The penny has finally dropped with the Government that Kyoto is going to cost us. After years of ignoring the issue of compliance and then dithering about what to do, a sum of €1 million was allocated in last December's Budget for the purchase of carbon credits this year.
Everyone knows this was a token provision, just to secure a "Budget line".
The Government has estimated that it will have to buy 18.5 million tonnes of credits between 2008 and 2012 to compensate for its own failure to cut Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions.
Nobody can say with any certainty what this may cost, but even at €10 per tonne of carbon dioxide (C02) it would work out at €185 million. There will also be penalties for failing to limit the growth in emissions to 13 per cent, based on 1990 levels, in 2008-2012.
Figures show our emissions are already 25 per cent higher and, with no firm measures taken to reduce them, the Republic will have to pay the price. But instead of falling on the biggest users of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, the burden will be borne by the general body of taxpayers.
"Our emissions are way ahead of our EU counterparts, and unless we bring this ludicrous situation into line we will pay a horrendous price," Martin Cullen, then minister for the environment, warned in November 2002, calling on his colleagues to "bite the bullet" on carbon taxes.
But the Government did no such thing. Tánaiste Mary Harney, who once made a name for herself as an environmentalist for getting rid of Dublin's smog, led the charge against such taxes on the basis that they could threaten the competitiveness of the Republic's industrial sector.
She was supported by her old friend, Charlie McCreevy, as minister for finance, who smugly declared last September that "going ahead with the carbon tax just wasn't worth it", because the modest level of tax envisaged would not dissuade consumers from using fossil fuels.
Harney even argued that the Republic, being such a small country, couldn't make any difference on its own in terms of tackling the huge global problem of climate change. Yet our greenhouse gas emissions, at nearly 18 tonnes per capita, are among the highest in the world.
We're right up there in fifth place after Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand. Our emissions are also way ahead of the average of 11 tonnes per capita for the EU as a whole and the average of two tonnes per capita for the developing world, which includes China.
What happened to the Government's National Climate Change Strategy (2000), which explicitly endorsed the introduction of carbon taxes "from 2002 onwards"? Was Mary Harney among the ministers looking the other way when it was formally adopted by the Cabinet?
Even though a levy of €7.50 per tonne might have achieved a cut of less than a million tonnes in CO2 emissions, it would have been an important "signal" that we need to move away from burning fossil fuels to more environmentally acceptable alternatives, such as wind power.
Moneypoint, the huge coal-fired power station on the Shannon estuary, might have been converted to run on natural gas, as envisaged by the 2000 strategy, but instead it will continue belching out five million tonnes of CO2 annually until 2025 at the earliest.
All the ESB's multimillion euro investment will do is to reduce emissions of harmful sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides so that the power plant complies with EU directives. Fears about leaving ourselves too reliant on gas from Russia and Algeria stymied any conversion.
Ironically, it is to Russia that we will probably be going to buy carbon credits. As elsewhere in the ex-Communist bloc, it has registered a huge reduction in emissions since 1990, mainly due the closure of dirty, carbon-intensive industries in the cause of economic reform.