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

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute the following:

"having reflected on the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, declines to accept the carbon budgets presented for 2021-2025 and for 2026-2030 as: — they are not aligned with the State's commitments entered into under the Paris Agreement; and

— therefore, calls on the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications to consult with the Climate Change Advisory Council in order to amend the budgets accordingly; and further calls for a revision in the third budget to ensure it reflects our climate obligations based on the latest science and the principles of climate justice.".

I will go through the amendment in order to make it clear to people what we are saying. We propose the deletion of the current motion agreeing to the current inadequate carbon budgets. We replace it with text stating that having reflected on the most recent IPCC report, the Dáil declines to accept the carbon budgets presented for 2021 to 2025 and for 2026 to 2030 as they are not aligned with the State's commitments entered into the treaty signed in Paris in 2015, and calls on the Minister to consult with the advisory council to amend the budgets accordingly. Our amended motion further calls for a revision in the third budget to ensure it reflects our climate obligations based on the latest science and the principles of climate justice.

Listening to this debate, I must ask what we are doing here. It is only days since the third working group report of the IPCC. The co-chair has told us that it is now or never if we are going to avoid going over 1.5°C. The UN Secretary General put it adroitly and accurately when he stated: "Some government and business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. Simply put, they are lying."

The IPCC report is clear that we are on a trajectory to absolute disaster and catastrophe and the only thing that can avert it is deep economic and structural change or, in other words, a complete revolution in how are societies and economies are organised. Instead of taking action, most of the people and political parties here, including the Green Party, and the world, are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Even worse than that, we are pushing the Titanicfurther into the water through the EU signing up for a long-term deal with the US to ensure demand for 50 billion cu. m of US liquefied natural gas until at least 2030. We are signing up for more fossil fuels and more fossil fuel infrastructure that will then have to be used for decades to produce a profit.

What we have before us is simply not in line with the science. The Chairman of the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action, who is a member of the Green Party, earlier anticipated that we in People Before Profit would make the argument that the budgets presented are not adequate. He knew we would do that because he was at that committee meetings when scientist after scientist said very clearly that this was not enough and would not contribute to staying under 1.5°C of global warming. He went on to say he does not think free public transport is the answer and that he does not think banning data centres will help. I happen to think that it will. What we need is a significant reduction in energy usage and material throughput, on a global basis, but that can be done in a way that also improves people's lives with measures such as free public transport, a four-day week without loss of pay, retrofitting and saying we do not need data centres with all the algorithms and everything else. Let us use the energy we have to improve people's lives.

Deputy Leddin does not agree with those measures. That is fine; no problem. However, let us at least start with carbon budgets that are based on science. Then we can work out what policies we need to get there. We do not have that to start with. It is a complete abject failure by the Government and the Green Party that they have brought forward carbon budgets that simply do not measure up. What is contained in the carbon budgets is less than what is in the programme for Government. What is in the programme for Government is less than the EU commitments. The EU commitments are less than what is demanded in the Paris Agreement. Bit by bit, there is a complete disconnection from what the science is saying. That is because these budgets are attuned to political realities, rather than making the case to people about what we need to do and then finding a way to do it. We think it can be done in a way that improves the lives of ordinary people as opposed to making their lives harder.

The overall target in the Act of a 51% cut in emissions by 2030 is insufficient. It is particularly insufficient when taking into account the obligations set out in the Paris Agreement "to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances". Ireland is a developed country. It is the fifth wealthiest country in the world per capita, although obviously most people do not feel that; it is the billionaires who feel it. That is why we need a much faster trajectory. We should be aiming for a zero-carbon economy by 2030.

Second, the budgets make no provision for, or do not account for, emissions from shipping or aviation. For a country like Ireland, that is quite an omission. We are just going to ignore these emissions. We are not going to count them on our balance sheet and other countries will not count them on their balance sheets. That way, we all sail on towards catastrophe with our eyes wide open but everyone can pat themselves on the back because they had a carbon budget. The carbon budgets use a baseline of 2018. It is not 1990, which is what we should use, and not even 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed. The consequence is that we get higher budgets than we would otherwise be allowed if we used a baseline of 2020. It does not even include the Government's own programme for cuts of 7% per annum. The eminent scientist Professor Barry McMullin calculates that these budgets amount to an average of 6% worth of reductions per year, and that the CCAC's budget amounts to 495 metric tonnes of CO₂equivalent, not 468, which is how much it would be if a 7% cut per year was delivered.

The budgets are also less ambitious than what is recommended by the EU. The EU looked for cuts of 55% by 2030, rather than 51%, and uses 1990 as the base year rather than 2018. If 1990 was used in the advisory council's carbon budgets, they would provide for a reduction of just 45%, not 51%. There is clever accounting going on to try to pretend that something closer to the science is being done here. The budgets are less ambitious than the United Nations Environment Programme's emissions gap report, which called for cuts from 2020 to 2030 of 7.6% per year to be in with a 50:50 chance of limiting warming to under 1.5°C.

The carbon budgets are not compliant with the Paris Agreement and its obligation to reduce emissions in a fair and equitable way between richer nations and poorer ones. Quite outrageously, the Climate Change Advisory Council essentially says this is not its job. It states, "It is not the job of the Council or the Carbon Budget Committee to make such value judgements." Conversely, the point was made by scientist Dr. Andrew Jackson that, according to the climate Act, "CCAC is specifically required by law ... to carry out its functions in a manner consistent with implementation of the Paris Agreement 'to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities". The carbon budgets back-load the cuts to the second budget, with cuts of just 4.8% per year for the first five years and cuts of 8.3% for the second five-year budget. As well as the political reality that this Government will be gone, the consequence of that is that any slippage in the first five years, and there already is some slippage, will be very hard to fix in subsequent years. Some stuff takes time - there is no question about that - but there are things that could be done immediately, like, for example, free public transport, rolling out mass retrofitting, and so on.

A very concerning point was made in the most recent IPCC report. It noted that the whole world, including these carbon budgets, is reliant on the deployment of vast unproven future technologies to deliver net-zero by 2050. The advisory council itself admits that future targets rely on carbon capture and storage technology, massive carbon sequestration and land use that is neither planned for nor possible at present. That is like relying on a future fairy tale presented to us by some of the techno-modernists who suggest we do not really need to worry about this today because a magic solution is around the corner, as opposed to dealing with the science that is presented before us.

At the committee, Deputy Bríd Smith proposed reductions of a further 67 metic tonnes of CO₂equivalent to account for aviation and shipping emissions, as well as our obligations under the Paris Agreement, but all of those amendments were rejected by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. For that reason, we should not accept these budgets. We should send them back and come back with budgets that are actually in line with the science.

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