At 200 pages, with 475 separate actions and costing somewhere around €125 billion over the remainder of the decade, the climate plan published today is one of the most comprehensive documents ever produced by an Irish government.
It also marks one of the most dramatic policy departures ever undertaken by any administration. If fully implemented – if even most of it is implemented – it will represent a change in public policy on a par with Lemass’s great opening up in the 1960s, joining the EEC in the 1970s, or the social partnership/inward investment model that fuelled the massive economic catch-up of the 1990s and 2000s. It will be a profoundly different way of doing many things.
But implementing that decarbonisation programme will be enormously difficult – technically, economically and, perhaps most of all, politically.
Many of the measures will involve cost or inconvenience or both to individuals and businesses that will not be welcomed. Not everyone will relish the opportunity to retrofit their homes and all the hassle and expense that goes with it, nor the extra expense if they don’t. Not everyone will welcome the squeezing of private motor transport in towns and cities, nor the additional cost of driving longer distances, through tolls or additional taxes on fuel, nor will they want local bus routes changed. Many farmers will not want to change the way they farm, no matter how much guff about being stewards of the environment is tossed their way. Many businesses will groan under additional costs. Not all change is welcome or desirable.
Significant opposition
The pledges from Government that the transition will be “just” and “fair” run up against the reality that those things mean different things to different people.
There is already significant political opposition in the Dáil to annual increases in the carbon tax, one of the measures more or less universally accepted as a necessary tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At a time when heating and fuel bills are already rising, the political sensitivity of rising costs is likely to grow more, not less, acute. Sinn Féin, currently most people’s tip to lead the next government, remains vehemently opposed to the tax.
The recent Irish Times/Ipsos MRBI opinion poll showed that there was significant public opposition to some climate action measures. That doesn't mean that the public can't be brought around to accept the measures; other polls show a high degree of awareness of the threat posed by global warning and climate change. But it does mean that the Government has its work cut out to communicate the need for the measures and the longer-term benefits that should flow from them. Accepting short-term pain for long-term gain, however, is not something at which our public or political culture, not to mind our governments, have a very distinguished record. That said, there is no end of dialogue, consultations and climate education promised. Whether they produce the desired public buy-in is another matter entirely.
The delivery and governance mechanisms in the plan appear pretty strong. A delivery unit will work across government, supplying quarterly reports on progress. Ministers will have to account for their compliance or otherwise on an annual basis. There is no guarantee, of course, that the Government will stick to the plan or the timetable. But if it doesn’t, then that will be clear enough.
Green coup
The plan will run up against considerable capacity constraints. Retrofitting half a million houses at a time when the construction industry is supposed to be building 30,000-40,000 houses a year will be difficult, to say the least. A million electric vehicles on the road by 2030 seems hopelessly optimistic. The list of measures that have yet to be worked out in any detail is preposterously long. The plan is woolly on the rather critical question of how it is to be funded, how much of the national development plan budget it will eat up, and how much new borrowing and spending it will require.
But what is undeniable is that the plan represents a very significant political success for the Green Party. After a year and a bit in government – in the midst of a pandemic, too – the party has moved climate action to the very centre of the Coalition’s priorities and committed the country to a radical scheme of decarbonisation that could only have been dreamed of by the party when it was in opposition.
It has often been the way that the means of bringing about major changes in Ireland have been smaller parties in government with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael persuading those parties to do it. The Greens have managed that trick with both of them. It is quite the coup. The hard work of making that change real, however, is only beginning.
