Setting up a ‘climate council’ will let Government do nothing at all

WHAT ARE we like that it’s big news in environmental circles this week that the Government is appointing the first Climate Change Advisory Council, asks Victoria White.

Surely the Government doesn’t need to appoint 10 people onto a board to tell them the planet is burning because people are using too much fossil fuel and they’ve got to do something about it? Can’t they read the papers which reported the G7 yesterday committing to stop using fossil fuels by the end of the century?

Ah, but the Government may put the Advisory Council to other uses. The Council will tell the Government what to do but it will have no power to do anything. That way the Government can get away with doing nothing at all. Many environmentalists have campaigned for it to be modelled on the Fiscal Advisory Council which offers advice to the Government which the Government promptly ignores.

The latest example of the useful role the Fiscal Advisory Council plays in this area happened just this week, when it advised the Government against a pro-cyclical Budget for fear of overheating the economy. The Economic and Social Research Institute echoed these warnings. The Government wants to be re-elected and it isn’t listening.

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As it happens, it is the former Director of the ERSI, the justifiably respected John Fitzgerald, who is to chair the new Climate Change Advisory Council. I don’t doubt Fitzgerald’s personal commitment to this issue for one moment, but his approach to climate change to date has been very conservative. In a 2011 ERSI research paper on energy he described supports for onshore wind energy as “probably too generous” and described incentives for off-shore wind and wave technologies as “premature”.

In a recent newspaper article he said the gradual raising by the EU of the cost of emitting carbon was “the best strategy” to combat emissions in the short term because it will incentivise investment in new energy technologies. Other experts argue strongly that carbon pricing does not drive the innovation which produces new sources of carbon-neutral energy which Fitzgerald thinks are the only way we can stop global emissions increasing in the long-term.

It’s innovation we need, not analysis of what we have. A talking shop won’t produce that, particularly when the Government can ignore what it says. If we need a new body at all, what we need is a kind of environmental IDA charged by Government with the job of de-carbonising this economy as a matter of urgency. Then we could put a firm plan on the table at the UN climate summit in Paris in December.

One of the main criticisms which the environmental movement has made of the proposed make-up of the Climate Change Advisory Council is that it includes “ex-officio” members of Teagasc, the ERSI, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and the Environmental Protection Agency and that its “independence” is therefore compromised. Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have found environmental credentials lurking deep in their pockets and are waving them around, arguing that the four agencies should form a “technical secretariat” but have no say in the Council’s final decisions.

But what good is a watch-dog which barks but doesn’t bite? We already have environmental and overseas aid NGOs and they are badly needed. What we don’t need is an environmental NGO set up by Government. What we need is Government. Government which governs in the national interest.

The hard truth is there is no way any Climate Law will halt or even lower Ireland’s carbon emissions without political will. The Climate Law has been completely oversold by many hard-working, committed environmental activists, some of whom have spent years trying to get it onto the statute books. The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, for whom I have volunteered early and often, collected 5,000 signatures in the last week asking Minister Alan Kelly to amend the Climate Bill before it is enacted. For their pains, Minister Kelly said he would “genuinely look at” amendments to the Climate Law such as an explicit statement on the Council’s independence and a commitment to publish their reports within a shorter time-frame.

But SCC lamented he had not committed to an emissions target for 2050 without which, it said, the law “cannot deliver the low-carbon future it promises”. How on earth can a law saying we should reduce our emissions to a target “deliver” a low carbon future? No-one even knows how its infringement would be punished. What we are doing is putting into law a laudable aspiration which might perhaps fit better into the Constitution in this jurisdiction. But we are modelling ourselves here on the UK, whose climate law, enacted in 2008, has not even begun to “deliver” a low carbon future.

Many of its advocates campaigned for the UK law’s enactment and in defending the law they are defending their own careers. However, Dr Matthew Lockwood has a fascinating study of the law available through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Open Access programme. He argues that the targets in the law have not in themselves driven investment in low carbon energy generation; that “physical and financial” incentives would have had to accompany them. He also reports that support for environmental activism has declined since the law was passed and that the hostility of some sections of the political and business community to low-carbon initiatives has increased.

The law came in on the wings of huge global concern about climate change. There was cross-party consensus on the issue as David Cameron put on some green face paint to soften up his image. This consensus has collapsed since the recession. Lockwood argues that the tussle to produce the country’s fourth “carbon budget” in line with the law — led by the independent Committee on Climate Change — was in itself an achievement. But he argues that without political and public support, the law is in danger of being ignored or repealed.

Meanwhile the bould Paddy is attempting to enact a weaker climate law to “deliver” a low carbon future. Arguably it is better than nothing. But I have seen how the proposed law has kept the environmental movement occupied for years on end. I am not one bit surprised that Minister Alan Kelly continues to refuse to produce his National Mitigation Plan until well the next General Election is done and dusted.

I have seen the Government’s record on climate change, noted a couple of weeks ago in Dublin by Ban Ki-Moon, as it attempts to be let-off our commitments on agriculture and prepares to bust through our 2020 EU emissions targets. And I have seen the same Government, just like its predecessors, quarantine advice it doesn’t want behind the closed doors of talking-shops.

As an environmentalist I am in a very uncomfortable minority of one on this issue. But I would prefer there were no Climate Change Advisory Council if that is the Government’s idea of taking action on climate change.

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