I am willing, here and now, to make a prediction, dear reader: This week, you will see various opposition politicians – presumably including some you think are generally “sound” – announcing their opposition to the increase in the Carbon Tax that will hit families and households around the country this week.
But those objections, I predict, will be no more than skin deep: We will get the usual stuff. That the time is not right. That the increase should be deferred. That there should be offsetting counter-measures to help families with their bills. That the climate is important but the wrong people are being taxed to pay for it, and we should be raising taxes on corporations or data centres or some anonymous population of billionaires instead.
What Irish democracy does not have – unless some enterprising political party wishes to prove me wrong – is a political force willing to say that the Carbon Tax is utter nonsense, economically corrosive, unfair, and should be abolished.
Yet, all of those things are true.
We will start with the purpose of the Carbon Tax. It exists for a reason – but most people do not understand the true reason it exists. Probably, if asked, most people would say that the purpose of the Carbon Tax is to make pollution more expensive in order to dissuade people from using fossil fuels, and therefore to reduce the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the environment. But this is only partly true.
Because the other purpose of the Carbon Tax is as a deliberate attempt by the Government to distort the energy market in favour of renewable electricity and energy. Think about it: Electric Cars are more expensive than diesel cars, so the Government subsidises them and gives you a grant. But it also jacks up the cost of diesel and petrol to make running a diesel or a petrol car relatively more expensive. The Carbon Tax is a thumb on the economic scales, designed to try and make you use “green” energy at the expense of fossil fuels.
The only problem is this: Try as they might, the Irish Government (inspired entirely in this regard by the Green Party) has failed to make renewable energy cheaper or more efficient than fossil fuels.
Eamon Ryan, when he was in Government, used to talk endlessly about something called “The Green Economy”. He also devoted his entire political career to bringing the “Green Economy” into being. The basic idea was that Ireland could become a global leader in producing a new kind of lean, green electricity, one which would see us lead the world in innovation and becoming a net energy exporter.
To this end, several tools were employed: Windmills and wind energy were subsidised to the tune of over €15billion. Grants and tax breaks were given to green energy producers while fossil fuel users were taxed out the gazoo. The basic idea was that the Government could interfere in the market to make Green energy cheaper and more reliable, and that by doing so it would be used more, and that as it was used more it would become cheaper and thus no longer need subsidising.
The only problem is that none of this has worked. Ireland, far from being a global leader in Green Energy, now has the highest electricity costs in Europe. Electric Cars, far from being the future, are falling in sales as people discover their re-sale value to be very low. Even those electric cars that are being sold are being heavily subsidised in many instances with grants or tax schemes for the purchaser. The independent “I have lots of money and want to choose my own car” market for electric vehicles still isn’t there.
This is the economic tragedy: For two decades the Irish Government has taxed the Irish people with a promise of a new green economy, and for two decades that economy has stubbornly refused to take shape. The reason? The technology simply still isn’t able to compete with fossil fuels.
Wind energy is still less reliable than gas or (god forbid) coal. Combustion engines are still more reliable and easier to maintain than electric ones. Open fires still heat your house more reliably than electricity, especially when there is a storm that knocks out the power lines.
The total cost of Ireland’s project to distort the energy market may never be known. What we can say for certain is that it has run to the tens of billions, dramatically increased people’s costs, and accomplished very little except for the creation of a client class of “Green Entrepreneurs” and Green Businesses whose existence is still almost entirely reliant on continued handouts from the Government.
In fact, it is worse than that: A whole constituency of voters and companies have been created who rely on Government climate policy almost entirely for their survival. Those companies have employees and owners who vote. And their support will now go to those who maintain them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
This entire Green Boondoggle – of which the Carbon Tax is perhaps the most important symbol – is an enormous cancer on the national economy, sucking resources from productive sectors of the economy in pursuit of an almost religious mania to reduce Carbon Emissions.
And the best bit? It has barely even done that. Ireland is still on course not only to miss its 2030 climate targets, but to miss them by a wider margin than a Mayo Man with an open goal standing between him and an All-Ireland Final victory.
That there is no political party in Ireland with either the relatively modest intellectual prowess, or the slightly greater level of courage, required to make this case, is very disappointing. Because complain though they will about the timing, or demand though they may that “someone else” pay, they are all committed to keeping the great green carbuncle on the national backside firmly on the gravy train that the Green Party set in motion.