Way back in December, the Irish Times published a little-noticed (by their standards) piece by economist John FitzGerald (son of late former Taoiseach Garret) on the question of Ireland’s climate commitments.
Why was it little noticed? Because, I strongly suspect, it didn’t really say anything new. All it did was re-state the climate policy of the Irish establishment. FitzGerald’s credentials to do that are impeccable: Aside from having been an ESRI economist for years, he is also a former Chairman of the Government’s Climate Advisory Council; and served on the Northern Ireland Authority for Energy Regulation. He is married to former Labour Party minister Eithne FitzGerald, and worked in the Department of Finance for 12 years. You don’t get more “establishment Ireland” than Dr. FitzGerald. Here’s what he had to say:
“Here at home, we have a lot more to do to turn our stated commitments on climate change into effective action at scale. We have the second-highest emissions per head in the EU, and need to do a lot more to reach net zero by 2050.
We have made good progress on decarbonising electricity and in retrofitting buildings. But we are moving too slowly on transport – we need better public transport that encourages people to switch, and we need to electrify our car fleet at a much faster pace: most new car registrations should be EVs, beginning next year.
Progress in agriculture is disappointing, in spite of it being clear that modest changes would have a real impact. Switching a portion of land from beef farming to forestry should be a winner for both farmers and the planet.
To make that happen there needs to be enhanced support for green action, taxation to discourage emissions, and regulatory reform to allow farmers to modify their existing activity. The further extension by the EU of the derogation on nitrates is not the answer.
We like to portray ourselves as climate progressives on the world stage. But we need to step up our game at home to tackle emissions.”
Note two things here: First, the commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Everything he describes thereafter is in service to that goal – reaching a point where the Irish economy adds no more Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere than it extracts.
Second, the measures he says are essential to achieve this: Higher taxes, a reduction in beef farming, rapidly electrifying the car fleet, and further decarbonising electricity and retrofitting buildings.
Both of those sets of objectives should be looked at coldly and dispassionately. First, it is worth considering the appropriateness of Ireland’s target to reach net zero by 2050, which starts with an intermediate target of reducing emissions by 50% by 2030. The world’s largest polluter, China, has an official target of reducing their own emissions by a maximum of 10% from peak levels by 2035 (though a minimum reduction of 7% will allow them to also hit the target). Here we can see that Ireland’s emissions targets are vastly more severe than China’s.
India, meanwhile, targets that emissions should peak in 2030 before they begin any reductions at all. In fact, over the next five years Indian emissions are set to grow by 10-15% over the next five years, while Ireland plans a 50% cut.
What about the United States? Well, that country has no binding emissions targets at all, of any kind, in any policy. Even the previous Biden administration, while announcing an intention to hit net zero by 2070, enacted no legislation on the idea. The idea of emissions limits has since been abandoned by the Trump administration, which means that the US will not even consider climate action similar to Ireland’s until January 2029 at the earliest, and that’s assuming a sweeping Democratic Party win in the congressional and Presidential elections of 2028.
In other words, Ireland has adopted extremely aggressive emissions reductions targets at a time when the world’s largest polluters are either going in the opposite direction, or doing the very bare minimum.
Second, we should consider the economic costs of this policy divergence: One of the reasons that the Irish Government invests so heavily in renewable energy, for example, is that the market will not do so by itself. Subsidies are necessary because renewable energy is less efficient and more expensive than fossil fuels, which is why the United States is planning an enormous expansion in gas-powered electricity, slated to hit 252MegaWatts by 2030, an almost tripling of that country’s gas-powered electricity generation. In other words, while Ireland is planning to make energy more expensive, the USA is planning to make it cheaper.
Third, we should consider the use of incentives. As Dr. FitzGerald sets out, Irish policy requires economic coercion and a reduction in economic activity: We must tax more, and we must literally use policy, under his plans, to switch away from economic activity (beef farming) to mostly non-economic activity (forestry). That has enormous costs.
The electrification of the car fleet adds to these costs, both in terms of the Government subsidies required and the additional electricity generation needed. And then there’s the other impact, pointed out ably by Konstantin Kisin on the BBC’s Question Time last week. People really should watch this exchange:
If Ireland reduces beef farming, for example, that does not mean that the global climate benefits. It means that demand for beef is taken up by supply from elsewhere – usually and often places like Brazil, where the climate impact of beef production is higher. Ireland is already deforested to make way for beef farming. In Brazil, new beef farms require the removal of forest. So in essence what Dr. FitzGerald proposes is replacing Brazilian rainforest with Irish imported Nordic spruce plantations to improve our climate numbers, at the expense of our economic activity. The same goes for almost every industry or job driven out of Ireland by the higher costs of Net Zero.
Kisin calls this “economic suicide”. He is correct. But you simply will not find any debate about it in Irish media, or Dr. FitzGerald ever being subject on Irish radio or television to the kind of questions I raise in this piece.
Nevertheless, this debate is essential. It is one that we must have, before it is too late.