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Letters to the Editor Irish TImes (published 28 March) — Irish Government’s ambition to fail on climate action

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Inconvenient Truths about Ireland's carbon budget compliance

An expectation that current policies are sufficient to halve emissions this decade appears absurd

Sir, 

Brian Ó Gallachóir’s article 'Ireland's emissions remained almost within limit during first carbon budget' (19 March) would lead the reader to understand that Ireland is close to ‘achieving’ compliance with the first Carbon Budget. However, scratching the surface reveals many inconvenient truths.

Failure by a little is still failure, and this failure will be deducted from subsequent Carbon Budgets. The relative generosity of the first Carbon Budget needs to be recognised, being almost 50% greater than the subsequent, more ambitious, Carbon Budget 2026-2030.

Significant ‘successes’ achieved in recent years have been achieved despite (and even contrary to) Government policy and technical adjustments to recorded GHG emissions. World events, such as the Covid pandemic and war in Ukraine, arrested GHG emission growth. Only the 2008 Financial Crisis cut emissions by more in recent years.

Since sectoral ceilings were never finalised to stay within the Budget, their credibility is questionable. That said, within sectors, significant non-policy events have also played their part. Electricity generation benefitted most significantly from an exponential increase in power imported through the interconnectors with the UK - in essence, the offshoring of emissions related to electricity supply. We know that unchecked electricity demand increases are such that half of all the electricity consumed in Dublin and Meath today goes to data centres. The rollout of renewable generation is welcome, but in the absence of some guardrails around growth in new electricity demand, the sector will simply continue to chase its own tail, with new demand continuing to outstrip new renewable supply.

In Transport, our second biggest emitting sector, emissions have actually increased by 12% so far this decade.  An expectation that current policies are sufficient to halve emissions this decade appears absurd at this juncture.

In Agriculture, retrospective downward revisions of GHG emissions by the EPA are such that direct comparison of emissions from the sector against its sectoral ceilings is no longer viable. In effect, the first 9Mt of GHG mitigation for the sector, out of a total budget of 106Mt, comes from changes made to the calculation of the emissions for the sector itself, or ‘improvement in the data robustness’. No Government effort was made to account for this factor.

Avoiding a high-speed accident because you ran out of fuel is not analogous to purposely slowing down. In the same way, almost’ staying within your budget due to more favourable accounting or unintended external events is not comparable to actual and deliberate efforts to do so.

That we failed to stay within the first Carbon Budget is one thing, but welcoming failure as a success risks undermining public support for the action that is needed to succeed in meeting our commitments to reduce GHG emissions, and licenses procrastination by another generation of political leaders.

Yours, etc,

Terri Morrissey, Chair An Taisce

5 Foster Place, Dublin DO2 VOP9

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Related:

'Is the Emissions Glass Half Full or Half Empty?': By Emeritus Professor John Sweeney, Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS), Maynooth University