Climate change: How many warnings do we need?

Mary Robinson’s stark and unambiguous warning came just as the possibility of hundreds of millions in European Commission pollution fines came into public view. If Ms Robinson’s warning pointed to an immediate danger to humanity, or at least the lifestyles we take for granted, the EU fines reminded us of some of our least attractive, self-destructive national characteristics — our reluctance to face up to reality or observeessential, life-protecting social regulations.

The commission may impose backbreaking levies because we continue to fall short on obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This warning, primarily a consequence of farm animals’ capacity to produce dangerous gases, comes less than a year before milk quota limits are lifted and plans to double the size of the national herd become a reality. Already, Irish agriculture is the world’s biggest producer of methane gas after New Zealand, so next year’s expansion represents a significant environmental challenge.

Coming as it does after a successful, decades-long campaign to block the EU nitrates directives, a regulation designed to protect water quality, this latest failure represents a trend — and a victory for an often narrowly focused, self-serving lobby. It would be unfair to blame just one sector for the rules-are-for-someone-else syndrome; we are all culpable. Nevertheless, the farm sector seems particularly reluctant to accept that climate change will force huge differences on the way we live, work, and do business.

Because of that, it seems essential that the consequences of the planned — and essential — growth in food output be more clearly understood before the project escalates, if it is not already too late for that. After all, it does seem pointless to meet the great challenge of feeding the world’s soaring population by means that accelerate climate change. A process that steals from the future to satisfy today’s appetites is not sustainable.

Three UN reports in recent weeks have focused on the urgency required. That warning was echoed yesterday morning by Ms Robinson when she said that we have “at most two decades to save the world”.

Yet it is hard to identify even one area of meaningful, transformative, and quickly realisable public policy that reflects the urgency contained in that warning. Energy Minister Pat Rabbitte’s statement yesterday, that he was determined to produce 40% of our energy through renewables within six years, is reassuring but we will have to wait until 2020 to see if that target is reached.

The scale of this worldwide challenge to our way of life is more than daunting, but so are the stakes. Put in its simplest terms, we either confront climate change in a meaningful way or face terrible consequences, consequences we may not easily survive. That we face European Commission fines because we have not reduced emissions of greenhouse gasses — a mere skirmish in the climate change war — confirms that we have not grasped the great urgency of the situation, that we still imagine this crisis has nothing to do with us. Are we really that blinkered? Are we really that stupid?