Cantillon: Was Teagasc put on the climate council to placate the IFA?

The establishment of a new advisory council on climate change initiates what many hope will be a significant change in Government policy around the issue.

Apart from advising on strategy, it will hold the Government to account if it fails to hit emissions targets set down by the European Union.

That said, environmentalists have been kicking up a fuss about the proposed format of the new body.

They claim the automatic inclusion of four State- backed agencies – the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Teagasc, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) and the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)- effectively stacks the deck in favour of "big-government types" who will baulk at presenting inconvenient truths.

Conspiracy theorists suggest the EPA, the ESRI and the SEAI are merely cover for Teagasc, the State’s agricultural agency, which they claim is there at the behest of the Irish Farmers’ Association. Teagasc scientists, who have serious green research, may feel bummed at being cast as potential villains of the piece.

Environmentalists insist that because the farming group is mandated to promote the interests of agriculture this may put it potentially at odds with the work of the council. The anxieties around Teagasc were stated in a recent assessment of the Government's climate change Bill, which establishes the council, by international environmental law organisation Client Earth.

What all this shows is that temperatures, domestic not global, are running high as the State’s moves towards a low-carbon era.

Many experts believe the ambitions of Irish agriculture, the main contributor to our emissions, in the post-milk-quota era are not reconcilable with State targets.

Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly almost confirmed yesterday that the State would not meet its EU greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, which insist on a 20 per cent reduction by 2020 on 2005 levels.