Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Blah, blah, blah is what we have heard for 30 years from politicians. Greta Thunberg got it correct about the Taoiseach and the UN Security Council, as in regard to much of the debate that has happened today. The gulf between the promises, the rhetoric and the talk and the reality of the action or lack of action grows wider and wider. The Taoiseach was correct when he said at the UN Security Council that climate change is the defining challenge of our generation and that the council must do more on the issue of climate and security. He did not, of course, mention that sitting in the room with him were representatives of the US military, which is the biggest polluter in the world and the biggest contributor to climate catastrophe and the biodiversity crisis we face.

I listened earlier to the contribution of the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth. I did not catch all of it, but he was making the point that we all used to reference GDP whereas now we, including the CSO, no longer rely on GDP. There is a gulf between that talk and the reality of the Government's action around data centres. The argument used by the Government for why we have to proceed with data centres, despite that it is an absolute contradiction in terms of meeting the Government's inadequate 51% target by 2030 in terms of climate change, is precisely the argument around GDP. The Government is absolutely committed to that so it is complete and rank hypocrisy.

A climate emergency suggests an emergency response. If your house is on fire, you call the fire services. You do not pour petrol on the flames. That is what the Government is doing in driving ahead with the construction of additional data centres on top of what we already have here and the building of further fossil fuel infrastructure such as liquefied natural gas, LNG, terminals. This is completely at odds with the commitments the State has made under the Paris Agreement, its own promises, what was said today and what was said by the Taoiseach at the UN Security Council. It will consign all of the targets to the bin, but nonetheless that is what is being pushed ahead.

There has been a great deal of focus on the aspect of the People Before Profit-Solidarity Planning and Development (Climate Emergency Measures) (Amendment) Bill 2021 that would ban data centres. The other very important part of that Bill, which will debated later this evening, is to ban investment in further fossil fuel infrastructure. It makes no sense to sink further money into fossil fuel infrastructure that will be with us for decades into the future. The more money that is invested in fossil fuel infrastructure, the more the vested interests, the capitalist class, will push to stick with it because they will not have made their money back from the investment. It makes no sense to have any energy investment in fossil fuels from which we have to move away rapidly.

All investment in energy should be going into energy solutions rather than creating more energy problems, yet the Government is also going to oppose that aspect.

There has been an amount of commentary generally about the IPCC report, which is very stark in its conclusions on the speed and scale of the disaster we are facing. Something a bit less commented upon was the leaked second draft of the IPCC report on mitigation strategies. It states we must move away from the current capitalist model to avoid surpassing planetary boundaries and climate and ecological catastrophe. That is scientists saying that, not socialists. It is scientists who are looking at the reality that capitalism is driving us towards disaster. Deputy Barry makes the correct point that they could be scientists who are also socialists.

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