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Dear reader: Somebody call RTE and give them the good news, for my wife and I have finally become the vanguard of that long-predicted phenomenon: Climate refugees.
I write this piece from a (blessedly cheap by modern Irish standards) Limerick Hotel room, having been forced from our home by the simultaneous and extended absence of electricity, water, mobile phone signal, and any indication of any kind as to when they might return. The best that the Electricity Supply Board, whose employees are assuredly doing their best amidst a nightmare, can tell us is that we will be restored to functionality at some point over the next four or five days.
To be honest, the absence of electricity and all it powers aside, Storm Eowyn passed us by without much incident. One night of howling gales wrought no obvious damage to man, building, or any nearby trees. A slightly ruffled robin knocking on the window to demand his food on Friday morning was the only evidence of any disturbance. Well, that and the dead plugs.
750,000 homes and farms and businesses lost their electricity on Thursday night. By the time this is published, well over half will have had it restored, but others will endure a long week of darkness and cold. For two nights, the two closest towns to me have been shrouded in darkness, reduced to long queues outside the one chipper which must suddenly be thrilled that its dubious investment in a generator has proven so profitable.
We are told that this storm, Eowyn, is the beginning of a new climate normal. Some of you will no doubt dispute that, pointing out that occasional freak weather events happen even in this part of the world. But regardless of whether you dispute it or do not, this is what we will be told. That there will be more Eowyns, and worse.
To try to head off this eventuality, our little society has done a lot of things in recent years, almost all of them on the orders of the wise men and women we have elected to govern us. We have subsidised electric heating, and banned solid fuels of one kind or another. We have taxed diesel to nearly €2 per litre. We have encouraged people to switch to environmentally friendly electric vehicles. We have pledged to rid ourselves of innumerable cattle (how guilty they must have felt, all those cows in their sheds on Thursday night, knowing that the howling outside was their burps and farts being repaid, ten times over).
The problem, I suppose, is this: While those wise men and women were encouraging us to become ever-more reliant on electricity to power our lives, in order to save the environment, none of them appear to have thought that it might be worth their while to invest in bulking up and hardening the very electricity network on which we rely.
A simple point: For years now, the Government has been trying to build something called the “North-South Interconnector”. This great infrastructural project, which is almost as old as the Children’s Hospital, is supposed to run through the counties of Meath, Louth, and Monaghan, traversing into Northern Ireland and giving us the capacity to import some of what Donald Trump would call that big beautiful British nuclear power that we refuse to generate here at home on some long-forgotten moral grounds. The reason it has been delayed is a long-standing dispute with the local landowners, who want the government to put the cables underground, rather than building pylons.
One might think that the sudden emergence of Ireland as a possible preferred destination for holiday-making winter hurricanes might prompt a re-think of the Government’s position on undergrounding that project. Whatever damage the power of the wind might wreak, it remains unable to blow beneath the surface. And climate change is unlikely to bring us earthquakes. If they put the cables underground, they might at least be able to both build the interconnector, and happily proof it against future storms.
Of course, the interconnector alone would not prevent a repeat of this weekend’s national disaster. But the fact of that disaster should surely prompt a major re-think in our national climate debate, especially with a new Government having just taken office.
Ireland produces about one thirty-three thousandth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. That is to say, for every atom of carbon dioxide the Irish economy produces, the rest of the world produces approximately thirty two thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine. These measurements are not exact, and might vary depending on your particular scheme of climate accounting, but no matter what you use, the figures point to the same conclusion. Were we to eliminate our carbon emissions altogether (which would require the extinction of all human, mammalian and reptilian life on the island, leaving only plants to survive) then the trajectory of the global climate would not change at all.
Indeed, it is readily apparent that on its own terms, the global race to stop “catastrophic climate change” has been entirely lost. Just this week, the United States pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords and its new President ditched all subsidies for electric cars and pledged more oil and gas drilling. That’s decades of Irish climate policy, functionally undone in terms of impact, at the stroke of an orangeman’s pen. How history rhymes.
So if what we are told is right – if it is right – then there will be more Eowyns. There will be more Eowyns regardless of whether you drive a Tesla, or take your plastics to the shop for 15 cent apiece, or how much you pay for your diesel. You are not going to stop it. The Irish Government has many powers, but altering the trajectory of the global climate is not amongst them.
There is something we could do, though: We could take all that money we are using to subsidise unprofitable windmills, and invest it in a long-term hardening and improvement of the national grid, making our power and water infrastructure less vulnerable to hurricanes and storms. So that if these storms do come, as we are told they will, they have less of an impact on us.
I think back again to that chipper in my local town, which is making a year’s revenue in a weekend because it had the foresight to be prepared for a storm. I know the owner a little, and she does not strike me as somebody who worries all that much about the Climate. She was prepared.
Yet the people who run this country, and who claim to have foresight of climate disasters today and into the future? They were not prepared. Not at all. And thus, here I am, a climate change refugee in my own country. Along, I am sure, with thousands of others.
It would be nice, now and again, if Irish public policy made sense.
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