Seanad debates

Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Annual Transition Statement: Statements

 

10:00 am

Photo of Rónán MullenRónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will try to stay within the allocated time as well.

Having listened to Senator O'Reilly and the Minister of State, I was struck by their eloquence and the importance of what they have said, particularly what the former said about the most vulnerable people in the world. I empathise deeply with what they have said but I find myself feeling that there are things that I must say here because they are the truth and hence I feel a need to put them on the record.

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, who is the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. His name is synonymous with the strength of his conscience and for speaking his mind instead of just going along with the crowd. I have all of that in mind when I say that there are things sometimes that one feels the need to say that one would rather not say but one must as one thinks they are true. St. Thomas More once wrote:

By applying a remedy to one sore, you provoke another. That which removes one ill symptom, produces others.

That observation could be made about our climate policy at the moment. In addressing the serious running sore of climate change and carbon emissions, we are spawning a growing list of other problems, which, in turn, damages both the effectiveness of measures taken and public support, which is also important.

Our targets for environmental policies have a tendency to be unachievable and, therefore, we should focus our limited resources on ways to protect the people who are most at risk from climate change such as those who live in coastal communities. I find myself much more sympathetic to the comments that have been made about adaptation rather than about mitigation. Let us consider the task of cutting Irish carbon emissions by 51% by 2030. If we are honest, is that not wildly optimistic? Is it something that sounds good on a poster?In 2020, it was acknowledged that the two main Government parties agreed to it just to get the current coalition agreement over the line. One does not need to be a climatologist or a mathematician to see that reaching the target would require very deep cuts to all areas of society, particularly agriculture. It seems to me that the EPA has now effectively confirmed that the target is a pipe dream, even if it does not say it out loud. We see that emissions rose by 6% in 2021, despite at least an 8% fall year-on-year being needed to reach the 2030 target. The EPA says that the urgent implementation of "all climate plans and policies, plus further new measures" will be needed to meet the target. That statement by the EPA will send chills down the spine of people struggling to pay their ESB bills and to fill their cars.

Let us look at other targets. Is the target of 1 million electric vehicles on Irish roads by 2030 not completely unrealistic? Surely it will be missed. Electric vehicles are very expensive, and those who can afford them are currently on waiting lists to get them. We want to retrofit 500,000 homes and install 680,000 heat pumps, and this at a time when tradesmen and women are desperately needed to construct new homes, and people are waiting weeks or months for an electrician or plumber to do small jobs. It seems to me that we simply cannot afford to do all of it at the one time, and something is going to have to give. That is what I mean by saying, by treating one sore we seem to create others.

On oil, we must be willing to accept the fact that regardless of how quickly we change, Ireland is going to be dependent on fossil fuels for many years and decades to come. There are moral, as well as economic, considerations to make. President Biden is travelling to Saudi Arabia next month to ask the Saudis to increase oil production to try to push down international prices. Rather than allowing new exploration within the United States, he would prefer to import it from the Gulf, with all the issues around human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, not to mention the carbon cost of transporting oil, which his policy raises. It seems to me that this is the ridiculous and almost morally bankrupt pass to which climate policy has brought the United States.

I wonder whether we are following a similar policy in Ireland. We have banned any new licences for oil exploration, preferring instead to depend on costly imports from abroad, which have a higher carbon cost. Where is the sense in that? A third of our gas comes from the Corrib field, which will be gone within the decade, but by then our use of gas will not decrease by a third, which means we will need to find new sources of imported gas. While we are adopting renewables, should we not try to utilise new domestic sources that may exist, such as the Barryroe field off west Cork, instead of relying more and more on questionable sources of oil from abroad? I worry that we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.

The phrase "just transition" is regularly used in discussing this issue, but what does it even mean? There are no climate measures which do not involve very unjust outcomes for some people, in terms of their lifestyles or their pockets. Rightly or wrongly, large sections of rural Ireland believe that an urban Dublin-based elite is intent on waging war on the way they live their lives. This is corroding public support for necessary environmental policies. Nowhere is that more evident than in relation to the carbon tax. Surely the entire basis of that tax has been wiped by the soaring cost of fossil fuels in recent months. Although it may be small, what moral basis do we have for expecting people to pay it at a time of soaring fossil fuel prices, while expecting them to support climate-change policies generally? The carbon tax is treating one sore but creating others.

Even worse, is the surreal fact that VAT is charged on the carbon tax, which is effectively a tax on a tax. How on earth is this justifiable? That raises a further question about the injustice of charging VAT on electricity bills. VAT is designed to tax luxury items. Electricity is not a luxury item. In this day and age, it is absolutely necessary for people to live. VAT is a competence of the EU as I understand it, but I find it impossible to fathom how all that is morally justified.

I realise that most of what I have said is very easy to say. It is easy to be the Cassandra, the person heralding disaster, who says that this is not going to work. What I am getting at is that there needs to be integrity not just in our policies but in our communications about policies. We need to continue to soul-search as to how much of what we are talking about as being among our goals is realistic and how much of it will happen. My strong belief is that there is a certain amount of undesirable outcomes that we simply must accept at this stage and that we must focus our effort much more on supporting the most vulnerable people in the world, who will be most at risk from things that are going to happen in the area of climate change. I greatly fear that it simply is not in our capacity to bring about some of the changes that are being talked about. Rather than adopting a set of unrealistic targets as dogma and denouncing those who might question them as deniers of one kind or another, we need to be realistic about what we can do to prevent climate change, given our small size and our limited resources. What we do must be done in a way that garners support from the public at large, and not their resentment and hostility, which I am sorry to say, I increasingly observe.

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