The Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment, Darragh O’Brien, declared at a recent informal meeting of EU environment ministers in Dublin that Ireland would seek, in its EU Presidency, to be “honest brokers” to “achieve our climate targets and to secure the prosperity of our industries”.
This is an admirable aspiration, especially for a country so far behind in meeting its own climate targets. But it will be a very challenging one, and already glosses over the glaring contradiction between the EU’s climate and environmental targets, as set out in the 2020 Green New Deal, and the upfront and central emphasis on “competitiveness” in the Irish presidency’s stated priorities.The environment, and climate in particular, are relegated to a very secondary position in the presidency programme.
Of course, EU’s industries must be competitive on world markets if they are to prosper. The problem lies in the degree to which “competitiveness” has become a code word for loosening the restrictions on carbon emissions and other environmental regulations that underpin the green deal, and which have already been rolled back alarmingly under pressure from lobby groups.
This presidency now faces great pressure to further relax (“simplify”) the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), which requires polluters to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, bringing emissions down while generating revenue to finance a clean transition. It has so far halved the emissions in the sectors it covers.
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It is particularly disturbing that this move to undermine the ETS comes at a moment when, as the minister acknowledged in his comments, referring to the unprecedented wildfires raging in parts of Europe, “There should be no question or no doubt that we are in a crisis. We need to reset how we approach this in terms of the urgency”.
If we are truly to address the interlinked climate and biodiversity crises – and they are an existential threat to the European Union – then we must make them the yardstick by which other priorities are measured, and not vice versa.
It is perhaps not well enough understood that these two crises are intimately connected. Failure to finance the restoration of the EU’s (and Ireland’s) ravaged ecosystems, for example, is one of the factors underlying the spread of wildfires. Abandonment of agricultural systems, unaccompanied by nature restoration, has led to the accumulation of scrub fuel burdens that feed the fires.
Rapid, well-funded and innovative implementation of the EU’s environmental strategies is needed, not their relaxation. This is not a luxury, it is a necessity, and should be the focus of this presidency. Without a liveable environment, ‘competitiveness’ will be an empty aspiration, in a threatened landscape it is becoming increasingly easy to imagine.
