Opinion

Progress and success are not the same thing when it comes to climate action

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil naively believe they can have policies that both increase and decrease carbon pollution at the same time, and still be rewarded for making a good effort

Among other initiatives, the next government will need to scale up home retrofits with a suite of regulations, funding, policies and institutional support. Photograph: Getty Images/iStock
Among other initiatives, the next government will need to scale up home retrofits with a suite of regulations, funding, policies and institutional support. Photograph: Getty Images/iStock
Sadhbh O'Neill
Tue Dec 17 2024 - 06:00

In late October this year, the Spanish city of Valencia experienced its deadliest floods in decades. The images of cars piled up like toys in thick mud showed how vulnerable we are in the face of weather events made more frequent and more extreme by climate change. Yet with the distraction of Christmas and new year approaching, that event will be filed away with the lengthy catalogue of climate disasters from 2024.

Calamity commands our attention and empathy in 30-second clips on our smartphones, but the story arcs towards clean-up and recovery when in reality that is only a first world luxury. As the world smashes through planetary boundaries and a stable climate, the frequency and scale of weather extremes will leave many lives, communities and places destroyed forever.

Because the political cycle and our attention spans are so brief, one of the most important features of climate lawmaking is to design a response to climate change that reaches far enough into the future to have real impact over decades. Given how dependent we are on fossil fuels – which are the main carbon polluters – it will require co-ordinated Government action to phase them out from electricity production, transport, heating and industry. Doing so will be disruptive and the timing may not always be convenient.

Precisely because politics operates with short cycles and with incentive structures that reward both profligacy and pollution, we need the law and our institutions of Government to co-ordinate action in the public interest over the long term.

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Richard Lazarus, a US legal academic wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2008 that the legal and political device needed to address climate change is a “pre-commitment strategy” that effectively restrains future lawmakers from policy reversals.

Staying within the carbon budgets after 2025 will require commitment, discipline and politically difficult decisions across the economy

An effective climate law, he wrote, locks in long-term targets, insulates officials of government from politics as much as possible, and structures the implementation process to diminish the influence of short-term interests.

The climate law passed by the Oireachtas in 2021 arguably ticked all of those boxes in spades. It is now facing its most serious test. The law did what politics can’t do, at least not all of the time: it set Ireland on a pathway to a fossil-free future with both long-term and medium-term targets that are legally binding across the whole of Government, created a system of five-year carbon budgets based on scientific and expert advice, and established a system of ministerial accountability and a reporting cycle.

While EU targets can be framed as an imposition (though of course the Irish Government negotiated these as an equal partner with other member states), no one can say that a law that was approved by every single political party in the Oireachtas with the exception of Aontú and a handful of independents is undemocratic. Notwithstanding their differences, the political system wisely accepted these constraints on future action knowing that good intentions and nice words won’t cut it. Restraint is the most important policy lever available.

[ Fossil fuel use reaches global record despite clean energy growth ]

As talks continue on Government formation, negotiators will be discovering that the amount of wriggle room available to duck out of their responsibilities under the climate law is extremely limited.

If anything, the next Government will be saddled with even greater climate policy challenges than the previous one. Staying within the carbon budgets after 2025 will require commitment, discipline and politically difficult decisions across the economy. Whether one looks at rates of electric vehicle penetration, home retrofits or new renewable energy production, the 2023 Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) Energy In Ireland data suggests that Ireland is completely off course, with the modest reductions in emissions insufficient to meet the 2030 targets. Despite the law, targets and fine speeches, in 2023, 82.3 per cent of all the energy we used in Ireland still came from fossil fuels – with just 14.1 per cent coming from renewable energy.

Whether the prospect of EU fines of up to €20 billion as reported by the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council – and written about elsewhere by Fintan O’Toole today – will motivate party leaders to pay attention to the cost of inaction remains to be seen. Indications are that the two largest parties naively believe that they can have policies that both increase and decrease carbon pollution at the same time, and still be rewarded for making a good effort.

As the SEAI pointed out, progress and success are not the same thing when it comes to climate action. To “succeed” at climate policy, the next Government will need to intervene at an unprecedented scale to regulate fossil fuels out of existence. It will need to increase the scale and pace of renewable energy deployment, expand public transport, and scale up home retrofits with a suite of regulations, funding, policies and institutional support. More of the same won’t be good enough.

Sadhbh O’Neill is a researcher in climate policy and was a Labour Party candidate in the general election. She writes in a personal capacity