Inaction will cost us dearly - Emissions report

IT is not at all surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency has reported that we are unlikely to meet our target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020.

Ireland’s annual emissions from agriculture, transport, the built environment, waste, and non-energy intensive industry are projected to be 9%-14% below 2005 levels by 2020. The shortfall won’t bring our world to an immediate end but it again highlights our feeble commitment to environmental issues.

Agriculture and transport continue to be the dominant factors in this race, one that aims to have zero carbon emissions by the end of the century. The huge increase anticipated in the national dairy herd now that milk quotas have ended will undoubtedly exacerbate the situation no matter how Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney argues. Indeed, his implausible denials seem to epitomise our head-in-the-sand indifference around these planet threatening issues.

Just as it is hard to argue in a country with such a wet climate that water is a precious resource which we must cherish, it is difficult in this verdant land to imagine that we are, albeit unintentionally, destroying it inch by inch, habitat by habitat, acre by acre. Yet we are. Maybe if we regarded the figures on carbon emissions as a matrix of how we cherish the future and our children’s place in it, we might do better. The EPA report will hardly define this week’s news cycle but ignoring it will have profound, deadly consequences.

DISCOVER MORE CONTENT LIKE THIS