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Chapter 1: What are Ireland's current climate change targets and how are we performing?
Last week's publication of Ireland's latest set of climate change projections led to a ping-pong flurry of claim and counterclaim about just how well we are doing. We won't hit our targets in 2030, the Minister acknowledged, but we will shortly after that date. Delusional thinking, said opposition figures. Well, which is it?
Philip Boucher-Hayes, presenter of RT Radio's Hot Mess and Countrywide, joins me now in the studio. Morning, Philip.
Good morning, David. How are you?
So, 2030 climate change targets, how are we doing?
Why don't you ask me first how we're doing on our 2020 climate change targets?
I would say we got those, did we?
No, we didn't. Six and a half years after that deadline, we still haven't gotten them. And we're not going to, at the very, very best case scenario... hit that until about 2029. More realistically, it's probably going to be in the early 2030s. And it wasn't that ambitious a target, relatively speaking.
It was one of those percentage figures over a baseline year, which is kind of completely meaningless to everybody. But in real terms, we only got about a third of the way there and we were still left with 12 million tonnes of carbon that we had to account for post 2020. And we still haven't done that. So that puts our 2030 target, which is much, much more ambitious.
And it's looking at taking about 30 million tonnes of carbon out of the economy annually. And it means that, you know, the suggestion that we might get there in the early 2030s is unrealistic, according to the scientists that I've been talking to. Like a part of the problem here is.
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Chapter 2: Why did we miss our 2020 climate change targets?
So we're now at the field by field, farm by farm, factory by factory, car by car, retrofit by retrofit, really, really boring, unsexy work Work in which there's not very many votes. So there's not a huge amount of kind of resources being thrown at this.
And when I translate what the scientists and the statisticians and the officials are saying to me from techno jargon back into English again, they say that it's not really a case of us missing our targets because missing implies that you're taking aim. What we're doing is we're dropping the ball.
Okay, and there will be consequences for that, or there may be consequences for that in terms of fines, in terms of carbon credits that we have to purchase after 2030. Now, the Minister was in here last week and he was saying there's no framework agreed, so we may not have to pay anything.
Again, ask me about our 2020 fines and was there a framework? Yes, there was. Is there a framework for 2030? I have talked to officials in his department. I have talked to officials in DG Enviro in Brussels. I have talked to other civil servants here and academics. And they all say, you know, this has not changed. The framework is agreed on.
What is not yet agreed is the 2031 to 2040 targets and a framework for that. But we were... Right throughout that period when we were paying 2020 targets, the NTMA was out there in the market diligently buying up carbon credits when they were good value and storing them away. We stopped during the austerity period, started again in 2015.
And then in about 2022, we kind of like the poker player at the table, pushed all of these carbon credit chips out into the middle of the table and said, here you go, EU, take that. They said, we will take that and we want you to buy another 4 million of them from Slovakia. Because it's not enough.
Ironically, little side note here to the last conversation that we had, Slovakia and Ireland both were talking about building nuclear power plants at the same time that we looked at building current. So we obviously didn't. And we outlawed nuclear. Slovakia did. And they now have enviously clean electric generation. That's not a pro nuclear statement for me. It's just a statement of the facts.
So missing the 2020 targets cost us a fair few million and is still costing us about 100 million euro a year at the moment. Your listeners will not thank me for telling you about statistical transfers and ETS flexibilities. Neither will I. There is a lot of money being foregone every year. So there is a framework there right now for 2020 and for 2030 targets.
OK, so we may end up paying something, certainly. Finn in Malahide wonders what countries have hit their targets and how did they do it? Interesting question.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do we face in meeting the 2030 climate goals?
And I'm not considering here things like The desire to go from 11% afforestation to 18% afforestation, which implies a half a million hectares of land. So just to get to the 2030 targets alone would take a landmass the same size as Louth, Carlow and Kildare. Now, I know I've chosen three of the smallest counties for effect there.
And I am being somewhat facile because obviously you can co-locate an awful lot of those different activities. You can put solar panels and sheep together. You can put wind turbines and forestry together in some instances. But the problem is that we have placed this pressure on the need for land.
But the government hasn't assigned any priority to it and hasn't said, we think that wind turbines are more important than tillage or whatever. Why have they not done that? Because obviously you wouldn't make very many friends or you'd make an awful lot of enemies in different sectors. And the money men, the investors, realise that these targets are incoherent as they are at the moment.
All they are is targets on paper. There isn't a strategy to get there. And we are leaving it to the courts very often to end up determining that strategy.
OK. Agriculture, biggest emitting sector. And a lot of people in the sector feel that they're getting blamed unfairly for not making more progress. But is progress being made? Can progress be made?
An awful lot of progress can be made there. Farming is the biggest and the most persistent of our emissions polluters. But it's also the sector in which the most research about how to solve the problem has been done. We called this exercise the marginal abatement cost curve, because why would we call it something memorable if you can come up with something that nobody will ever remember?
But this MAC curve, as I'm going to abbreviate it, is a toolkit of different things that can be done on farms differently. breeding for lower emission, less belchy cattle, additives that you can put into your slurry pits, additives that you can put into the food.
And with a large rate of compliance and a huge amount of extra resource being thrown at this, you could actually do an awful lot better than agriculture is doing at the moment. But we're not throwing that resource at it. We're not doing, as has been done in other countries, turning to those
very, very profitable export facing industries, the processors and the factories and saying, you're making a lot of money from this. It's time that you ponied up and you started investing here. Those companies are and are able to point to small pilot schemes and so on, but nothing at the kind of scale that achieves the result that we need.
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