Colm McCarthy: 'My target is bigger than your target'

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan has elevated a policy aspiration to the status of a precondition for the formation of a stable government. The aspiration is the reduction of 7% per annum in Ireland’s emissions of greenhouse gases, a figure whose origins lie in calculations by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

They reckoned that worldwide emissions would need to fall at this rate if total warming were to be contained at 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level. Warming has already reached about 1.1°C, so a steep and early reduction is needed to prevent the number going above 1.5°C.

The IPCC did not offer target reduction rates for each individual country – the 7% relates to the whole world

The greater the ultimate extent of warming, the greater the damage to the world economy and society. While the ambition to keep warming below 1.5°C is widely shared, there is scepticism that containment below 1.5°C is even possible at this late stage, given the policy failures over the last three or four decades. But it is a perfectly legitimate aspiration.

The IPCC did not offer target reduction rates for each individual country – the 7% relates to the whole world. The panel are acutely aware that the planet has one atmosphere and that uniform reductions across geographical areas are an irrelevance.

Climate action has failed for a myriad of reasons but one of them has been the impossibility of breaking down planetary imperatives into nation-sized emission targets and securing agreement from 200 sovereign states to respect the targets agreed.

Whether Ireland cuts emissions by 7% or 70%, were that feasible, is a rounding error in the overall scheme of things

The European Union is the only significant global player to have taken climate policy seriously and has had greater success in damping emissions than most other parts of the world. But Europe accounts for just 11% of world emissions, well behind the USA and the largest emitter, China. Whether Ireland cuts emissions by 7% or 70%, were that feasible, is a rounding error in the overall scheme of things.

The best reason to lament Eamon Ryan’s choice of the 7% number as the principal red line in his talks with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is that it deflects attention from some components in the Green Party position which would help to strengthen policy. Politicians and the media political commentators love targets, especially round numbers.

“My target is bigger than your target” would be an adequate summary of the discussion about housing policy during the recent election. But a target is not a policy. A target expresses the desired outcome after the policy has done its work. If a candidate to manage a county team told the interview board “my policy is to win the All-Ireland” and nothing more, the proceedings would end on the spot.

Policy is about the selection of policy instruments, things like taxes or subsidies, or regulatory interventions. It may be desirable to cut emissions in Ireland unilaterally by 7%, especially if the rest of the world would do the same, but whatever reduction eventually emerges will be the consequence of the policy settings selected by the next government.

Ireland has a framework of carbon taxation, in part the handiwork of Eamon Ryan’s last stint in government

The Greens are genuinely committed to increased taxes and charges on carbon emissions, more so than the other political parties. In this, genuinely a policy not a mere target, they are fully in tune with economic advice that has been persistently ignored around the world since first proffered in the 1980s. Had modest, but increasing, carbon taxes been agreed at Kyoto in 1995 and consistently applied, instead of unimplementable quantitative emission targets, the world would now be in a better place.

Ireland has a framework of carbon taxation, in part the handiwork of Eamon Ryan’s last stint in government and both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are supportive. Sinn Féin and the hard-left groups in the Dáil are the only element in Irish politics opposed to the taxation of carbon emissions in principle.

On television on Sunday, Mr Ryan held out the prospect that a Green new deal would be a positive component in an economic stimulus package once the COVID-19 crisis has been contained. Whatever policy is to be pursued will be constrained by financial reality and there has been too much rosy talk about a V-shaped recovery.

It is neither convincing nor necessary to suggest that overdue climate action is free of economic cost

Adjusting to the post-COVID-19 world will diminish the scope for economic policy experiments and a coherent climate policy internationally will impose further costs of economic adjustment. The failure to pursue serious climate policies internationally has, as predicted, increased the cost of the changes that must now be made.

Delay makes climate adjustment more expensive and the Greens were right to support carbon charging over a decade ago. It is neither convincing nor necessary to suggest that overdue climate action is free of economic cost. Eamon Ryan would have been better advised to draw his red line on carbon taxes – at least it constitutes a policy and one of proven effectiveness.

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