The findings of the Tax Strategy Group – responsible for advising the Government on Irish Tax policy – published this week, were stark. Ireland is not on course, nor anywhere close to being on course, to meet it’s objectively ridiculous 50% emissions reduction targets by the end of this decade. Nor, reading through the documents, is there any remotely convincing plan to get the country back on track. As things stand, emissions are on track to fall by about 29% – an absolutely astonishing reduction, and one that will come at great cost.
The Tax Strategy Group outlined some of that cost – higher taxes on fuel. New taxes on electricity. Higher taxes on big cars. An absolute ocean of economic pain, targeted almost entirely at the middle classes. And one that, by the agreed scientific analysis of the world’s experts, will not be enough to prevent “catastrophic” climate change.
Because 29% in Ireland simply isn’t enough. And the truth is that 51% in Ireland simply isn’t enough, because if we were to achieve it, we would be literally the only industrialised country to do so. Most of the others are not even trying.
The United States, for example, is barely trying, and under a Democratic administration at that. The kinds of taxes on fuels and cars that we treat as normal in Ireland would provoke a political revolution in the US, so they simply will not be enacted. Even our most basic measures, like grants for more efficient heating systems, are not being enacted there.
All of this at a time when, to look at the media, the climate situation has never been more urgent. It’s embrace climate action or be cooked, on every news channel, every day, every time.
It would be entirely imprudent not to consider the possibility that the like of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are correct, and in the absence of any concerted global climate action, catastrophic climate change will follow in reasonably short order – two to three decades from now.
But if that is the case, then isn’t it also time to realise that on their own terms, the time for prevention has passed?
It is, to use the USA as just one example, abundantly clear that the kind of climate action that true believers say is essential will not be enacted in the United States. Not this year, not next year, not for the remainder of this decade.
Which should prompt all of us to ask a basic question: What then?
Last week, the Journal ran a poll asking its predominantly younger readership if they were feeling something called “Climate Anxiety” – and a disturbing number of people answered in the affirmative. Indeed, this is a phenomenon that’s being repeated across the west. “Climate Anxiety” might be defined as a feeling, in the young in particular, that the world is on the precipice of final catastrophe, mass extinction, and the collapse of civilisation, and that they will live to see it.
But of course the media is janus-faced on climate anxiety: At once reporting it as a terrible affliction, and at the same time doing everything in their power to make it worse. It is, by and large, the same people who will tell you that Climate Anxiety is bad one day, and then tell you that the Polar Icecaps will be gone in ten years the next.
Surely, it’s time to embrace a different attitude: Climate realism, if you will.
Climate realism would focus not so much on preventing climate change, but on conserving environments. Because the practical low cost things that we can do are achievable – like reducing the amount of plastics in the oceans, or planting more trees, or building denser cities. There’s an environmentalism that makes countries and cities nicer, cleaner, places to live, without burdening people with worries and anxiety about whether carbon dioxide is 0.04 or 0.06 per cent of the air they breathe.
Climate realism would also examine the likely worst impacts of climate change, and seek ways to mitigate them: For example, if Eamon Ryan was a climate realist, he would not be proposing the building of 2000 homes in Dublin Port, while at the same time worrying that Dublin Port might soon be under water. To use biblical terms, what we are doing at the moment is as if Noah had spent the years before the flood telling everybody to cop themselves on, when it was too late to do so. Instead, Noah built an Ark. That’s what Climate realism would do.
But of course the problem is that if you ask Climate Scientists what an “Ark” strategy would look like, they cannot tell you: One week, Ireland is going to be colder and wetter. The next, hotter and dryer. The week after that, hotter and wetter. They’re all agreed on catastrophe, but not agreed on what the catastrophe will look like.
And so, all we are left with is climate anxiety: A growing section of the population fearing impending doom, with absolutely no practical way to mitigate that doom. It’s borderline insanity.