Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I was, and while I am unable to respond to all the points, I will respond to some of the comments raised.

Senator Boyhan is right on what he said in his contribution. The purpose of the structure of the Climate and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 is to hold the Government to account, and perhaps I could and should have done a more detailed assessment of what happened last year. The circumstances are difficult, because I understand that the annual transition statement was made before the House in December and I do not know why it has taken this long for it to lead to these oral statements, but the Senator's point is correct that we need to follow proper process.

In response, some of the facts from 2019, which perhaps I should have provided earlier, as Senator Martin has said, do give us some hope, in that there was around a 4.5% reduction in emissions in 2019. There was around a 9% reduction in emissions in the emissions trading system, ETS, sector. We are effectively starting to switch away from the use of coal in Moneypoint Power Station and to stop using peat, and that is where the big reduction was made. There was also a reduction in agriculture and domestic dwellings, mainly because of a mild winter, which came out of a drought in 2018 and reduced the amount of fertiliser being used. It is complex, but while there was not an underlying shift, it was a welcome reduction. The 8% to 9% reduction of emissions in the ETS sector showed us what is possible, and that kind of reduction in one year gives me a certain amount of hope.

Senator Byrne raised a number of points, some of which I will address in my other comments, but he is absolutely right on his point about the clean-air legislation. It is a clean-air policy and it is critical that we have win-win situations when we are dealing with climate issues. We are expecting to launch a new clean air strategy in January, and that will be followed fairly quickly by a consultation process, with a view to imposing a complete ban on the use of smoky fuels across the country. The way regulation will be carried out will not be by having the Garda check people's houses, but a the point of sale, which will simplify the process. We will add to that the phasing out, over time, and in the same way, the use of other smoky fuels, so that we are not beset by legal challenges in terms of favouring the use of one fuel over another. These developments will be critical in terms of saving lives, but they will also help us with climate emissions reductions.

I very much appreciate Senator McGahon's comments on the electric vehicle, EV, charging network, and he is right that that will be the critical element in the transport sector. It will not be the only element, because as others have said, we must see modal shifts and start getting out planning right so that we can achieve the balance that will enable people to have shorter commutes and access a community within 15 minutes of where they live so that they do not need to drive everywhere. However, for those who do drive, changes are coming. The electric car will improve, its range will get longer, there will be more choice available and the price will come down. Electric cars also provide certainty for divers because they are better cars. I had a meeting recently with the oil industry representatives from the filling stations across the country, and I told them that we need to see progress in advance of those vehicles coming. There must be an up-front investment made, because we cannot wait until the cars have arrived before we realise we have a huge problem and then invest. Some of the climate fund was invested in a project with the ESB, working with various filling stations to see if we can put in high-speed charging ahead of the arrival of this new fleet of cars in the next two to three years. I will be honest, and admit that the pace of delivery on that work has been slower than we would have hoped, and I have passed that message on to the filling station representatives. We must get this right, or else we will have to look at alternatives, such as passing a regulation which states, for example, that we will use supermarkets for the charging of EVs. We will have to put in place new infrastructure if we cannot use existing infrastructure, which seems to me to be the more sensible way to go.

I very much agree with Senator Moynihan's comments. I posted a tweet last week stating that the switch to cycling is central to the Just Transition. My former colleague Saoirse McHugh pointed out that it is more of a spoke of the change rather than being the hub, and she is probably correct - it is one of the strands of the Just Transition, but it is an important one. When I was a City Councillor before I became a Deputy, I recall the high percentage of those working in Dublin City Council who did not own a car, and it has not changed that much. Almost half of the households in Dublin do not own a car already. When it comes to transport planning, everyone assumes that everyone has a car, but actually a large proportion of those in Dublin do not. I always thought that the provision of public transport, cycling and walking infrastructure is for those sections of society who do not have access to a car. It is a social justice issue, as I see it, in that those who typically live without a car in the most central parts of our city are those who suffer most from the poor air quality that results from the cars passing through. It is a social justice issue, and it always has been, but I take the point that the switch to cycling is only one of the spokes in the change brought by Just Transition.

It is is not regarded as unfair, I will take the comments of Senators Boylan, Higgins and Dooley together, because all three spoke well about the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2020, which is passing through the Houses at the present time. I had the pleasure of working with Senators Higgins and Dooley on the joint Oireachtas committee on climate action, and I am aware of Senator Boylan's work in the area. Senator Boylan stated that the aim was to rush the Bill through, but there was not any expectation of it being rushed. There is a timing issue, but I do not believe that there has been fundamental disagreement in the committee about some of the structural changes being brought in, namely, the three five-year iterations, which are similar to those in place under the UK legislation, and represent an appropriate development and iteration of the original 2015 Act.I read the Supreme Court judgment as stating that the plan needed a level of step-by-step enhancement in ambition as we go. The reason I am keen on the time aspect is that if we can get it up and running as soon as possible, that will allow us to include 2021 in the first of the five-year cycles and that would have the benefit of starting straightaway.

It seems that the process of pre-legislative scrutiny has turned into a legislative process, which is strange and may have worked out well, we will have to wait and see at the end of the process. We presented a full draft text which I do not think is ordinarily the situation for pre-legislative scrutiny. Perhaps, in some ways, much of the deliberation that has been done would ordinarily have been done on Committee Stage or Report Stage. It is a strange process in which I am not directly involved, but am just following from a distance. I thought it was a useful chance to outline some of the background.

Senator Higgins said that to bring people with us, we have to be going somewhere, and that is absolutely true. I agree with Senator Dooley and others about no false consensus. There cannot be too weak a consensus but I think there is an appetite for consensus. What I hear in this Chamber is that desire exists.

I will use Senator's Dooley's contribution as a chance to branch into the issue of agriculture. Burrenbeo is a good example of how to bring the agricultural community with us in west Clare. I will connect that to what Senator Dolan said. She cited her father, who was a drystock, small farmer in Ballinasloe. She said that farming is a vocation and she is right, but we would all agree that it cannot be a vocation that comes with a vow of poverty. We need to pay our young people. We need to get young people into farming. The truth is that our drystock and suckler farmers get all the blame on the climate front but they are not the enemy or the problem. We need to get them to pass on their skills in the next ten or 15 years. Their average age is in late 50s or 60s. We need a generation of 20 somethings to learn from the other generation and we need to pay them both, one to teach and one to learn and take it on. Where we get the money for that is going to be key. It will come from Europe under the Common Agricultural Policy. Some of it is already coming from some of the funds that we get from the climate fund to which we have committed in advance. It comes down to what we value and if we value natural system services, carbon storage, good quality food, high quality water and preserving biodiversity, we are going to have to make political decisions around their funding. That is where the consensus becomes difficult because people have so many different resource requests. We will have to commit to funding because there is not an urban-rural divide. We need good nature and food. We want a balanced country and do not want to live in a land of industrial factories. I think, therefore, we can steer the consensus in the direction of considering how we pay our young farmers.

Senator Fitzpatrick mentioned various issues. I will pick up on one specific detail relating to national retrofit and how we deal with householders. She is right that much of the funding so far is being targeted at the warmer homes scheme and those in receipt of fuel allowance, by definition targeting people who are less well off, and it is absolutely right to do that. I expect that by June of next year, we will have a package for those in ownership of their own house. I expect that we will maintain a grant but it will not be the only or key element. The retrofit scheme will also come with the potential for a loan finance package which will be open for a variety of financial institutions to opt into. That will have a guaranteed mechanism whereby the State, perhaps with the support of the European Investment Bank, EIB, will provide a capital fund to guarantee a certain tranche of the loans. That then de-risks some of the loans from default and brings down the cost of interest, which starts to make the numbers make sense, coupled with the grant. This is a significant investment in a home and could cost €30,000, €40,000 or more but will transform a home and people's health for the better. That mechanism of a guaranteed loan system, available through a variety of lenders, and mixed with the national retrofit office, is one of the ways that I hope we will progress.

In response to Senator Martin, I love going from hope to honey bees. I will pick up on one of the things that he said about consensus and the potential to build back better after the Covid-19 crisis. I think the pandemic has transformed the sense of the local and the importance of the local environment. To face the climate challenge, we have to translate the insurmountably large-scale problem back to something about people's homes, communities, streets and local environment to which they can relate. I absolutely agree with the Senator.