Carbon crackdown is nigh
So, warnings from the Green Party and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that we can’t meet EU targets for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 were taken less than seriously by most.
Even when Environment Minister John Gormley said Taoiseach Brian Cowen has asked cabinet ministers to bring forward additional measures to lower carbon emissions, everyone’s attention drifted back to worries about their bank deposits. However, at the very least, it means Agriculture Minister Brendan Smith and his Department will be distracted, preparing proposals to deal with our higher-than-anticipated cattle expansion — instead of fighting for a farm waste grant extension, for example.
Our cattle farmers have proved unpredictable; not nearly as many as expected turned their backs on cattle, when the Single Farm Payment cheque appeared.
That’s why agriculture still accounts for 27% of our greenhouse gas, twice as big a contribution as in France, a major agricultural producer.
Cars and cows are seen as the main cause of our emissions rising faster than anticipated. And Minister Gormley believes that offsetting will be the main solution to rising cow numbers.
That means the government must buy more carbon credits, having already put aside €290 million. This expensive policy of purchasing credits from an investment fund or a carbon company, in order to offset our economy’s carbon production, is a measure of how serious our government is about greenhouse gas emissions.
But where will the money for credits come from, in these economically straitened times? Sooner or later, it may come from carbon taxes.
According to the Green Party, the Taxation Commission will shortly make carbon tax proposals. Carbon tax is seen by experts as the cheapest way to reduce emissions.
A tax of €20 per tonne of carbon dioxide might amount to two or three cent per litre of petrol, for example.
In farming terms, it would equal a dairy tax of €47 per head per year and a tax on beef of €23 per head per year.
That tax could close down some farms. And a carelessly imposed carbon tax would expose the absurdity of greenhouse gas controls. Which is that if everyone in Ireland stopped driving, and disconnected their homes from the electricity and gas grids, their reduction in emissions would be dwarfed by increasing emissions in other parts of the world — because the rules do not apply in the US, Brazil, China and India, and scores of other countries.
Developing countries argued that they were not the main contributors to greenhouse gas emissions during the industrialisation period.
Brave Ireland agreed to be lumped in with Britain and Germany, whose factories and power plants were belching out smoke a century before ours did.
Presumably, it was the politically correct thing to do.
And now the correct way to tax agricultural emissions seems to be to tax the consumer, adding it to the shop price for milk and beef, so that imported, exported and domestic production are taxed equally.
The revenue raised could be returned to farmers as a subsidy to buy feeds which result in less greenhouse gas emission, or to keep their cows outdoors longer, which would have the same effect. So a carbon crackdown wouldn’t be all bad news for farming. And our tree growers could become green heroes, reducing Ireland’s carbon overshoot from seven million to 2.3 million tonnes, if they accelerate our afforestation.
