Political World
Climate & carbon footprints walk back on to front pages
I did a phone interview with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary in 2008, at a time when there were moves afoot to include the marine and aviation sectors in climate change reduction targets.
Both sectors had got a bit of a free pass when it came to controlling emissions. O’Leary was really dismissive of the move and the efforts by some European politicians and officials to include aviation in the emissions trading scheme (ETS) from 2011.
O’Leary predicted the ETS would collapse in the face of a severe economic downturn and its failure to involve the rest of the world.
In a withering criticism of the ETS, O’Leary described it as “just a way for Europe to tax itself out of existence while no other country in the world joins”.
“With a good deep recession and an unemployment crisis across Europe, that will bring them to their senses,” he says.
In typical cavalier style, he said: “The only way that it can be stopped is on a worldwide basis, not by a bunch of European idiots and bureaucrats levying tax on companies for some notional value that’s put on climate change.
“It’s an irrelevance. Wittering on about the Kyoto Protocol even though Europe is the only place that has any tax.
“There are far more pressing issues to deal with when oil is at $130 a barrel than putting another tax on air travel.”
O’Leary was right about one element of his argument. The recession was lurking around the corner at the time and it arrived with a vengeance later that year.
Over the following years, climate change fell off the agenda like a brick. Up to about 2009 there were between 2,500 to 3,000 articles every year in Irish newspapers on climate change. From then on, it just fell off the cliff as a topic, plummeting down to a couple of hundred articles in each succeeding year.
After the disappointing outcome of the UN global summit in Copenhagen in late 2009, it no longer seemed to be a priority issue with governments, especially those battling with economic crises in their own countries.
That kind of mood has changed in the past few weeks. US President Barack Obama announced a new policy on emissions last month that promised an “all-out climate push”.
It’s a brave initiative and is a demonstration of a second-term US President determined to lead by example. The timing of his announcement, to clean up coal-burning plans, could not be better – coming only months ahead of the crucial UN global summit on climate change to be held in Paris.
At present there are no federal limits to the amount of pollutants that can be pumped into the air by coal plants in the States. The Obama administration said the initiative would cost $8 billion but would save anything up to $54 billion over time.
Unsurprisingly, there was plenty of blowback. Obama’s opponents majored on the new rules pushing up electricity prices to unaffordable levels. Their argument is that technology and the market, rather than limits or rules, will achieve balance. It will come as no surprise that the need to tackle climate change is not a unique selling point for any of the candidates seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
Obama’s policy, plus a far more engaged attitude towards climate change by the Chinese, has led to a change of political mood in anticipation of the UN-convened talks in Paris – certainly a marked improvement from the last big effort in Copenhagen in 2009, which ended in confusion and a cobbled-together deal.
In all, 196 countries will come together in Paris seeking a deal that will come into effect from 2020. What will be sought is a commitment to limit emissions to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This time around, a silver bullet will not be sought, rather a quest for individual State commitments to come up with solutions that are fair to all, equitable and ambitious. Less than half of the countries, a little over 90, have made pledges so far.
So where does Ireland fit into this scenario? Well, it is likely that the country will have its own climate change laws in place by the time the Paris summit takes place. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill has reached report stage in the Oireachtas and should be enacted relatively soon into the Autumn session.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
Academically, politics is described as a science. But in the real world, it’s more of an art – and one of the big decisions a Government has to make is to decide when to call an election.
Will they see out the full term, or will they go early – either to mitigate the damage they will ship, or to secure a victory before things go awry, or the economy takes a dip, or some kind of controversy erupts?
Timing is everything.
And there’s a bit of art to that – not to mention a lot of luck. If you call it early and win big, you’re a genius. If you call it early and lose, you are the political version of the village fool.
Charlie Haughey was a poor judge of the public mood. Twice he called snap elections and on both occasions they backfired. Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as Taoiseach in late 1979 and did not – technically – have his own mandate. He tried to remedy that by calling an election in 1981. But it recoiled. Ray MacSharry warned him not to hold it during the H Block hunger strikes when republican prisoners were dying each day. He did not listen to the advice and found himself out of office.
After his return to power in 1987, Haughey tired of presiding over a minority government that kept on losing votes in the Oireachtas (the opposition won nine private members motions).
So he called a snap general election and it backfired. Fianna Fáil lost seats and had to broker a coalition deal with the Progressive Democrats and his long-standing political adversary Dessie O’Malley.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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World of Politics with Harry McGee
I was cycling down Mount Street in Dublin on Tuesday. It’s a wide esplanade that links the Grand Canal with Merrion Square. The street is a mixture of fine Georgian buildings and modern office blocks.
About half-way down is the office of the International Protection Office, which deals with asylum seekers who have arrived in the country.
Needless to say, the office has been overwhelmed in the past year. Besides an estimated 80,000 refugees who have arrived from Ukraine, there have been about 20,000 people from other parts of the world who have arrived into Dublin (mostly) claiming asylum.
The numbers peaked around Christmas, but they have been falling a little. In January, more than 1,300 people arrived seeking asylum but the numbers fell back to 831 and 858, in February and March respectively.
They are still huge numbers in a historical context.
So back to my cycle on Tuesday. I knew that some asylum seekers were camping outside the International Protection Office, but I was taken aback by how many. There were six tents lined up on the pavement directly outside. Then on the ramp that led down to the basement carpark on the side of the building, there were about another 20 tents.
It looked like what it was, a refugee camp in the middle of Dublin’s business district. If you pan out from Mount Street, you will find tents here and there in nearby streets and alleys. There were a good few tents in an alleyway off Sandwith Street about 500 metres away.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
World of Politics with Harry McGee
God that was a dramatic and historic weekend in England, wasn’t it? So much excitement, so much change, so much hype, so much out with the old and in with the new, and what looks like the coronation of a new leader. Yes, the local elections in Britain were something else weren’t they!
Apologies for not going on about King Charles III but the contract I signed when I became a lifelong republican forbids me to discuss the topic!
I know the British local elections sound a bit boring by comparison, but the results were stunning.
The Conservatives lost nearly 1,000 seats, the British Labour Party gained almost 500 and both the Lib Dems (with 350 gains) and the Greens (gaining over 200) also had amazing days at the polls.
It was Labour’s best day since 2002 but its victory was only partial. The Greens and the Lib Dems actually made gains at the expense of Labour in more affluent areas, and in parts of Britain where there were high numbers of graduates.
It was in the Red Wall constituencies in the North of England where the Labour recovery was strongest. These are working class constituencies with pockets of deprivation where people voted for the Labour Party forever. But all of those constituencies voted for Brexit and then voted for the Tories in the next general election. Labour is now winning back some of those votes.
Local elections are classified as second-tier elections which essentially means – from a national perspective – they are not life-or-death affairs, and not everything turns on them. Of course, it’s really important to have good local representation. But they are not an amazing weather vane for who rules the country.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App
Download the Connacht Tribune Digital Edition App to access to Galway’s best-selling newspaper.
Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Or purchase the Digital Edition for PC, Mac or Laptop from Pagesuite HERE.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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