The Irish Times view on Ireland’s climate targets: backsliding must end
Fail to plan and you plan to fail, runs the old business adage, and it applies all too clearly to the Government’s foot-dragging approach to measures addressing the climate crisis.Plans are being made, but they are manifestly inadequate to meeting the State’s target of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and they are also running later and later.Under the Climate Action Act 2021, the Government is committed to producing an annual statutory updated plan at the beginning of each year. Last July, the Taoiseach assured us that “Officials across the system are already working on CAP26 – the next iteration of the Climate Action Plan that must now focus on meaningful actions and accelerated delivery to help close the emissions gap that has been identified.”Yet now the Minister for Climate, Darragh O’Brien, has indicated that the Climate Plan for 2026 will not now be published before April, a similar delay to last year’s plan, with no guarantee it will be published even then. This lack of timeliness is all the more reprehensible given that earlier this month the Minister had already admitted that our emission-cutting by 2030 will itself fall short of the target by around 50 per cent.READ MOREA Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Cheerier than Game of Thrones and brimming with Irish talentWho were the Dublin rioters? What 82 prosecutions tell us about the unrestFirst Look: Inside the new-look Bang restaurant from the duo behind Kicky’sThe big question: Is Ireland willing to accept lower economic growth to cut immigration?It is bad enough that this shortfall could cost the public purse many billion in EU penalties. It is worse that it indicates a complete failure to treat the climate emergency with the gravity it deserves, as the defining crisis of our era.Underlining this gravity, last week the EU’s Copernicus climate change monitoring service projected that rising average global temperature will pass a critical threshold in 2030, previously not expected until 2040. As the Climate Advisory Council has repeatedly warned the Government, this increasing pace of climate change will result in every more frequent and ferocious extreme weather events in Ireland, with dire consequences for lives, livelihoods and communities across the country.The Minister argues that he cannot produce the plan until the next sets of five-year carbon budgets have been agreed. These budgets establish the amount of greenhouse gases the country can emit in a particular period while remaining within climate targets.As we have seen before, these budgets are very difficult to agree, because they impact the emissions ceilings for different economic sectors like agriculture, transport, industry, electricity generation and construction. The difficulty of this process, however, cannot justify further delays, since we have already overshot the last two budgets. Rather, it should spur the dedication of more resources, and more ingenuity, to completing it.Every overshoot, and every delay, only make the targets for the next period even harder to achieve. This vicious cycle must be broken.
