Maire Devine (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I acknowledge the recognition by the Government that we are in a climate emergency. It gives me no pleasure to remind people that this declaration has been made as Ireland trails behind our European partners. Ireland's emissions have been rising steadily while other countries have been reducing theirs. We are now playing catch-up and it is vital that we choose solutions that are evidence-based and based on science, as we no longer have the luxury of time to experiment with ideas. Unfortunately, this is where I think the all-of-Government climate action plan runs aground.

I say this while acknowledging the work that has been done by this House over the past year. In July of last year, the special Joint Committee on Climate Action was established and I was honoured to be a member of it. We considered the deliberations of the Citizens' Assembly. It is fair to say that none of us at the time appreciated the scope and breadth of the problem, nor the scale of the challenge ahead. The committee spent months scoping and quantifying the problems in agriculture, transport, housing and energy production, so much so that we had little time to adequately investigate solutions - proven solutions which were clearly evidence-based and verifiable.

There is an absence of this in the climate action plan, which can be described as a melting pot of ideas, based on an approach of, "Let us try this and see what happens". It is high on aspirations but we need to be much more specific. It uses words like "investigate", "review", "examine" and "consider". In my time here, I have learned that such words are not robust enough. Second, it defers the bulk of our obligations until after 2030, which is 11 years away. Third, it places a cost burden on the citizen while incentivising the market to sell the solutions. I am not here just to be oppositional. However, I want to be prudent and I want to go with the evidence that is available and that underpins what is positive and what is proven to work.

Regrettably, it did not include an all-Ireland strategy despite the fact carbon dioxide and methane emitted in Strabane will not stop at the Border and will cross to Lifford. While many of the individual actions in themselves appear laudable, there is no coherent, integrated strategy which we can say with any certainty will yield results. The plans refers to banning the sale of combustion engine cars by 2030, stopping the burning of coal and peat, the increase of carbon tax by 500%, the deep retrofit of 500,000 houses, the shut-down of Moneypoint and the planting of more forestry. These measure sound and are very laudable. However, without any assessment of the availability, affordability or viability of alternatives, it simply seems to be a wish list of aspirational ideas.

Let us look, for example, at the electric vehicle alternative to conventional cars. When setting targets of almost 1 million EVs on the road by 2030, what consideration has the Government given to the affordability of this purchase? In rural areas, many householders are two-car households so how viable is this target? Indeed, given the housing pressures which have resulted in many adult children living back with their parents, many rural households have three or four vehicles.The plan aims to incentivise single-car dependency across rural Ireland but it makes no provision whatsoever for a modal shift to public transport. With six out of ten children travelling to school by car and only one out of ten children travelling to school by bus, the action plan makes no provision to shift tens of thousands of car journeys per day to public transport. Let us assume for a moment that somehow or other, a two-car household managed to magic up the €80,000 required for two EVs, and let us also assume that we get 1 million EVs on the road by 2030. There is still no evidence that this will reduce emissions.

The Minister should look at Norway. Norway has a similar population to Ireland and a similar level of emissions per capita. It also has the second highest plug-in EV ownership in the world, at 300,000 units. It has more land under forestry and it has a higher carbon tax than we do. Despite all of this, Norway has failed to reduce its emissions at all since 2011. On the other hand, neighbouring Sweden has almost twice the population of Ireland and has only 80,000 EVs, yet Sweden has exactly half of the emissions of either Norway or Ireland. My point is that there is no concrete evidence that a transition to EVs would have any notable impact on our emissions over the next decade.

There are other environmental and ethical concerns about EVs, which have not been adequately cross-examined. Over the next ten years, the powering of EVs will still be heavily reliant on coal, peat and gas. We will still be using these fossil fuels to produce electricity. Studies show that an EV powered by coal-burning electricity will not begin to return an environmental benefit until five years into its use. There are also metrics which bring in the question of the environmental benefits, if any, of scrapping perfectly functional, low-emission combustion cars in favour of new EVs. Just as we are complicit in the burning of blood coal at Moneypoint from the Cerrejón mine in Colombia, we will now become complicit in the escalation of human rights abuses in cobalt mining for EV batteries in Congo.

It is fair to say there is no quantifiable or verifiable evidence that EV targets will have any meaningful impact on emission reduction, even if somehow or other, almost half of our current 2.6 million car owners could magically afford the outlay. We cannot honestly predict whether a rolled-out charge network for EVs will not end up being a stranded asset by 2030, just like the electronic voting machines. The aspirational target that 45,000 households per year, which after spending €40,000 on an EV, will then borrow anything from €30,000 to €75,000 to do a deep retrofit on their homes-----