Opinion:The Climate Bill published by the Government last week was almost a carbon copy of one the Green Party presented to the Oireachtas in late 2010. You might think then it would be getting great praise from these quarters. I am afraid not. It was nice to see the word-for-word, page-for-page recognition of that earlier work, but certain small but critical changes mean we have everything still to do.
One could get all high and mighty about the frequent replacement of the word “will” with “may”, but that is not the key problem. The critical change was the deletion of a 2030 emissions reduction target, which was put there to show what our State was committing to do.
Why was that one target so important? Because more than anything else it was a barometer of political will. Without it, the public servants and the private sector understand that we are not serious about tackling climate change. That we are not for real. Setting a target makes sense because the Government itself is responsible for a lot of what we have to do.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require the building of a whole new power system, based on the clever use of energy efficiency and the development of our renewable resources. Responsibility for designing that system lies with government rather than individuals making their own energy choices.
We need this new power system to have as much public ownership as possible, which is one more reason why we need to give clear signals and commitments. If you are a farmer investing in your own power supply, then you want to know the market price will not collapse in 10 years’ time. If you are a pension fund manager risking 20-year money, you want similar security that the State’s clean energy policy is here to stay.
The change will take decades to deliver but the most critical investment decisions have to be taken now. New energy sources from the sun, wind and sea are available for free but tapping into them requires an upfront capital investment. The price of that power depends more than anything else on the cost of capital, which in turn depends on the level of political risk investors perceive.
Investment certainty
This new Bill is only going to confuse things more and increase the cost of borrowing. We have a real comparative advantage in this area and if we got some investment certainty around this power switch we could give the whole economy and country a lift. Instead this Bill is a recipe for drift and delay.
The Government spent the past two years twiddling its thumbs while it sent out the secretariat of the National Economic and Social Council to reconsider its whole climate policy. As the director of Nesc, Rory O’Donnell, noted in this newspaper last week, the council became convinced that within just one generation we can and should turn Ireland into a 100 per cent carbon-neutral country.
Speaking at a conference in Maynooth last month, he also noted that while this was the greatest possible challenge, what has been achieved to date shows that perhaps the switch might not be as difficult as some think. He argued we should be honest and admit we don’t know exactly what a zero-carbon future is going to look like, but the only way to find out how it works is to start learning by doing.
Nesc argues that rather than relying exclusively on “top down” emission-reduction targets we should also put responsibility for the transition into the heart of the public administration system. We could then use both public and private agencies to deliver the change we need, through a “loop” or iterative innovation process. The remarkable thing is that while it is abandoning the use of targets, the Government has also decided to ignore that alternative or complementary “bottom up” approach. What we have ended up with is the worst of both policy worlds.
The Government’s new climate advisory body is made up exclusively of representatives from the delivery agencies and will have no power to influence the rest of the public system. A similar body in the original legislation had real power, thanks to a legally binding 2030 target, but it can now simply be ignored. We have created the environmental equivalent of the fiscal advisory council, with even fewer teeth. The departments of finance, enterprise, transport, agriculture and the Taoiseach will be able to look on with benign indifference, never to be held to account.
The best example of a similar change in the past was the opening up of the country to international trade, which started some 50 years ago. That was led from the front by both TK Whitaker and Seán Lemass, but no such figures are in power today.
The people at the top have some vague idea that leading companies and modern economies see growth coming from new low-carbon technologies but have no sense as to how it could happen here. They heed instead the doubts voiced by the employers’ body Ibec, which as usual has so many different paymasters it does not know which way to turn. They fear the reaction of the Irish Farmers’ Association, which is in turn frozen by fear of what it might be asked to do. They listen carefully to the trade unions, who by their nature want to protect the status quo.
And so we are left in limbo. Our regulators have already read the political signals and are putting the brakes on new energy investment, which had just started to take off. The public picks up the same sense of uncertainty and the number of calls to our national retrofit scheme has dropped by more than half in the last two years.
The only outcome from this Bill will be a continuation of the risky course we are set upon. With 90 per cent of our energy coming from imported fossil fuels, we are burning up money as well as the planet. We are leaving ourselves utterly exposed to the next oil or gas price shock. And all this Bill has to say is: hunker down, suck in some more benzene, stick to austerity. As if there is nothing else to do.
* Eamon Ryan is leader of the Green Party and a former minister for communications, energy and natural resources