Madam, - The debate in your Opinion & Analysis pages on climate change was both interesting and timely, being followed last Friday by the EPA report on Ireland's emissions of greenhouse gases in 2004 and by your own Editorial on this topic last Saturday.
However you appear to have completely misunderstood the thrust of the report and instead you are propagating a view that is demonstrably incorrect. Furthermore you are recommending measures to Environment Minister Dick Roche that would not only damage the Irish economy and its people but would do nothing to reduce global warming.
This report shows that, predictably, our emissions are growing year on year and are not reducing as required by our commitment to the Kyoto treaty.
The temporary reductions achieved in 2002 and 2003 were caused largely, as the report acknowledges, by the closure of a fertiliser plant driven by natural gas which also produced, as a by-product, oxides of nitrogen which are even more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
Irish farmers still use fertilisers, of course, but these are now imported from abroad and hence do not figure in our greenhouse gas account. How this apparent "reduction" can be trumpeted as an achievement is beyond me and, I suspect, most right-thinking people.
We could, of course, achieve even bigger reductions by slaughtering all the cattle in Ireland and importing dairy and meat products from Brazil. This would fulfil our Kyoto requirements at a stroke but do nothing to prevent global warming and would indeed accelerate the destruction of tropical rainforests.
It is also claimed that decreases were achieved in the energy sector but if these claims are examined they are found to be largely misleading. What happened was that, instead of burning peat to make electricity, we burnt natural gas; this results in a once-off apparent reduction.
In a similar vein the UK government encouraged its energy sector to switch from coal to gas and used the resulting decrease to claim the country was fulfilling its Kyoto requirements.
As it is, our need for electricity is increasing all the time at about 5 per cent a year, so installing new, more efficient, combined heat and power generating plants will help, as will increasing the percentage of energy derivedfrom wind turbines. But a 5 per cent annual growth rate is like a runaway horse, difficult to stop. So I would be willing to wager that the figures for 2005 will show that our output of emissions has continued to grow or, at the very best, not reduced in the slightest.
The simple inescapable fact is that the target set by the Kyoto protocol for Ireland is not achievable by any means except those that would destroy our economy or force a resumption of large-scale emigration. Neither of these unpalatable options will help to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases.
We need a new national debate with proper consultation from all sectors of society to try to resolve the conflicting demands for prosperity, growth and security of energy supplies without concomitant damage to our, and our children's, natural environment. - Yours, etc,
Prof JOHN SIMMIE, Environmental Change Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway.