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.