Fergus Finlay: What’s stopping us becoming a laboratory for green innovation?
A fast-burning wildfire in West Kelowna, British Columbia. A huge area of British Columbia in Canada is being turned into a smouldering wasteland by the hour.
I’m in Hudson Park, trying to banish negative thoughts, when something Vicky said occurs to me. Vicky is my daughter, and she works in backroom politics (not quite my backroom, alas, but that doesn’t stop her being a progressive and deep thinker).
Before I tell you what she said, I need to explain the negative thoughts. I’ve always been one of nature’s optimists. There isn’t a subject under the sun about which I can’t say “it’ll be all right on the night”. Up to now, that has even extended to climate change.
I’m not in any sense a climate denier. I believe the science. I completely support people like Greta Thunberg and the way she speaks for the next generation. When I look at my grandchildren, I carry a burden of guilt about the world we are bequeathing to them. I despise the populist approaches that try to pretend it’s a hoax. Nobody who isn’t insane or a charlatan believes that.
But I’ve always believed in my bones that we’d find a way. Leadership, public policy, science, good government, would somehow figure out how to turn the clock back. New inventions would be discovered, and we’d manage to cool the earth in time.
I’m wrong, aren’t I? The world’s poorest countries have suffered in the extreme from climate warming for a while now. Drought and famine and ever-increasing poverty have been the visible consequences in the Horn of Africa and in parts of Asia for years. The flooding in Pakistan last year led to 33 million people losing their homes, and the entire economy of the country has been simply destroyed.
But now some of the richest and most developed parts of the world are burning. Thousands of people have been made homeless in Hawaii by enormous fireballs dropping out of the sky. A huge area of British Columbia in Canada is being turned into a smouldering wasteland by the hour. Holiday resorts throughout Europe are being rendered uninhabitable.
I know some of these places. Some of my happiest memories come from lighting fires and cooking over campfires in the Canadian woods of BC, of all things. My sister, Finola, who lived for many years in BC, has relatives there who are being ordered to evacuate today.
So I’m standing in Hudson Park, grappling with the thought that my generation has entirely failed. And that it’s the worst failure imaginable. That’s when I heard Vicky in my head.
“We’re failing,” she said, “because every bit of policy is expressed as ‘we must’. Nothing is expressed as ‘we can’. It’s all about punishment, never about opportunity. Yet if we look around, there are opportunities everywhere. Ways to save the planet, change our behaviour, make life better. If we only made one key decision.”
She was talking about Ireland, not the whole world. But she has one simple alternative that could make Ireland a leader in terms of changing the rest of the world.
The Green Machine, she calls it. Let’s decide that this little country of ours is going to go for it bald-headed. Do whatever it takes, spend whatever we have to begin changing everything.
Look around, she says. So I did, yesterday morning.
Hudson Park is a little community park, built a few years ago by Dun Laoghaire County Council near where I live. At weekends the playing pitches and playground are full of kids and families from all over the area. At any time it’s a lovely safe place to walk a dog. It’s a community park, so it’s surrounded by the community — houses and roofs everywhere.
Standing in the middle of the park you can see maybe 60 good solid roofs all around. Three of them have solar panels, no more. But over to the right of the park, there’s a senior citizens’ complex called Beaufort. If you walk in there are maybe 50 little houses, clustered around a green space in the middle. Every one of them has photovoltaic panels on the roof — every single one — and in the back of the complex there’s a bank of 8 air-to-water heat pumps providing a district heating system for the entire complex.
The senior citizens who live in Beaufort — they are all, I think, local authority tenants — have A-rated wrapped homes, warm and comfortable all year round, and very low energy bills. That’s the sort of thing, Vicky would say, that a Green Machine would do everywhere if we gave the Machine its head.
She has other examples. Wicklow County Council, not too far from where she lives, has just built the first covered carpark in the country — entirely covered in solar panels. It will power the Council’s head offices.
I wrote here a couple of weeks ago that a billion euro would install solar panels on 100,000 houses, heating those homes, providing warm water, and charging tens of thousands of chargers for electric cars. In the scheme of things, a billion euro — actually five times that — is an investment we can make. And we’ve almost no solar farms in Ireland. Surely that’s a no-brainer opportunity.
What’s to stop us from positioning ourselves — the entire country — as a laboratory for green innovation? Why couldn’t we, if we chose, set up institutes aimed at establishing green technology as a core pillar of higher and further education modules?
For example, I hadn’t heard of NZEB until Vicky told me about it. It’s a branch of the Waterford Wexford Education Board in Enniscorthy that specialises in training tradesmen around the knowledge (because they already have the skills) to produce Nearly Zero Energy Buildings.
We’ve made significant progress in the agriculture and food sectors, although there is a huge amount more to be done. There’s a range of individual programmes and initiatives — I only recently heard about Origin Green, for instance — which is aimed at enabling producers (farmers), manufacturers and retailers to develop a food and drinks sector that truly respects the environment. And they’re getting there.
I wish I had the knowledge and skills to go through the economy, sector by sector, to identify opportunities for change. It’s really what needs to be done because all of us react much better to a process of change where we can see a reward at the end of it.
That’s where the idea of a Green Machine comes in. Let’s face it, we’re going to have to pay more taxes and make big investments. But if we bring every idea together under one roof, give it a brand we can all identify with — make it ours, in effect — and change the narrative entirely. No longer about “if we don’t do this we’re all doomed”. What The Green Machine says is “let’s throw the kitchen sink at this and give our kids and grandkids a country to be proud of and a future worth living”.
CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
