Madam, - Donal Buckley of Ibec is right to defend the State's purchase of carbon credits as permitted under the Kyoto Protocol (Opinion, December 14th). However, the Government's overall approach to the climate change issue is all wrong.
We can meet our climate change targets in three ways: by reducing our own emissions, by buying carbon credits on the international market or by investing in new emission reduction projects in developing countries. These latter "clean development mechanisms" make sense, as long as they deliver emission reductions that would not otherwise have taken place. However, such "buy-out" mechanisms are now becoming the mainstay of the Government's response. They are a stopgap measure because this Government refuses to acknowledge the scale of the challenge facing us.
Buying our way out of the Kyoto Protocol may work up to 2012 but the bill is likely to be twice or three times the €270 million fund thus far set aside by this Government. Its cost estimate is based on the over-optimistic assumption that we will achieve real reductions in our own emissions over the same period and that the price of carbon will stay low on the international markets. But the likelihood is that carbon credits will become more expensive and the reality is that our emissions are still increasing year on year, as we build more roads and burn more fossil fuels.
The investment decisions we make today in transport and energy infrastructure will determine the scale of our emissions for decades to come. In this context the Government's refusal to set any longer-term climate change targets beyond 2012 is an act of gross irresponsibility.
At the United Nations negotiations in Nairobi last month, the European Union committed us to reduction targets of at least 15 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. In Ireland we will be almost 30 per cent above our 1990 levels by the end of this decade. This means we would have to cut our emissions by a third within one decade to meet such a commitment.
And that is just the start. We know that in the following few decades, reductions of up to 80 per cent will be needed if we are to prevent runaway climate change. Buying our way to meeting these targets will be prohibitively expensive. As one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the fifth highest per capita emissions, we can no longer play the "poor mouth" and shirk our international obligations.
The Stern Report has shown that the sooner we start to take real steps towards reducing our emissions, the better for our economy. The real problem with the Government's use of carbon credits is not the mechanism itself, but rather the damage that delayed action causes. These changes are inevitable. It is better to make them sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, the Minister for the Environment was last week talking up the small scale of our own emissions within a global context, as if our moral responsibility was thus somehow reduced. Refusing to acknowledge such long-term issues when an election looms might work within a cute code of political gamesmanship. However, I believe the electorate will see through such a shallow understanding of the Irish people's willingness to commit to a just and necessary cause. - Yours, etc,
EAMON RYAN TD,
Dáil Éireann,
Kildare Street,
Dublin 2.