There's the tired old trope that when everyone is unhappy someone is doing something right. Not sure that's correct ever. But more to the point if the the government's emissions cuts plan doesn't even hit the intended target one has to wonder.
The chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council has said that while the Government's emissions cut plan is an important milestone, the sectoral targets are problematic and not consistent with the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act.
Marie Donnelly said the agreed targets will need to be revised upward and monitored closely in the light of experience.
She said the emissions cuts amount to a reduction of just 43% and so are not consistent with the Climate Act.
On RTÉ's Morning Ireland she said: "When you quantify it, the numbers do not come to 51% as foreseen in the Act.
"They actually come to 43%, so we have a gap. We have a gap of about five million tonnes."
And then there's the issue over the political theatre earlier in the week where it seemed fleetingly that the GP might, just might, be unable to row in behind FF and FG over the reductions in agriculture emissions when 22% was raised as the target. Now it is 25%. So was this all choreography?
And how is this going to work in practice?
George Lee on RTÉ has a good overview:
For the past two decades, despite contributing more per capita to global emissions than most other European countries, Ireland was one of the biggest laggards when it came to climate action.
Policymakers talked about it, wrote about it, and planned for it.
Irish governments made emissions reductions commitments to the EU, the UN, the IPCC and others.
But when push came to shove, very little was achieved.
Ireland had a longstanding and legally binding commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020 and completely failed to reach that target.
And last year instead of reducing emissions by 4.8% they went up by 4.7%.
So now everything is focused on 2030. And some of the targets are going to hit closer to home than others. Not least:
Transport emissions are to be reduced by 50% by 2030. That will mean public transport, electric cars, bicycle and walking whether we like it or not.
And although none of this is set out in any great detail it is likely to mean congestion charges in cities, increased road taxes, higher petrol and diesel taxes, higher parking charges and anything else that can be dreamed up to encourage people to leave the car at home.
But Lee makes an incontrovertible point:
Climate action is now a fact of life and the longer we delay acting the harder and the more expensive it is going to be.
One thinks about how - if efforts were made ten years ago, or twenty years ago, the slope that we are on would be that much shallower, that much more easy to ascend. Eight years.
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