Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will start with a quote, with which I am sure that Ceann Comhairle is familiar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Shakespeare put those words in the mouth of Brutus as he went to battle with Mark Antony, but it could well have been said of the debate about climate and our approach to the challenge of global warming that is having such an impact on communities. The stakes are truly enormous if we fail in this challenge. However, it cannot be said at the moment that we have been seizing that current; we have considerable ground to make up.

I take the opportunity to thank the officials in the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, as it was when I was Minister there. We had responsibility for seeking to manage two of the most globally impactful forces hitting our world. One was digital transformation. I am very proud that we delivered the national broadband plan, and I am glad to see Deputies now calling for it to be delivered more quickly. Most of the time, I was faced with opposition to that. We also have in train the online safety Bill.

We put in place the first climate action plan that was compliant with the obligations to our European Union colleagues that we adopted. We put in place the first just transition commissioner to work with the profoundly impacted communities in the midlands and we laid the foundation of the climate Bill that we are debating today. I wish the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, well in the work he is taking on there, which is of enormous importance. Today is a milestone as we are carving a pathway to deliver the transition by 2050 so that we will have a climate-resilient, biodiversity-rich, environmentally sustainable and climate-neutral economy.

Enshrining these objectives in law is an important statement of intent by the Oireachtas. However, I am not one of those who seeks to find the tightest possible straitjacket and seeks to find hooks for litigation so that sectors can be whipped into line. That is not how we will deliver what we need. If we end up in the courts fighting about progress on climate, we, as politicians, will have failed. The challenge is not about defining and finding bulletproof legislation; it is about winning citizens and showing them that to cling to business as usual is to condemn their sector, their community or their children to a stunted future.

I was not among those who sought to enshrine the 51% goal of the programme for Government into law.

It is not that I do not believe in that ambition, but that I believe it is risky to seek to bind our citizens in a legal obligation without properly teasing out with them what it implies. We cannot do that without consultation and a clear roadmap. However, I accept the majority view was different in the committee and I will accept that here in the House, but there are no grounds for the suggestion in the letters to the three party leaders, which I have seen, that the programme for Government signed up to a cumulative 7% per annum reduction in carbon emissions. The Government signed up to our being at a level 51% lower by 2030. The programme for Government recognised that the path to that could not be 7% per annum but would have to take account of the slow impact of some policies and the need to build up over time.

I respect the science behind the 51% ambition. However, I believe it is the height of cynicism for some politicians to insist on the science in embedding high ambition and then to turn their faces resolutely against both the science and common sense when they tell us they will reject what is needed, such as a higher carbon price, such as quicker planning processes to allow infrastructure to be built, such as the pure illusion that only the enterprise sector need take up the slack in making the changes, or such as claiming that banning liquefied natural gas, LNG, will reduce our emissions. It will not reduce our emissions by a single gram.

Too many of the responses I have heard on this Bill from politicians embrace the principle of environmental sustainability but insist on hands off sacrifice in their backyard. They want to find solutions and impose obligations upon others. That is the height of cynicism. The sad truth, regardless of whether we like it, is that the take, make, use and dispose culture that has been a feature in the creation of environmental degradation is embedded in all of our lives, not in the lives of a small number. To reverse it, we will have to change the habits of a lifetime. We will have to accept infrastructures with which we are unfamiliar within our communities. For years, we have accepted having gallons of inflammable liquid buried below our towns and villages, but we baulk at the idea of renewable energy replacing those fossil fuels. We have to get our heads around that and we have to work with people to bring them with us.

We will also need to mobilise a lot of capital. This will not all be mobilised capital provided by Government. This is about changing the direction of travel of our communities, our sectors and our enterprises. Usually, disruptive change of this nature is brought about by a technological revolution that is sweeping all before it. What makes this different is that we, the politicians, have to find the momentum to make the changes that disrupt the traditional ways of doing things. I am up for the battle of delivering the 51%, but let us be honest with ourselves about how challenging that will be. The hard-won climate action plan which I put in place sought to stretch what was achievable. It set out that by 2030 we would have 12 GW extra of renewable energy - a quadrupling of what we now have, one million extra vehicles on the road, 500,000 homes insulated to a B2 rating, 600,000 homes with heat pumps, 19 farm measures, outlined by Teagasc, fully implemented on every farm in the country, a carbon tax of €80 to drive the change, the end of peat and coal and 8,000 ha of forestry planted each year. We are now signing up to increase those commitments by 75%. No Deputy I have heard contribute to this debate thus far has seriously addressed how that gap is to be filled. That is where our attention should be focused now.

As we seek to find the extra 13 million tonnes reduction annually, we will have to embrace more costly interventions than we have considered to date. The technologies that are coming will not provide us with solutions in the next ten years and so a new climate action plan will have to examine challenging changes, such as substantial increases in the carbon price, significant cuts in our herd - people do not want to talk about that - and higher retrofit targets. These are discussions we need to have and to face honestly. We need to engage with people on how those changes can be achieved and how they can still have a strong and prosperous future having made those changes. Unfortunately, the instinct of some politicians is to whip up fears around these changes instead of finding ways in which we can deliver them and give people a better livelihood.

The question needs to be looked at differently. If we do not start to make these changes now, we will be leaving a legacy to the next generation that, as I said previously, is stunted in every dimension. Our farms will not be able to support a decent family farm income if we do not start to make the changes. Our enterprises will not be able to compete in a carbon neutral Europe if we do not make the changes. The living patterns will condemn us to high costs and poor comfort if we do not make the changes. This is about a vision of a better Ireland, better for farmers, better for enterprise and better for communities. That is what we have to carve out and bring people with us on.

The challenge is to rethink the way in which we do a lot of things. That is difficult. Politicians on all sides need to face that challenge. Some 70% of us are living in homes that are far too big for our needs. Our fleet of 3 million vehicles are idle 95% of the time. Some 30% of our food is wasted, imposing a carbon footprint of 3 million tonnes lost. We can change our way of thinking in these areas. There are huge opportunities to do better, to give us a better standard of living, but with less impact on our environment. We need to find ways of doing that.

In the area of land use, some of the practices now in place are pushing farmers to the very limit of their effort yet yielding them virtually nothing from the marketplace in return. By changing the way we use our land, they can capitalise on a very substantial carbon dividend. In some cases, as much as €700 per ha could be gleaned by making a switch in the way farmers farm and manage their lands. Farmers often ask about where the dividend is for them. We have to find ways of producing that dividend for farming in sensible ways that build the type of vision we have set out for ourselves in 2050. I believe that is possible.

Members of this House have also opposed vehemently the idea of a carbon price. A carbon price is merely a way of saying that some of the practices that are generating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are imposing massive costs on the rest of the globe and on our communities. That is why we are talking about putting a price on carbon. The other side of that is that in putting a price on carbon, we will have revenue we will have to devote to cutting other taxes so that we can reduce the burden on work and provide support for changes in practices in our sectors and in our communities that will make life better for all. As a community, we need to get that into our heads. The reason there is a price on carbon that is rising year in and year out and will hit €100 per tonne by the end of the decade and, on a conservative estimate, €250 per tonne by 2050 is because it is doing such damage. The other side of that coin is the huge opportunities for people to earn from managing and farming carbon to deliver cheaper ways of reducing the impact of it on our environment than some of the many more costly items that would otherwise enter into the calculations.

Much of the more imaginative thinking we need is embraced by the concept of the circular economy and the strategy that could be created if we rethink the supply chains of all the activities that we undertake as a community.

I am pleased that the climate committee has accepted my request to act as a rapporteur on how thinking around a circular economy can help us to make that transition, particularly in sectors such as food, construction and retail where the impact is very high.

Agriculture has received more attention than it deserves in this debate. It is important to note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, recognises that biogenic methane, that is, the methane that comes from livestock, can only be reduced between the ranges of 24% and 47% by 2050. We need to recognise that agriculture in this country is different and is not going to be treated the same as other sectors because of its important contribution to food supply and rural economies. However, it would be blind to pretend that farming cannot make significant changes that will make the journey to achieving our environmental targets much easier and can, in the process, prove rewarding for farmers. In the future, farmers will have smaller herds because they will earn a large part of their income from the way in which they manage carbon. That is a future people will embrace if we provide the institutional arrangements to deliver it.

Finally, we have a great deal of really important information from scientists, who have provided us with a vision of a burning globe. That creates the sense of urgency we need if we are to change. However, that change will not be achieved by pointing the finger at communities, sectors or enterprises. To make changes, we need to embrace what I call the three Ls, namely, legacy, legitimacy and leadership. We need a vision of a better future as a legacy we pass on to the next generation. That legacy will be better homes for our children to live in, better farms for them to manage and better enterprises in which they can find work. We also need to found authority to make changes on legitimacy. That is why the citizens' assembly was so important. It showed how dialogue, fairness and just transition are integral to this process. We need those elements to empower us to make the sometimes quite radical changes needed to cut through the barriers that otherwise will hold us back. Finally, we need to mobilise leadership in every section of our community, including sports, community, economic and financial organisations, to recognise that this is a change that requires a truly national effort and will deliver for us if we achieve it. If we miss this opportunity, we will spend our time, as Shakespeare said, "bound in shallows and in miseries", having failed to live up to the expectation that is set upon this generation.

I warmly commend the Minister on presenting the Bill to the House and look forward to the debate on it. Most of all, I look forward to the sorts of actions we can collectively take and that will bring our citizens with us on an exciting journey of change, at the end of which we will have a better country.

See this speech in context