The purpose of the 2015 Paris Agreement is to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. We are failing. Average global temperatures in 2021 were around 1.11 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to provisional UN figures. Extreme weather events affecting our temperate part of the globe prove the urgency of action for us now. Busting through the 1.5-degree ceiling on a once-off basis is on the cards within five years. It will become the new normal rapidly thereafter.
Way behind time, we have just arrived at the end of the beginning of decarbonisation in Ireland. After last Friday’s Government agreement on sectoral emissions, the issue is not what was agreed upon but what will be delivered. The harvesting of low-hanging fruit for the Green Party is over, politically. We are in real time now. Detailed plans to make good on sectoral allocations will emerge within months. The litmus test is whether an inexorable increase in emissions can be reversed. Radical change in our economic model is required for this to happen. How close the agreement comes to delivering its targets remains to be seen.
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The Climate Change Response Bill 2010 is barely remembered now, with good reason. It went nowhere. It lapsed on the dissolution of the Dáil in April 2011. The Greens in government since 2007 fought hard for climate legislation. It was published in the last months of the life of what was by then a beleaguered administration. Over the Christmas of 2010, it was murdered by an Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) at the height of its power. But they weren’t alone. Business lobby group Ibec piled in for the perfect pincer movement.
It didn’t go far enough for environmental non-governmental organisations. But they were easily dismissed as well-meaning idiots. The adults in the room picked holes in the proposals and, funnily, people from wildly diverse politics came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t the right Bill, or it wasn’t the right time or both. The Oireachtas debates read like a script for climate caricature.
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Then senator Ivana Bacik leading in the Seanad for a Labour Party surging in opinion polls and on the cusp of its historic electoral advance in 2011, spoke about the inadequacy of the proposal. With unintended merriment, she insisted “the Labour Party is the true green party”. It certainly has people with good instincts on the issue. But when it went into government in 2011, the green agenda was walked back, not led forward. Carbon budgets were abolished. Critically, carbon charges were frozen; therein lies a lost decade.
The year 2023 will be a new first for the allocation of carbon as economic currency. This will be Minister for Climate and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan’s lasting achievement if we survive to enjoy it. It is also a significant reallocation of political power.
The extent of that power can be measured by what happens when it is disturbed. The IFA has had a good campaign on sectoral emissions. They have reasserted their primacy, but not their hegemony among other farm organisations. During the 2019 beef crisis, that organisation reached its nadir. A series of splinters meant seven farming organisations sitting in negotiations with the Department of Agriculture. Once mightily disciplined and formidably powerful, farm politics was an ineffective quagmire.
The complexity of carbon allocation favours the better-resourced IFA. Their president, Tim Cullinan, was a constant media fixture who rallied his base. They succeeded, as they see it, in limiting the damage to a 25 per cent reduction in emissions for agriculture. The bigger picture is that they have agreed tacitly to a new world order, that a decade ago was stopped in its tracks. It may be too little too late, but the terms of the conversation for farming, as for much else, are now permanently changed.
Independent TDs will tell farmers what they want to hear, but cannot be stuck with the responsibility of delivering
Carbon reduction has been good politics too for Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue. Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s third choice for the job, he has been a lucky general. Commodity prices are generally good and that is the baseline for the standing of any minister for agriculture. He has been able to work around the IFA in ways previous ministers would hardly have found possible. Paradoxically the weakness of the IFA, compared to its historical strength, is compounded by the electoral diminishment of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The IFA’s power, supplemented by the competing Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, was its discipline in tethering greater numbers of rural TDs in the larger parties to its agenda. The dispersal of rural political representation undermines the operating model of farm politics. Independent TDs will tell farmers what they want to hear, but cannot be stuck with the responsibility of delivering.
There is disbelief around sectoral targets as yet unsupported by detailed plans. There is also the unaddressed issue of enforcement. Ryan successfully legislated to compel agreement. It is unclear how he can compel action. The Irish system excels at nodding in agreement as a prelude to masterly inactivity. Outside our parochial politics is a world that since 2011 has been tossed from the frying pan into the fire. The political dynamic lags behind science. But politics is not rational. At a certain moment, lethargy will turn to alarm. In 10 years our debate on carbon emissions over the past six weeks will seem as embarrassingly dated as debate on the Climate Change Response Bill 2010 a decade ago.