will Ireland have done all it can to ensure that human activities do not cause global average temperatures to increase by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels? Second, does the legislation show a clear commitment to climate justice so that those individuals, corporations and societies that have contributed most to the problem of global warming contribute most to its solution? With regard to this Bill, the answer to both questions is "No". That is what has to be improved upon.

The Bill is a positive improvement on the legislation proposed last October, which was full of loopholes and vague language. At least it is now tighter from that point of view but some areas remain to be tackled. The justification for the Green Party entering the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael Government was that it would have an impact on climate change but the Bill now before the Dáil falls way short of what is actually required. The biggest problem with the Bill, although not the only one, is the weakness of its definition of "climate justice". Put simply, climate justice means that those individuals, corporations and states that contribute most to climate change must contribute most to its solution. Some of the world's poorest people, who are affected by drought, flooding and the loss of land to desert not at some time in the future, but today, have contributed hardly anything to climate change.

In 2015, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty calculated that the top 10% of emitters worldwide contributed approximately 45% of global emissions annually while the bottom 50% contributed approximately 13%. Accordingly, the first principle of climate justice is that the richest individuals and societies, those that contribute most to global warming, must pay to protect poorer individuals and societies from its negative effects and must also play the biggest part in halting and reversing those effects.

Climate justice must also apply to carbon taxes. Carbon tax is one of the most commonly proposed means of lowering emissions but it is controversial because it can be regressive, meaning that those with less wealth and income end up paying a greater proportion of their income and wealth than those with more. This is the situation we are at with Ireland's current tax regime, which involves a simple tax on fuel, oil, natural gas, kerosene, marked gas oil, liquid petroleum gas and solid fuels. The Bill should include progressivity in carbon taxes as a guiding principle of climate action. There is a need for all carbon taxes to be progressive, that is the proportion of an individual's income or wealth paid in tax to increase with increasing income and wealth and for the revenue from such taxes to be solely spent on measures to further climate justice, including a just transition.

The question of a just transition for those who could lose their jobs, such as those in Bord na Móna and the ESB is a major weakness in the Bill. There must be strong income supports and retraining, alongside investment in sustainable green energy in the areas most affected. A just transition is best achieved through the solidarity economy, meaning through initiatives controlled and owned by local communities. For example, a body of research shows that a community is much more supportive of renewable energy production if it has a stake in it. The Western Development Commission has shown that community-owned energy initiatives have greater economic multiplier effects than externally-owned projects.

Climate justice demands that the Bill sets much more ambitious goals. The global target for net greenhouse gas emissions is that they reach net zero by 2050. However, the living standards of the poorest people, who are least responsible for climate change, need to rise to acceptable levels. That means the poorest countries should be allowed to increase their emissions for some time after the richest nations. They should not be expected to reach net zero emissions until after 2050. To achieve the global goal, countries such as Ireland need to reach net zero emissions long before 2050 and we have to be looking at 2040 or 2045 at a maximum. That has to be dealt with on Committee Stage. In particular, section 35C of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 on just transition should be inserted in the Bill. I will propose that when we come to amendments.

Earlier this month, the High Court found that the Government as a whole was not obliged, in the exercise of its executive power, to have regard to a national mitigation plan, nor to the furthering of a national transition objective under the 2015 Act. The Government must seek to fix this loophole by way of an amendment on Committee Stage. It must close the loophole identified by the High Court in the Friends of the Irish Environment v. An Bord Pleanála (Shannon LNG) case. This Government has committed to giving statutory effect to ending the issuing of new licences for the exploration and extraction of gas. The Minister indicated that this commitment would be provided for in legislation on Committee Stage of the Bill. However, this will not impose a ban on LNG infrastructure being developed in Ireland to facilitate imports of fracked gas. The programme for Government includes an explicit commitment to bringing forward a policy to end imports of fracked gas and LNG. The Minister should address this gap in the Bill and publish a comprehensive plan to ban the importation of fracked gas, and specifically to ban LNG terminals in Ireland this year, which should be included in the Bill.

Experts in climate law and science have identified a weakness in the drafting of the new section 6A(5), which sets a binding target for 2030 to guide the setting of the first two carbon budgets by the Climate Change Advisory Council. There is some uncertainty over how the 51% emission reduction target, as set out in the Bill, is to be calculated. I am not a climate scientist so I will leave it to the scientists to make those points. The Minister has a copy of that letter from those scientists and he should respond to it.

The Joint Committee on Climate Action recommended that the Bill should fully account for emissions from aviation, shipping, non-territorial or consumption-based emissions, and offshore mitigation strategies. All of these areas need to be explicitly addressed in the Bill, alongside targets to prevent the offshoring of Ireland's climate obligations.

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