Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Supposedly one of the central pillars of the just transition we need to address the climate crisis is the idea that it will be a just transition. I do not know how many times I have heard the Minister, Deputy Ryan, and other Ministers in the Government wax lyrical about how if we seriously address the climate crisis, it can be a win-win situation. This is what it should be. If we address the climate crisis, and the biodiversity crisis I might add in, people could have warmer homes and lower bills. They could have better public and cheaper transport systems. They could have more biodiversity and a better environment if we met our afforestation targets. This is what it should be but it is not what actually happens.

In the process the Government is not willing to challenge the logic of the market system, the way it is responsible for wrecking the environment and the way it simultaneously makes its money through exploiting ordinary people. The elephant in the room about who should pay for the just transition to a better climate future is the absolutely extraordinary rising, staggering and obscene profits of the energy companies. The Government does not want to do anything to cut or cap their profits or to call out the obscenity of their profits while people are being hammered with increased energy bills. The Government does not say a word about this. It thinks it is perfectly okay that they make a fortune. Then the Government comes in here and lectures ordinary people about how they have to take the pain to deal with the climate through increased carbon taxes and other forms of regressive taxation on their energy such as VAT and the public service obligation, PSO, levy. All of these hit hardest those who can least afford them and who have least control over the amount of energy they use in their homes or the access they have to public transport, or that they do not have, as is more likely the case.

If the Government continues to punish ordinary people who are least responsible for the climate crisis, they will turn people away from the climate agenda. Why not turn its attention to the obscene, and disgusting in the context of the current inflation crisis, profits of the energy companies such as the ESB, Energia, Shell and BP? They are making a fortune by wrecking the world's environment and crucifying ordinary people with the bills dropping through their doors. Unless the Government addresses this problem it will not get a just transition or any transition to a better climate future.

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