Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with my Government colleague, Deputy O'Dowd. I wish to acknowledge my fellow spokespeople on climate, Deputy O’Rourke from Sinn Féin and Deputy Bacik from Labour. I believe both Deputies to be genuinely committed to the issue of climate. Having listened to them, some of their criticism and their takes on the climate action plan are valid and legitimate. We welcome that kind of opposition. Some of the criticism is not valid or legitimate. To use Deputy O’Rourke’s words, I would say that we should move beyond rhetoric. That is something that should apply to all parties in the House, as well as the Government. I am thankful that we have a baseline of agreement about climate action among most parties in this House. It makes what feels like an impossible job to halve our emissions in less than a decade slightly more achievable. However, I think we really need to up our game, all of us, including the Ministers responsible.

I welcome many elements of the 2021 climate action plan but I think the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth and the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, will acknowledge that it is not enough. We have a series of ranges of emissions reductions for each sector and we have to convert those ranges into definite, single numbers for each sector that will be compatible with the carbon budgets. We are getting to the stage where further delay is inaction.

We are still at the stage where we have unallocated emissions reductions, comprising 4 megatonnes overall in the climate action plan, as well as an additional 0.9 megatonnes in transport. We urgently need to start discussing where those additional emissions reductions are going to come from. We need to stop talking about more roads and multibillion euro motorways and over-intensification in agriculture.

One challenge is significant institutional inertia in the big emitting sectors, and business-as-usual thinking is still too dominant. I remind the House that section 17 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 specifically obliges public bodies, insofar as practicable, to perform their functions in a manner consistent with a number of criteria including the most recent approved climate action plan, the furtherance of the national climate objective and the general objective of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and climate change adaptation. I will be honest here and say that I do not think many of our public bodies are acting consistently with the climate Act. In transport we are still talking about new roads for electric cars and electric buses instead of reducing vehicle kilometres and, as Deputy Bacik just said, fewer journeys. We are not talking enough about reallocating road space and achieving modal shift. In agriculture we are still on a pathway that involves the export of commodity products.

I am making these criticisms here and I accept some of them are uncomfortable but I also wish there were more making these criticisms with me, both inside and outside the House. It is not sufficient to say we are not doing enough. We need to describe exactly how we are not doing enough and to suggest measures that will bridge the gap. I call on Opposition parties and on environmental civil society groups to put the pressure on and start talking in specifics.

We need to stop ignoring the phenomenon of induced demand and accept that more roads bring more traffic volumes that bring more emissions even with 1 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2030. We have failed to quantify induced demand and we need to quantify induced demand and stop pretending it does not exist. We need to accept it politically but also officially. We need to get better advice. For example, the five cities traffic demand management report commissioned by the Department of Transport completely ignored road space reallocation and circulation plans, measures that have proven to reduce transport emissions in other countries. There is significant expertise in consulting firms on emissions reduction in transport and I see this expertise in Scotland and in Wales but not in Ireland. We need better advice and we need it urgently.

We need to look again at the emissions in the agriculture sector. We have to accept that technical changes to the ways that we spread slurry, genomics, feed additives and other business-as-usual measures will only get us so far. We have applied for another derogation from the nitrates directive for 7,000 out of 137,000 farms in Ireland, despite the fact that the water in 43% of our rivers is still of unsatisfactory quality and according to the EPA, agriculture is the primary contributor to this unsatisfactory quality. As far as I am aware, we still do not know what the emissions impact of continuing with the nitrates derogation will be.

I have addressed transport and agriculture but we also need urgent specific discussion on the other sectors. We have a few short months to make some very difficult decisions. We can talk about bringing people with us on the journey but if we are not prepared to make the journey in the first place, then that talk is pretty useless.

While I do commend the 2021 climate action plan, which contains many good measures, it is also not enough. We only have a few months to make the difficult decisions for the statutory 2022 plan. It is time we all got to work.

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