Environment - Greens full of hot air over climate change

The Green Party touted the establishing of a cabinet committee on climate change as a great victory for itself and an indication of its ability to influence our climate change policy.

The party has a valid case for insisting that climate change poses one of the greatest problems facing the world today, but it has demonstrated little initiative in trying to tackle the problem.

The committee is charged with overseeing sweeping efforts to achieve the Government’s target of reducing the country’s CO2 emissions by 3% over the next decade.

The Government’s performance in meeting Kyoto targets has been little short of pathetic, because the new committee has only met twice since the formation of the Government.

Environment Minister John Gormley had little difficulty going to Bali for the UN conference on climate change, but there does not seem to be the same kind of commitment among his government colleagues to discuss the changes necessary to meet government targets.

Mr Gormley told the UN conference that the Taoiseach would be chairing the cabinet committee. This was presumably supposed to demonstrate the Government’s commitment to change.

Finance Minister Brian Cowen made much of the government’s commitment in his budget address, but it seems that all this talk has just been so much hot air.

Surely this is not the way to tackle global warming.