Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will speak first, followed by Deputies Boyd Barrett and Barry.

I think I am the only Deputy here who sat for months on the Committee on Climate Action in 2019. We looked at this issue for weeks. We heard from all sorts of experts and witnesses and we received all sorts of data on the question of carbon tax. I was particularly struck by the witnesses from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. They appeared before the committee to give us evidence about the level of energy poverty in the country. Such was the level in 2019, before this cost-of-living hike, that the society was at that point spending an extra €4 million per year in fuel subsidies, in many cases to people who were already on a fuel subsidy from the State but also to others who were not on a fuel subsidy from the State.

One of the things their research showed us was that the level of energy poverty throughout the country was much greater than the measure, which is who gets to have fuel allowance, shows up as the reality for people.

Parking all this aside, my party and group have been against the carbon tax from the get-go. This is not because we do not take the climate seriously. We have tabled some of the most radical Bills before the House, including ending the extraction of oil and gas in this country, stopping the proliferation of data centres and banning liquefied natural gas, LNG, which the Minister and Minister of State sitting in front of me voted against not so long ago. We take the question of climate and the crisis very seriously.

The point about carbon taxes and ordinary people, however, is they are built on an extremely false premise. This premise is that imposing them helps people to change their behaviour. For example, they move from driving a dirty old diesel car onto a nice bus that passes by their house every half an hour, or they buy an electric vehicle, or indeed they retrofit their homes to the tune of €30,000, €40,000 or €50,000 because they will spend less on dirty old oil or gas that might heat their homes. This is a nonsense. For the vast majority of people, not only in this country but on the planet, carbon taxes do not help to change their behaviour. Their behaviour is embedded in what people here call the twin crises.

The twin crises of climate and cost of living are linked. They are not separate. They are linked by the fact we live on a planet that is propelling the market forward as the only answer to everything. That same market is propelling the climate crisis and the inequality and poverty in which people live. To support carbon tax is to be delusional. It is like sitting on the Titanicas it sinks and moving the deckchairs this way and then that way. The Titanickeeps sinking. To use a more modern analogy from the movie "Don't Look Up", it is like throwing stuff at the comet that continues to hurtle towards the earth to blow it apart.

The climate crisis is extremely serious but what are needed are radical measures that tackle the fossil fuel industry. I will finish with an example of where this is best understood. This is the example of the two countries that are wheeled out always as having done a wonderful job on carbon taxes. They are Norway and Canada. All of the research is wheeled out on both of them. Norway is one of the biggest polluters in terms of fossil fuels. It has a massive oil and gas industry. Canada has the Alberta oil sands, which is one of the dirtiest forms of producing gas on the planet. They are not good examples of how to deal with the climate crisis. How we deal with it is by going after the big polluters. These are the oil and gas industry, the plastic industries and those related to them. It is not going after ordinary people who cannot afford to change their behaviour. Instead of this, the Government should go after the guys at the top, the 1% dirtying the planet, and give the rest of us a break.

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