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

There is an old joke about the weather that everyone talks about it but no one ever does anything about it.

It feels the same with the transition. Everyone is in favour of it. Even the usual climate denier Deputies in this House talk about how and when the transition should happen. My main concern is that despite the rhetoric there is no actual transition taking place. What progress there is in any area is akin to Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill. For every step forward we see the boulder slip down again. For every electric bus we purchase or every claim of a home that has been retrofitted, we see another data centre being permitted or we hear talk of a new airport runway or a spike in car sales.

This is not just my impression. Looking at the global picture, it is clear there is no real transition taking place away from fossil fuels. The Global Carbon Project, GCP, estimated that fossil fuel emissions in 2021 will reach 36.4 billion tonnes of CO₂. That figure is only 0.8% below its pre-pandemic high in 2019. Both coal and gas emissions have already surpassed their pre-pandemic levels, with a 2% increase in gas emissions and a 1% increase in coal emissions between 2019 and 2021. Since the first Kyoto climate conference, global carbon emissions have continued to rise and they are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. In April, we found out that just 20 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, including Shell, Exxon Mobil and Gazprom, are projected to spend $932 billion by the end of 2030 to develop new oil and gas fields. In May, we found out that the oil and gas industry took advantage of the war in Ukraine to spread misinformation about the causes of the energy crisis to apply political pressure and to pursue a long-standing wish list of policy changes. This is according to a report by InfluenceMap. The website DeSmog.comreported oil executives and lobbies conducing a public relations blitz in the days following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We see the same results to some extent in this House, with the clamour by some Deputies for LNG and their support for the Barryroe oil field. These are the same voices that share the same contempt for the climate crisis and the same greed that informs these campaigns globally. My question to the Minister of State is: Exactly what transition we are talking about?

The EPA has made it clear that we are failing to meet the targets that the Government set out in the climate action plan. A significant gap exists across all sectors in terms of planned cuts in emissions and those of transport, agriculture, energy, etc. That is bad enough, but the targets themselves are inadequate and are not in line with the science or with the scale of the crisis we face. We are not in a transition; we are in a war. We are not in a transition when we think that it is okay to build more data centres, to build LNG platforms, to licence the extraction of 300 million barrels of oil at Barryroe or to implement carbon taxes on ordinary people whose sole purpose seems to be to pay for retrofitting for the already wealthier sections of society or to subsidise the purchase of EVs.

Radical and far-reaching policies were what the IPCCC report said were needed in 2018. We are still awaiting those policies. In the meantime, in India and North Africa, we see more record-breaking temperatures where the limits of human endurance, the so-called wet-bulb temperature, is now exceeded with alarming regularity. These are temperatures and humidity where the body is unable to cool itself by sweating. This was seen in 2003 in the European heatwave that killed thousands of people and it is now a regular occurrence on the planet. What were once events that would occur within 100 or 1,000 years are now decade and sometimes yearly events.

We will not get the transition we need until we begin to challenge the economic systems and its priorities that are driving this crisis. That means challenging the very logic of capitalism and free markets. There is no middle ground in this war. Hoping that the market will deliver some magic new technology or that it will invest sufficiently in renewables is a child’s hope. It is time we grew up.

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