Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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71. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment if he will provide an update on all carbon reductions achieved as a direct result of implemented targets in the Climate Action Plan 2021. [62721/22]

Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I too send my sincere sympathies to the loved ones, family and colleagues of the soldier who was tragically killed last night and to the soldiers who have been injured. It is a devastating thing to happen for those families.

Will the Minister provide an update on all carbon reductions achieved as a direct result of implemented targets in the Climate Action Plan 2021?

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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The Climate Action Plan 2021, which was published in November 2021, set out a detailed roadmap for meeting our climate ambition under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 and included indicative ranges of emission reductions for each sector of the economy. The update for this year will follow on from the ambition set out in that and will reflect a strengthened climate governance framework.

Recent EPA reports have indicated that, as we have emerged from Covid-19, our national emissions have begun to increase again, by 4.7% last year, as some sectors have recovered. This has followed an overall decrease of 3.6% in 2020. The increase in total emissions in the past year has been driven by the use of coal and oil for electricity generation, as we have just discussed, as well as increases in both the agriculture and transport sectors. The recently approved sectoral emissions ceilings set out a framework for meeting our carbon budgets and our commitment to the 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. These will be reflected in the climate action plan due to be published next week.

Examples of where there have been reductions and where measures have actually been delivering in the past year are where we connected 700 MW of renewable power so far this year. That is a record year and we have never connected as much. What is really interesting is we are starting to see new sources such as solar power, which have been delivered through this auction process. That renewables capacity is critical to meeting our climate reduction targets.

A second example would be peatland restoration. To date, 10,511 ha have been rehabilitated across 35 bogs. That has delivered an emissions reduction of 68,000 tonnes of CO2 and will continue to do so each and every year because that is a permanent reduction process. That is 10,500 ha out of the 33,000 ha we have committed to do. As the Deputy would know, there are also great benefits in biodiversity as well as carbon benefits, together with benefit in just transition where some of the same people who have been employed and have skills in extracting turf have now been redeployed with other skills.

A third example would be the national retrofit plan, which was published last year. We are on target to what we said this year. A total of 27,000 houses have been upgraded with an estimated 33,000 tonnes in carbon savings, together with 131 GW hours in energy savings. Real change is happening and we are on track to do what we said we would do in retrofitting and renewables and in the rehabilitation of bogland. We need to do far more and to multiply the delivery but we are delivering.

Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I thank the Minister very much. I have great concerns. I have said repeatedly that I very much want the Minister to succeed in government because we need him to do so. I have worked in this sector for 20 to 30 years and I am becoming increasingly downhearted by the fact that I do not believe this Government will meet the targets or achieve what needs to happen. My biggest fear at this moment is that the Minister does not recognise that, that he thinks everything is still on track and, as he said earlier on, that he is slowly turning the ship around. Our emissions went up last year. We have the second highest emissions per capitain Europe and this Government has not met a single one of its targets yet.

The Government talks about retrofitting 27,000 homes. How many of those homes will be retrofitted to B2 standard? The Minister's target is for 500,000 houses at B2 standard in six to seven years’ time. I do not have faith that is going to happen. I wish that was not the case.

I have the annexe to the Climate Action Plan 2021. There are 493 actions on 250 pages, yet 166 delayed measures were still not done by November of this year, and the Minister’s Department has failed to action 41% of its own actions on time.

The Government is very good at producing documents, proposals, plans and coming out with very big headline statements, but delivering is where the Government is falling down. Where is the Government actually delivering and what changes is the Government going to make in the new climate action plan that reflect the reality that emissions have gone up and there have been delays in meeting targets?

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Those 10,500 ha of rewetted bogs are real, big and significant. Those 27,000 houses may not all be up to B2 standard but we knew that going into the year. That is what we set ourselves as a target, and we delivered it.

Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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There are 500,000-----

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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Those 700 MW of power are real. The Deputy is correct in that no one should be in any way complacent or have a false optimism, because the challenge and scale of the changes is so large and they will not be easy to deliver. We do not give up. Resilience is part of what we need in this whole climate approach.

There are three real restrictions which are holding us back. One is in planning. We all know our planning system is not functioning or delivering for either the environment or for the development of our country, and that is why we are introducing significant legislative changes to make that work better.

The second is our people. Our economy is at absolute full throttle and is growing 8% a year. It is very difficult to get many of the people we need. Bus drivers alone, if I can give one example, are a constraint in respect of the switch to public transport. The availability of bus drivers is our biggest problem. We are pointing in the right direction and there are actions taking place. We have 8,000 apprenticeships, which is the biggest number ever, going into retrofitting and other industries to help us make it happen. It takes time but we are addressing the obstacles.

The biggest obstacle still is politics, to be honest. There are Deputies in this House, and I would not doubt any of those present, about whose commitment on this issue I would wonder. We all know we can go around the country to every council and into any debate here in this House, and when it comes to the actual changes we need to make, the real political consensus, sense of urgency and hard decisions are still politically difficult. That is one of the things we have to change.

Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I agree with the Minister that there are Deputies in this House and councillors who do not fully grasp the reality of climate change and what will be and what is coming down the track to us. People and communities need to understand, and the Minister needs to help them make the changes they need to make.

The Social Democrats have sent a proposal in respect of solar to the Minister, and I will keep on talking about it because it will reduce people’s household energy demand by 40%. For some reason, the Government is not funding or doing this. That is a big gap in what the Minister is doing.

The Minister talks about the 700 MW of renewable power. That is very welcome, but how many hundreds of megawatts of emergency generation has the Minister allocated and granted this year to coal and gas-fired generation because he has allowed data centres to continue at pace with the pressures they have put on our energy grid? The Minister cannot look at these issues separately and there must be a holistic approach. All arms of Government need to be working on this. I fear the Minister is not being given the support from his colleagues in this. A whole-of-government approach is needed.

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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If we take solar energy as just one example, we will be setting a target, as I set out in my convention speech two weeks ago, for something like 5 GW of solar-generated energy by 2025. That is as much renewable energy as we have ever developed in the past 20 years just in solar energy in the next three years, and this gives the scale of change.

What makes me think we can actually do that? First, we are seeing those renewable auction systems, and there is a series of them. We learn as we go through each one, refining and changing them. Indexation could be one example of where we might adjust and change.

I am confident that a very significant proportion - I cannot remember the exact figure but at least half - of the solar we need is already on-stream and coming through that auction process. We need to change and go further, including looking at the concept around private wires in order that industry might be able to self-generate at scale to provide some of the back-up power we need and, significantly, deliver that quickly within the next three years. We also need to change the rules on farming to allow up to 6 MW of solar power to be delivered outside the auction process in order that we do not get caught up in all the complexities of that. Every school in this country in the next three years will use the carbon fund to install solar panels. I could go on. These are real measures that will make a real difference to us meeting what is an incredibly ambitious target. That is what we are doing. That is what is happening on the ground in reality.