Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I certainly agree with her initial statement that the IPCC report that came out the other day did not get the attention it deserved. It was very alarming, quite frankly, to read the summary, which I did. The Deputy is correct in her analysis that the war in Ukraine, the pandemic that still rages around the world, and the shocking rise in the cost of living meant it did not get the kind of attention it deserved. Sometimes when we are managing crises such as the war in Ukraine, the rising cost of living and the pandemic, we can lose sight of the mega-crisis which is climate change and the impact it is going to have and is already having on people.

I think the "blame capitalism" analysis is too simplistic. If we look at the state-planned economies like the Chinese economy, they are producing quite a lot of emissions which are rising very rapidly. Economies that were developed under socialist systems such as the former Soviet economies, Russia, for example, and North Korea, they are very much based on heavy industry and are really all about pumping coal, steel and all the rest of it. I think that is too simplistic. One good thing about capitalism is that it does tend to innovate and develop the kind of technologies that will allow us to deal with climate change. Technologies such as green hydrogen, offshore wind and carbon capture storage are all being developed and funded by capitalists, not by people who have different ideologies. I think that capitalist versus socialist thing is far too simplistic and far too ideological.

I agree that we need systems change. I remember saying a couple of years ago that if we were to achieve our climate targets and reduce emissions by what we had hoped we would reduce them by, we would need to shut down the economy and send everyone home. We pretty much did that during the pandemic and our emissions only went down by 6% or 7%. What that says to me is that we need systems change. We need to change the way we produce our energy, stop fossil fuels, and move to renewables and hydrogen. That is what we are doing but it will take time. We need to change our transport and food systems. We need to change the way we heat our homes. Systems change cannot be done overnight. It will take a generation to do it. We cannot just shut down the way things are. People still need to be able to live their everyday and normal lives. It will take a generation to go from fossil fuels to renewables, in my view. In the meantime, we have to live our lives.

See this speech in context