On Saturday, January 6th, 2024, the irrepressible enthusiast, wind-power optimist and founder of Ireland’s most important renewable-energy company Eirtricity, Eddie O’Connor died. A week later, as temperatures across Europe plummeted, sources of Irish energy-consumption were, in round figures: 74% fossil fuel, 19% imported and 7.50% renewable. That is to say that, if we depended on wind, the Irish economy would be dead and so would a very large proportion – the poorer part – of the Irish population.
Nobody who ever met O’Connor would fail to have been charmed by the bubbling cheeriness that infused his huge engineering knowledge. However, these admirable qualities certainly wouldn’t keep us warm when weather moves in from the Arctic, since the dawn of time mankind’s greatest existential foe. Just beyond the North Pole resides Siberia, whose permafrost, without any human agency, annually releases millions of tons of methane. This gas is, in terms of global warming, about eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Which raises some interesting questions about O’Connor’s bald assertion two years ago that the burning of fossil fuels “is the biggest source of global warming”.
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