Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

It was not as funny as that. That might not seem in any way germane to what we are discussing, but I learned a really important lesson that day. I learned what happened when human excuses meet immutable, external realities. I bargained in my training.

I told myself I was too tired or busy that day or that I probably had enough done and would catch it up later. I took my excuses out onto the roads of Dublin on an October bank holiday weekend and found out by mile 21 that the road just did not care what excuses I had prepared for myself. I feel that, to some extent, we are doing the same with the climate challenge. We are bargaining.

The language we use is that the science is not clear or the measures are too hard and unpalatable, that the consequences are too far away in terms of time or geography, or that we are small while others are big. The atmosphere just does not care. As we change its composition through human activity, it simply traps more and more of the sun's energy. The science is clear and the impact and effects of climate change are no longer far away. They are being felt and experienced in the here and now and will continue to intensify in the years and decades ahead.

If that was not abundantly clear before, the latest IPCC report published this week has made it so. One of the IPCC working group co-chairs, Mr. Hans-Otto Pörtner, stated:

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.

I will admit that cost me sleep on Monday night as I listened to the breathing of my three sleeping boys in the other room. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 is part of our Government's response to that call to action. The carbon budgets being discussed this evening are an outworking of that legislation.

A figure of 500 billion tonnes of CO₂emissions is the global carbon budget that scientists predict will give us a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. That translates to 62 tonnes per person worldwide, which in turn translates to approximately seven years of current per capita emissions each year in Ireland, or fewer than five years if we include agriculture. Total greenhouse gas emissions covered in the carbon budgets are 68.3 megaton CO₂equivalent in 2018. These numbers are mind-boggling, to be honest, but we must make sense of them. The baseline year that our climate Act sets out is 2018. The first two carbon budgets must, therefore, be consistent with a reduction of emissions of 33.5 megaton CO₂equivalent in 2030.

The proposed carbon budgets set us on a path to achieve a necessary climate neutrality by 2050 and present the potential to better our resilience to climate change and protect and restore biodiversity. They also meet the temperature objectives required of us within the Paris Agreement for temperature rise of below 1.5°C.

I share some concerns around the backloading of targets into the latter half of this decade. We must be honest with ourselves, however, and acknowledge that many of the bigger measures that are required will take time to put in place. We set out an average reduction of 4.8% per annum for the first budget period from 2021 to 2020, an average of 8.3% from 2026 to 2030, and in the third period, which is a provisional budget reduction target, an average of 3.5% year on year.

Following on from passing these budgets, we also need to ensure we deliver beart de réir briathar, that we deliver on these actions. Ms Marie Donnelly, chair of the CCAC, pointed out there is already a "significant [implementation] gap between climate action policy and climate action ... [delivery]". She went on to note, "Ireland’s failure to meet its targets is due to not matching the ambition of plans with timely and complete delivery of actions." Deputy Shanahan alluded to many of those things in that we need to speed up in our implementation. We have to go further faster, and I heard calls earlier to go deeper and be more ambitious with our climate targets. I would be all for that but we need to be able to tackle this climate challenge in a way that brings people with us, and, as the Minister often says, this is already a challenge beyond compare.

At the start this year, Mr. Ian Talbot, who is the CEO of Chambers Ireland, spoke about decisions made, or perhaps not made, by the State to lock in decades of transport-orientated emissions into the future. He identified how inactivity has caused the long delay in creating regulatory and planning certainty for offshore renewable energy. He commented that, "The main benefit to introducing budgeting is that it will no longer allow administrations to defer actions as the rolling five-year budgets require immediate action."

We know that political time horizon struggle to see beyond the next electoral cycle. In terms of budgeting, that will not do. We need to be long term and ambitious in these plans. One particular area in which we can address the twin crises of climate and biodiversity, because one is as serious as the other and they are, of course, interrelated, is land use change and forestry emissions. The climate action plan set out indicative ranges of emission reductions for pertinent sectors. I will again quote Mr. Hans-Otto Pörtner:

By restoring degraded ecosystems and effectively and equitably conserving 30 to 50 per cent of Earth’s land, freshwater and ocean habitats, society can benefit from nature’s capacity to absorb and store carbon, and we can accelerate progress towards sustainable development...

There are things on which we are waiting. We are waiting on a land use review, a land use plan and a national soil strategy. Both of these are commitments within the programme for Government. We are also waiting on an EU nature restoration law to help restore a nature we have already lost. We need now to begin to plan for the departmental capacity and resources that will be needed to take on that combination and help us restore some of our natural and biological heritage and, at the same time, address land use, land use change and forestry, LULUCF, emissions to see how best we can use our land in terms of carbon sink and carbon sequestration. These must be acted on and delivered as quickly as humanly possible.

I will return briefly to my harsh lesson in 2009. I did finish that marathon, although, as Deputy Naughten insinuated, perhaps in a time I might not want to share with the House. Something it taught me was relentless forward progress, however, and that every step we take now must be a step in the right direction. No matter how hard it is for us to put one foot in front of the other, we must move in that direction.

Mr. Philip Boucher-Hayes, who I think is one of our foremost and best journalists in terms of climate reporting, posed the following question when reporting the latest IPCC report:

Q: What happens when you put 270 physics, chemistry and environment PhDs in a room for eight years?

A: You get a revolutionary manifesto for changing the planet and saving humankind.

Let us adopt these budgets this evening, as challenging and revolutionary as they are.

I will close with the lyrics of a song that has often played in my head since the time of my election, which responds-----

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