Reducing carbon by 2020 will cost €1,350m

Ireland’s commitment to generating 20% of its electricity from ‘renewable’ sources by 2020 is to reduce CO2 emissions and contain to less than 2C the predicted global temperature rise.

The argument is that temperature increase is proportional to the increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2, so it behoves us to reduce our national contribution to the global total.

Irish CO2 emissions were 46.5m metric tons in 2008, the latest year for which data is available, and it is not likely that they have increased since. Of that, 10.3m tons arise from electricity generation (according to SEAI), of which 92% comes from burning fossil fuels. If we generated 20% of our electricity from non-CO2 emitting sources, this would reduce CO2 emissions by 12%, to 8.96m tons annually. This would reduce our annual contribution to global CO2 emissions by 2.24m tons annually. The Irish Times reports that in 2012 global emissions totalled 34.0bn metric tons. To put this in perspective, 2.24m tons is 0.0066% of global emissions and would mitigate 0.013C of a projected 2C global temperature rise.