Tackling climate change requires collective intent

World of Politics with Harry McGee

This is hardly going to make for the lightest summer reading. But then if you are reading this column, you are not going to get a blow-by-blow dissection of what happened on last night’s Love Island.

Instead, you get a dissection on another kind of things heating up – the slightly less racy issue of climate change.

In the last week of the Dáil this summer, the Climate Action and Low Carbon Act 2021 was signed into law.

We have had climate change legislation before in the past decade, but now, for the first time, we have strong statutory backing for the targets.

The law itself explicitly commits to reduce emissions by 51 per cent by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. That commits the Government to reduce greenhouse gases from around 60 million tonnes of emissions each year to 30 million tonnes.

It sounds like a lot – and it is. It will be hard, but it’s not impossible.

There is good news. Emissions fell by six per cent in 2020 compared to 2019 and fell marginally the year before.

That, however, is only foostering around. The real falls are going to have to take place in the next decade and keep on going for another 20 years.

Sure, every time there is a heat wave, or a storm, somebody pipes up and says: ‘That’s climate change’.

It’s not. You can’t judge any such change on the basis of a single event or even a cluster. But the long-term changes tell us unequivocally that global temperatures are continuing to rise.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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