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

This figure of €2.9 million gives us just a hint of the failure in this State. The fact that we can purchase credits from Slovakia gives us another hint that the entire EU trading system and sharing efforts are a form of a giant accounting trick. I think the Minister of State knows this. As someone said before, it is like a medieval indulgence that allows you to buy your way out while you continue to sin.

The full cost of carbon credits may well be more than €120 million in recent years and even this figure barely touches on the future cost, which is in the region of €8 billion by 2030. Despite 27 COPs and various lofty declarations, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere continue to rise. Far from reaching the inadequate targets that were set for reductions, this Government is overseeing an increase in emissions. This week, as reported by the Business Post, we find that Ireland is a virtual shadow land. A strange virtual reality exists here. Not only are we a tax haven for corporations and banks and not only do we operate a shadow banking sector and a shadow taxing sector, we also seem to have a shadow energy sector where hyper-scale data centres have as much energy as the official State national energy grid. It would be a mistake to think that these kind of trades are okay or in any way progressive in dealing with the climate crisis.

The State has purchased more than €120 million in previous years. The NTMA has invested World Bank funds and trades in various schemes as well as having credits from previous years. All of these are a form of credit denial as far as People Before Profit is concerned. It is a giant accounting trick that pretends to deal with humanity's greatest existentialist crisis by re-tendering market mechanisms and adopting neoliberal economic jargon and thinking somehow that we imagine CO2 out of the atmosphere. The reason Slovakia has credits to sell is not that it is a paradigm of climate action virtue but it that the state's credit will not even reach its own targets. According to the EU, Slovakia will fall well short of its own 2030 targets while its emissions rose by 13% by 2020 compared with 2005.

This farce means that this State, which is failing to reduce its own emissions, buys made-up credits from a state with rising emissions, which will also fail to meet its target, in order to comply with an accounting exercise so that we can tell each other at great length that we are addressing the threat to humanity's future. Carbon credits, be they under this effort-sharing scheme or the EU trading scheme, are fraudulent. They are efforts to marry the needs of the market and capitalist expansion with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These needs cannot be married or reconciled. The promised shake up in the EU's scheme will not address the fundamental flaws in the idea of carbon trading. We cannot trade our way out of the climate crisis and we cannot use the market and capitalist expansion to deal with a crisis caused by markets and capitalist expansion driven by the over-use of fossil fuels on our planet.

I believe the Minister of State knows this. It is a fraud and a set up to make it look like we are dealing with climate catastrophe and doing our bit when it is purely an accounting trick.

See this speech in context