Carbon tax was one of the few areas where the opposition could pick holes in the measures contained in Tuesday’s giveaway Budget. It underlined the political reality of how climate change impacts on the lives of people.
Carbon tax will increase from €56 per tonne of CO2 emitted by diesel and petrol vehicles to €63.50 per tonne. This, of course, adds to the cost of transport and therefore a not insignificant increase in cost-of-living expenses for people for whom transport and particularly private transport is an essential in getting to work and so on.
The dilemma for the iceberg-saving opposition in the Oireachtas, not to mention the “eco-socialists” – an oxymoron given the disastrous environmental record of the socialist economies – is that carbon taxes were one of the few areas in the Budget where people could see a direct hit on income.
Yet, all the opposition parties are to a greater or lesser extent in favour of penalising people for using petrol and diesel.
Cue Sinn Féin’s Finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty attacking the hike which along with bicycle sheds and something, something, constituted the meat of his forensic deconstruction of a Budget in which the Shinners were demanding smaller welfare increases in some cases than were delivered. Time for an MOT methinks…
This morning sees the publication of the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest – and eight in a series of four year reports- on the State of the Environment.
According to themselves it is in a terrible state – a point underlined in her foreword by EPA Director General Laura Burke.
She strikes a somewhat curious note that ties in with both the catastrophic pitch of much of what we hear about climate change – although not quite on the Extinction Rebellion and eco-socialist level – and a secular Calvinistic view that while industrialism has meant that “the quality of our lives has been dramatically enhanced,” that this has been the consequence of much sinning against the environment, and that now we must Repent. Or else.
It is a lengthy tome, and no more than any of the other chaps who are reporting on it this morning, I did not read the whole thing in the early hours of this morning. I am presently saving such attention for René Girard who has far more relevant and timeless observations on the human condition.
The conclusion is, predictably, that “we are not on track” to meet the targets that have been set and that are necessary to be met if we are to do our bit to save the planet.
Of course, all of those targets have been set by other people in external agencies. While no one is doubting the passion and commitment of the EPA and others regarding those objectives, the Irish state and its agencies are little more than short order chefs sweating in the kitchen while attempting to serve up what boffins in Brussels or Washington or in whichever office is responsible for overseeing the Paris Accords is situated would like on the menu.
That is sort of the existential place of the Irish state and its administrators: attempting all the time to balance the competing demands and pressures of a host of external actors and factors that care no more for Ireland as a concept or as an historic entity than the agricultural combines do for the corncrake.
The report references – without fully exploring the contradictions – the need for “accelerated action” to address the downside of climate change but “in the context of Ireland’s strong population and economic growth.” Well, sorry for wrecking the buzz but the two are incompatible.
You cannot have ongoing and forever “strong population and economic growth” and just magically avoid, never mind reverse, the inevitable environmental impacts which that has. The “eco socialists” do recognise that but are subject to the same schizophrenic belief that Ireland, or anywhere for that matter, can be at once the passive recipient of the backwash of “free movement of capital and labour” and at the same time create some postmodern De Valerian or perhaps Pol Potian frugal zero carbon utopia.
The same might be said to apply to those on the right who make a strong case for curbing illegal and opportunistic asylum migration but who appear perfectly content to allow the future of the country to continue to be a passive subject of transnational forces driven solely by the bottom line of the giant corporations.
That helplessness is illustrated by the report. The dependency of the economy on overseas capital – with workforces largely recruited from outside of the country – means that there is little if anything the Irish state can do with regard to the environmental impact all of this has.
That goes way beyond data centres and transport costs tied directly to the production process. None of their thousands of new employees exist in some zero carbon vacuum. They add greatly to the environmental as well as social and fiscal costs associated with housing and other provisions.
Yet, none of the “key messages” highlighted by the report refer to any practical means to tackle this. There is a reference to “unauthorised harvesting and extraction of peat on an industrial scale.” That be some lad from Tulsk with a van. Not one to the impact of the giant tech corporations and data centres in anything other than fluffy “why can’t everybody be nice” platitudes about the “circular economy” and what not. Well, “no one tells United Fruit what to do,” as the predecessors of these transnationals used to let their comprador rentier hosts know.
What the “key messages” do contain is a whole plethora of “suggestions” where the Irish state has the power to impose its will upon the citizens of the state. Not least the farmers, small business people, self-employed and employees who unlike the corporations are in no position to manage their affairs so that they can avoid taxes and sanctions tied to the climate change agenda. Carbon tax being just one example.
There are several pages about how the agricultural sector can do its bit. Indeed, it has no choice because the EU has Biblical amounts of directives which Irish farmers are required to comply with. There is also a reference to “fishing at unsustainable levels.”
Does that mean that the Irish state is proactively attempting to recover sovereignty over this sector and to protect a domestic and sustainable Irish fishing and processing sector and prevent further encroachments and unsustainable harvesting of our fisheries by super trawlers even from outside of the EU? Of course it doesn’t. The Irish state prefers to “decommission” the fishing fleet which will eventually mean that like most other things all fishing here will be in the hands of external actors.
Our job, meanwhile, is merely to take the bins out and sweep the yard in Industrial and Financial Centre Ireland, Inc. And not to be going around cutting turf on your own bog, catching the EU’s fish five miles off the coast of Kerry and generally being a threat to the world’s climate.