Proposals for offshore wind farms; A new sense of urgency is essential
On Monday, RTÉ gave a powerful example of a core obligation of public service broadcasting — tell the truth, even if the sky should fall in. Weather expert Gerard Fleming presented Will Ireland Survive 2050? It was sobering and almost too challenging. It showed how rising seas will change our country well before the children who started school this autumn start a family. “The sea will come and take them back,” he warned about cities built on estuaries — as all ours are.
Climate sceptics may scoff, but if they look at Delhi, where 25m people are being smoked like a side of salmon for Christmas, or Sydney’s 5m residents facing an “unprecedented, catastrophic fire warning” just days after California endured wildfires of record intensity, they might accept today’s science. If those hells do not convince, then deniers might consider this summer’s fires in Siberia, where 17m acres were turned to cinders. The inferno was so intense that Alexander Uss, governor of Krasnoyarsk, said it was “pointless, and maybe even harmful” to fight the fires. Russia declared a state of emergency in the Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk regions, an area larger than India. Irish orinitholigists may have identified a consequence of those fires. Birds like woodcock, which breed in Siberia but winter in Ireland, have returned to our shores, but juvenile birds are, so far, largely absent, giving rise to concerns that a proportion of this year’s young birds were lost in the inferno. A woodcock in the mine, as it were.
The scale of those fires is all but incomprehensible and even if they are unlikely — guarantees are impossible — here, they raise questions about how we are preparing. Fleming suggested we do much more and his warning must raise further doubts around controversial flood-protection plans for Cork city. Seen through the prism of Will Ireland Survive 2050? they seem the wrong answer to the wrong question.
One of the foils offered to climate change is decarbonisation. This is a difficult process, but New Zealand has led they way by making complete decarbonisation by 2050 a legal obligation — coincidentally, Fleming’s date for hosting the Leander Cup regatta along Cork’s St Patrick’s Street.
Renewable energy is fundamental in this and wind is a primary source. Last year, wind met a record 29% of our electricity needs — the second-highest in Europe and the highest in onshore wind. That was achieved though what might be described as the Dodge City phase of windfarm development, but yesterday’s decision, by an EU court, to fine the State €5m because it did not carry out an environmental assessment on a Galway site, suggests that period is over. So, too, does the application to survey the Waterford coast to establish its suitability for the world’s largest offshore windfarm.
Should these proposals be realised, they would make onshore wind farms redundant, a milestone many rural communities would welcome. However, it may make some fishermen (like the ESB workers in peat plants that are due to close) redundant, too. A way must be found to serve the greater good, while protecting those paying an unexpected price. The offshore farms must be established as quickly as is possible.
