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The Government and other State agencies must accelerate climate actions if national ambitions on reducing emissions are to be achieved, according to the chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) Marie Donnelly.
Responding to the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Ms Donnelly accepted Irish ambition matches what was being demanded by UN secretary general António Guterres in addressing the climate crisis, “but the difficulty is speed of implementation”.
She did not favour holding off on carbon tax increases due later this month, because they fund climate actions by helping those experiencing fuel poverty and retrofitting of homes – a position backed former president Mary Robinson.
The CCAC had highlighted implementation gaps, she confirmed. “There are questions about the speed at which we are implementing actions. We have delays. We have hesistancies. We have longer-term plans that are necessary. All of these need to be accelerated to achieve our national goals,” Ms Donnelly said on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
Once the Oireachtas passed the national Carbon budget in coming days, it would have legal standing, she said, then the Government would have to make the political decision of setting ceilings for individual sectors. The application of sectoral limits was urgently needed as it meant “they will have a clearly defined numerical objective in which they have to operate within the carbon budget cycle”.
There was a need to move faster to provide the required legislation, planning mechanisms and consultation options for the public to enable them to make the right decisions on decarbonisation to reduce their emissions.
All this had to happen precisely because of the energy crisis and the current geopolitical situation which was hitting peoples’ pockets, she said, and should not be held off because of that scenario. Ending reliance on fossil fuel imports with no control of prices was required to get people off that hook, Ms Donnelly believed.
Such measures were exactly in line with what was required to decarbonise Ireland; switching to renewables and increasing energy efficiency. “We need to switch as quickly as possible,” she added.
Asked whether the carbon tax was changing consumer behaviour, Ms Donnelly said: “Mr Putin is probably influencing human behaviour more than the carbon tax in that he put up prices to a much greater degree.”
Chair of the Elders Mary Robinson said the carbon tax had to be maintained because it was ringfenced for climate actions. On implementation of climate actions, the Government was moving in the right direction “but like other governments it’s not going fast enough”, she told Newstalk Breakfast.
‘Now or never’
The penny had finally dropped in society on a “now or never” scenario in responding to climate change. “We do have to peak emissions by 2025 in three years’ time and shrink emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 ... Now we know we have to be aligned. Now we know we have to be aligned very very quickly. It’s getting more urgent by the minute.”
Mrs Robinson said she was concerned the Ukraine war could cause the climate issue to slip down the agenda and potentially put pressure on people to accelerate their use of fossil fuels. She backed increased investment in clean energy by a factor of six to help reduce emissions and keep global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees.
The IPCC report made clear “any further delay in climate action would be fatal and foolish”, said Friends of the Earth director Oisín Coghlan. “It tells us we have to radically reduce our use of fossil fuels immediately, but thankfully that renewables are getting cheaper and more reliable all the time ... The scientists have said we have the technology to halve our emissions by 2030, what we need now is the political will to accelerate action.”
Stop Climate Chaos (SCC) coalition of environmental NGOs said Government action to reduce emissions and phase out fossil fuels “must begin now – not in 10 years’ time”.
It noted pathways in the report “overshoot the crucial 1.5 degrees guardrail” in spite of previous reports unequivocally stating that breaching that threshold would put humanity in grave danger.
Models used in the report also relied on unproven carbon removal technologies which opens up a major “moral hazard”, it added, and would distract from the need to cut emissions at source by phasing out fossil fuels and considering alternative economic systems compatible with reducing emissions in a faster, safer way.