Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The climate action plan is a monstrous piece of legislation for a monstrous problem. It includes certain key goals which are well known at this stage. These include reducing our net carbon emissions by half by 2030 and trying to get to a net zero carbon economy by 2050. The plan outlines Ireland's current greenhouse gas emissions and targets across a range of all our major sectors, including electricity, enterprise, the built environment, transport and agriculture. The list goes on. Some 183 recommendations have been set out in the policy to reduce greenhouse gas.

A new climate action plan is being developed. This will develop five-year carbon budgets and sectoral targets, establish a climate action delivery board and establish an independent climate action council as a successor to the Climate Change Advisory Council. Within that there is a range of initiatives that I will return to.

The Government is also stepping up climate action governance which is welcomed. This is to allow Ireland to transition to become a climate-resilient, biodiversity-rich, strong and environmentally sustainable economy. These are all laudable aspirations, no doubt. We absolutely have to recognise that we are in an emergency, but we are not alone. Ireland is very small in the overall scheme of things. It is a very small emitter, albeit large per capita, in overall terms in world emissions. In order for us to take a leading position, and we should take a lead, we must not damage ourselves competitively by trying to be an outlier if the rest of the world does not follow suit. I would like to see a lot of work done at Government level and particularly at EU level to try to bring our EU colleagues with us on this journey. Some may be more advanced than others.

I now turn to some of the sectoral things that are outlined here. Increasing renewable electricity to 70% by 2030 is something we have heard a lot about in the House lately, particularly on the development of offshore wind. The east and south-east coasts are largely targeted for the first developments of offshore wind which will largely be ground-attached pylons and floating offshore rigs. They would seem to be more pertinent to the west coast and the deeper water but that technology is still in its infancy. Those farms are probably ten years away. What are we building all of these wind farms for? It is obvious that they are being built to create greater renewable energy, but two more questions follow from that. First, how are we to build them? Second, what is this renewable energy going to support? I have raised the designation of a new wind energy port in the country. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has previously said that this is a competitive process. I am not sure what the parameters of the competition are but I contend that this port should be Rosslare Harbour for a number of reasons, not least its location adjacent to the fields and to the coast of Wales. Beyond that, it has deep water and it is geographically well placed to service all the offshore developments around the south-west coast. Quite apart from all of that, the south east needs major capital infrastructural investment from the State to address 20 years of imbalance. This would go some way towards that. There are lots of good strategic reasons for doing that.

The second question relates to what we will use all of the wind capacity for. It seems to be tailored largely for data centres. This has been raised several times in recent days in the House and rightly so. I have written to the Minister to ask how many memorandums of understanding have been engaged with to date in terms of private sector data centre development. I still have not received an answer. The media is now saying that the figure is over 75. That sounds like an incredible number of data centres in the country. In recent days, the energy regulator or someone from his office speculated that data centres could account for as much as 70% of our future electricity generation. Something is not quite right within those numbers, and that plan needs to be looked at and revised.

The Minister mentioned the establishment of a microgeneration scheme to allow producers to sell back electricity. Such schemes have been going around for ten years. Many people have set up private windmills. Many windmill farms have been approved on land but have not been developed simply because there is no way of getting a feed-in tariff to supply back into the grid. There is talk of creating better community participation in renewable energy projects and prices. That is basically the community rating. Again, no information has been forthcoming from the Minister or from anyone in the Department on what the legislation will require in terms of community ownership of wind farms.

As the retrofitting of houses has been raised many times, I will not go over that again. We will have to get over many issues around that. Accelerating the uptake of electric cars and vans so that all new cars and vans are electric vehicles by 2030 is a great aspiration, but it will not happen unless we do something extremely independent and new around taxation. That is the only way you are going to make these vehicles work out for a lot of people in the country and make them economically viable for purchase. I say "yes" to improving public transport.

I will conclude by speaking about increasing the rates of afforestation and the rewetting of bogs to act as carbon sinks.

The forestry sector at the moment is in absolute chaos, if the Minister is not aware. The present number of applications for felling licences and afforestation is nothing short of abysmal, to be quite frank. This is something the Minister is going to have to look at. I welcome the overall tenets of the plan, but we have a lot of work to do to succeed with it.

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