Climate change an urgent matter - Minister must tell it like it is

Days before the last general election, the man who would be minister for climate action, Denis Naughten, told RTÉ Radio’s Late Debate that when he was out canvassing, no-one on the doorsteps was asking about climate change.

He wasn’t saying it wasn’t important or that action wasn’t needed, but there was little in his contribution to suggest he was the person to inject a sense of urgency into the national response to the most pressing global issue of our time.

Two years on from his elevation to minister, there is still scant evidence that it has been similarly elevated in his mind from a challenge to the more appropriate category of crisis.

Of course, nobody wants a minister running around in circles, with his head in his hands, declaring we’re all going to die. But the truth is that with the increasing frequency of floods, freezes, storms, heatwaves and fires, people will die. And some already, tragically, have.

Admittedly, it can be tricky to find the right language to convey the message to best effect. Peddlers of panic are easily dismissed and merchants of doom don’t get re-elected.

But the minister’s tendency to present climate change in the gift box of investment is not working. His recent launch of the €500m Climate Action Fund brimmed with references to innovation, creativeness, endless opportunities, and solution-focused approaches. It almost seemed worth having the peril of climate change just to be part of all this excitement.

His response to yesterday’s damning Climate ChangeAdvisory Council report focused on the €22bn pledged in the Ireland 2040 National Development Plan to turn the country into a low-carbon economy by 2050. “That’s 22 thousand million,” he enthused.

And, indeed, it is a lot of money. But the irony is that it is a post-recession investment in the economy that is now driving our carbon emissions sky-high, so talking investment and climate change in the same sentence again fails to deliver the message.

If he is struggling for the right words, he will find them in the advisory council’s report, which opts for the likes of “urgent”, “disturbing”, and “disappointing”, and expresses all manner of concern — “significant”, “great”, “very”, and “major”.

Those words describe not just the risks and hazards associated with climate change [‘risk’ and ‘hazard’ also populating the report] but the failure of the Government to fully grasp the need for a detailed plan of action to mitigate it.

The plan needs to do more than declare what we want to achieve and should encourage and empower innovative people to work towards it [‘encourage’ and ‘empower’ are favourites of the minister] — it needs to set out very clearly those things we can no longer do if we want to get to grips with climate change. Negative, but necessary, words.

The report offers plenty more. The Irish economy is not on a pathway towards low-carbon transition, it says. In fact, it is “completely off-course”.

The minister may argue this is semantics and that actions speak louder than words. But words drive action.

And even if he is taking his cue from constituents who don’t ask about climate change, he needs to take the lead and tell them anyway.