Another day, another alarming headline about the spiking energy crisis and the spiralling rise in prices. Yesterday, the Irish Times reveals that the government was warned that 70% of the Irish people might be pushed into energy poverty if prices keep climbing.
If the words “energy poverty” make you envisage people going to bed early in a freezing house because they can’t afford to turn on the heating, then you’d be correct. That’s how serious the situation is. And if you are spending more than 10% of your income on energy, which is the definition of energy poverty, chances are your ability to buy decent food, or clothes for your children, or pay for your escalating rent, are negatively impacted, as are health outcomes and a host of other metrics.
Rising energy prices also push up the production and transport costs of those everyday purchases, so it’s a double whammy for the average household. An energy crisis is very likely to increase the number of people living in poverty.
The ESRI said that a 70% energy poverty rate would be a worst-case scenario, but noted that in mid-June the State saw a record energy poverty rate of almost 30%.
Another presentation, the Irish Times said, talked about rationing and about risks to “societal function and civil order”. People, it seems, might object strongly to sitting shivering in the dark, or not being able to charge their smartphones. Losing the ability to connect to tiktok might eventually awaken the rebel spirit in our teenagers, though it would be a high price for the rest of us to pay.
Meanwhile, the government is telling us to take shorter showers and grow lettuce, and then acting as if the energy crisis came around the corner and sandbagged them. “Rising fuel prices?” they are more or less saying. “What a shocker. Who could have foreseen that?”.
Pretty much anyone really, should be the answer. You can’t keep strangling the energy supply and then act surprised when an energy shortage starts pushing up the price of electricity and everything else.
But the dizzying pretence – or perhaps it is just staggering incompetence – goes on, with the Business Post reporting that the government is “livid” with the energy grid operator, Eirgrid, and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), whom they blame for not flagging this energy crisis in time.
The CRU told high-energy businesses last week that it will introduce a swathe of new tariffs designed to reduce demand and drive up electricity prices to levels that will force firms to use their own back-up power supplies.
It will also impose new tariffs on households through their energy providers at times of peak demand, which will make electricity approximately 10 per cent more expensive between 5pm and 7pm.
Barry Cowen, the Fianna Fáil backbench TD, has demanded a ‘review’ of the actions of the Department of Energy, the CRU and others. Thank God for that. A good government review will surely sort everything out, though it might, of course, take some time. Or a long time.
Cowen accused people of being “asleep at the wheel”. He might do well to direct that accusation at the majority of TDs in Leinster House, who have had their heads firmly stuck in the sand for years on this issue, and who still chose to ignore the glaring reality of what happens when you implement policies based on climate change hysteria without considering what the consequences are.
How idiotic can a government be? Or brazen? It takes a special kind of neck to start blustering that no-one saw this crisis coming when it was obvious to anyone paying attention that Ireland has been rushing to close down energy sources without considering the effect on supply.
The Cabinet can blame Russia and Eirgrid as much as it wants but the fact is that the government – and the Opposition – have been so busy chasing a green agenda that they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and are now standing helplessly by as a winter of discontent rapidly approaches.
The repeated actions of both Government and Opposition show a near-pathological need to show that this small country can be a “world leader” in banning traditional sources of energy, even when it endangers our economy and our well-being.
So in January 2021, this government rushed to end all peat-harvesting from Irish bogs to meet the EU’s green targets ahead of schedule. That put an end to burning turf in power stations, and to Bord na Móna peat briquettes, and to Irish horticultural peat, essential for growing foodstuff.
So instead, and the madness of this is hard to grasp, we import briquettes and peat from Latvia, Poland and Germany, with all the expense and carbon miles that involves. TDs like Carol Nolan have repeatedly pointed out this folly, but they are ignored by most of the media.
Germany, in contrast, has only just agreed its first National Peatland Protection Strategy, and is taking its own sweet time in closing down peat operations, because they put the needs of their people before the favourable opinion of the EU Commission.
In 2020, operations on Germany’s drained peatlands were responsible for 53 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. Ireland’s emissions for peat harvesting were only ever a tiny fraction of the worldwide total. Yet we’re leaving fuel in the ground and bringing peat thousands of miles to heat Irish homes. The situation is almost beyond parody.
We’re sadly no better when it comes to other sources of reliable energy. Last year, the government delightedly announced that it would refuse any more licenses to find oil or gas in Ireland, even though the rest of the world is hastily revisiting all those promises to ‘leave fossil fuels in the ground’.
“Through the Climate Act 2021, Ireland has closed the door on new exploration activities for oil and gas. There is no longer a legal basis for granting new licences,” Eamon Ryan trumpeted, with the usual addendum that Ireland was ‘leading the way’ on ending fossil fuel use.
He might, if he bothered to examine the situation a little more closely, have seen that we are leading the way because other countries are understandably backing away from a ruinous strategy which pretends that renewable energy isn’t unreliable and is blind to what will happen when energy supplies are closed off without dependable alternatives.
Germany, worried that Russia will cut off gas supplies, is going back to burning coal in at least two huge power plants – with Italy, Austria, the UK and other European countries considering the same. China has upped its coal production targets, and merrily ignores the climate-change-fretting of the West while it builds enormous coal-fueled power stations it says is needed to benefit its economy and its people. And Australia has just announced it is opening up almost 47,000 sq km of Australian waters to oil and gas exploration.
As Ben Scallan has repeatedly pointed out on this platform, Ireland is a tiny country, and our contributions to global emissions are correspondingly tiny, amounting to just 0.09% – that’s less than a thousandth – of the world’s man-made CO2 emissions.
So while experts believe that there are billions of barrels of gas off Ireland’s coasts, we are telling them that our green reputation matters more than our ability to ensure our people can access energy.
Our refusal to harvest peat, or to explore and make use of our potentially vast energy sources in the seas, is like leaving gold in the ground in the middle of a famine. The madness needs to stop.
Green activists point to solar and wave and wind energy, and if the technology existed for those sources to power the country, I’d be the first to welcome that, but they don’t. We’re struggling to get renewable energy up to 15%, despite the millions of taxpayer euros invested, and the wind does not blow, nor the sun shine, on demand. The same people who are closing down our peat harvesting, are of course, implacably opposed to nuclear power, even though it’s a green source of energy and shown to be largely safe.
Of course, those thumping the table about the climate won’t be sitting in the dark come winter, and they will also be amongst those least affected by energy rationing if that follows. Polls show a significant majority of voters are opposed to carbon taxes and raising fuel prices as climate change measures. Yet now the cost of green energy policies is starting to become a cold and harsh reality.
Some commentators have said that the energy regulator should cap the price increases sought by energy companies, and point to huge profits made by suppliers like Bord Gais who recorded a massive 74% jump in profits in the first half of 2022, even as desperate families turned to Vincent de Paul to pay their bills.
I agree. But those are all short-term fixes. We need to realise that other countries, when deciding energy policies, put their own economies ahead of the applause of the elites in Davos or the approval of the EU Commission. We must do the same.
Can our government, and our opposition, just for once, stop acting like useless, craven, spineless fools, and put the needs of our people first? Otherwise we might all be left sitting in the dark.