Climate policies pay dividends – but let’s not drop guard

Laura Burke, the Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was beaming with delight as she stood outside the EPA’s Dublin Office talking to me last Tuesday.

For once, she had some great news to tell – Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions went down by 6.8% last year.

It was the second consecutive yearly decline, and it proves that climate action in Ireland is beginning to work.

“Yes”, she said, “we have much further to go”.

“No”, she said, “we are not on track to meet our 2030 targets”.

But “look” she said, “this shows it is possible – we could do it”.

Ms Burke said this was the best news the EPA has been able to deliver in all her time there.

She has been a director at the EPA since 2004. Twenty years, and she has earned her credibility.

So, if Ms Burke says the cut to Ireland’s climate pollution last year was so good, then we are right to feel encouraged.

Some of the big emission reductions in 2023 materialised from “low hanging fruit” rather than transformational change.

There is a lot of climate anxiety around, especially among younger people.

Some worry the world will be destroyed by the time they grow old.

Perhaps this news that our climate policies are paying dividends and starting to turn the tide on emissions will give some comfort.

Nobody, however, should drop their guard.

The really hard work is still ahead of us. Politicians need to stick to the course. Much more can be achieved.

Some of the big emission reductions in 2023 materialised from “low hanging fruit” rather than transformational change.

For example, the biggest cut in greenhouse gases happened in the energy sector where emissions fell by 21.6%.

But it was achieved on the back of a 12-fold increase in electricity imports from the UK.

This drove the proportion of our electricity supplied from Britain to above 10%.

And none of the emissions associated with generating that electricity is counted as Irish – from our point of view it is a free pass.

There is nothing transformational about that – no changes to how we live, no gains in energy efficiency, no hard choices for people or businesses.

Its emission reductions easy-peasy-style – classic low hanging fruit.

Or take transportation.

The good news in this sector was not that emissions went down – it was that they “only” went up by 0.3%.

And this was despite a 3% increase in the number of vehicles on our roads, a 7.7% increase in petrol sales and a 1% increase in diesel.

That is very impressive at one level, but we really should be demanding more.

What happened in transport was that the proportion of ethanol, a carbon neutral plant-based biofuel, that is mixed into our petrol was doubled to 10% after a change in the law.

We are still driving the same cars, but because the carbon fuel in our petrol tanks has been further diluted, the greenhouse gas pollution coming out of our tailpipes has gone down.

Easy-peasy climate action again, but certainly not transformational change.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very much in favour of easy-peasy climate action – please could we have some more.

A further increase in the biofuel content of diesel sounds good to me.

More carbon-free nuclear electricity from France and the UK to back up our own renewable energy sources, instead of our own dirty coal and gas-fired electricity generators would be better for the climate.

So why not have more of that.

But this is not the transformational change to how we live our lives or organises society required to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Watch: Director General of the EPA Laura Burke says 6.8% emissions reduction ‘incredible positive’

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And anyway, the rules are changing so that in a few years’ time any carbon associated with electricity imports will be attributed directly to us.

More electric vehicles on our roads were the second significant factor behind the low growth in transport emissions last year.

But that was on the back of very attractive incentives for people to switch to battery electric vehicles.

Since then, the Government has deliberately pulled the rug from under EV sales by reducing the incentives and supports.

The consequence has been a fall of 25% in new electric car sales in the first six months of this year compared with the same period last year.

Bear in mind too that, according to the Climate Change Advisory Council, battery electric vehicles currently represent only 2.41% of the entire private car fleet of this country.

The Government’s target is to have 944,600 electric vehicles on our roads by 2030.

How are they going to achieve that when only 10,000 fully electric vehicles were sold in Ireland over the last six months?

If we keep going at that rate, we will only have added an extra 110,000 fully electric vehicles to the national car fleet by the end of 2030.

Driving an electric car is one of the best ways individuals can reduce their impact on the environment.

Surely, the Government should be doing better than that.

The Climate Change Advisory Council says the Government urgently needs to buck up.

They are calling for a comprehensive review of taxation in the motor sector to discourage the purchase of new petrol and diesel cars in favour of electric.

By that they mean changing vehicle registration tax, motor tax, excise duty on cars, carbon tax, the taxes on petrol and diesel, and more.

Of course, this would be the opposite of “low hanging fruit” in policy terms. It would require hard choices and upsetting people.

All of this is listed and committed to in the Climate Action Plan.

Yet it is not being done, they are not getting on with it, and it seems quite unlikely to be tackled in advance of a general election.