How climate slid down this Government’s agenda

You're listening to The Irish Times. It's Monday, it's February the 23rd and you're very welcome to the Inside Politics podcast from The Irish Times. I'm Hugh Linahum. One of the clearest divides between this government and the last one is its approach to the environment, to climate and to habitat protection. That should hardly come as a surprise, I suppose, given the Green Party's departure from power after the last election. But it still seems a little strange, given that all the main parties in the dollar and theory at least committed to issues such as decarbonisation and habitat renewal among those parties, Finnefall and Finnegale also were signed up to the legislation which governs these issues right now. But yet there seems to have been quite a transformation in approach. To discuss this, I am joined by The Irish Times is science and climate correspondent Carlo Nathari, Carlo Nathari. I'm good, thank you. Maybe we go first of all to that legislation which I was talking about, the act from 2021. I mean, that's still in place and not in theory at least guides the present government strategy. It is in place. I mean, the present government were there when it was born, if you like, they saw through to birth. So they brought it with them to this term in government. So whether they like it or not, their signatures are all over it. We do get the invention sometimes, they don't like it terribly much. There was certainly, and I remember particularly in the latter part of the last government, the Finnefall Finnegale Green Government, there was a lot of muttering from rural back ventures about tail wagging the dog and that kind of stuff. Yeah, and I mean, that's still there. But you know, there's only so much you can blame on a very, very small minority of people. This is a tough act. You know, it's not a tough act to follow. It's a tough act that they've put in front of them. There's no doubt about that. But they've accepted the reasons why it must be done. So to blame, if you like, if that word is appropriate, the Green Party as the minor party in the last government for bringing this forward, that's completely untrue. You know, before the Greens were in government, 2019 was actually the, if you like, the forerunner to this climate act, we had the first climate action plan. You know, that was led by Finnegale Government. So you know, they were in this and to the front of this, when it was, when there was kind of a sort of a groundswell behind it. So then to kind of try and maybe park it on a minority party and to say, well, we weren't really, you know, keen enough, but we had to do it to survive in government. And that doesn't really wash. So the objective in the act was to have, I think, 51% emissions reductions by 2030, which I think we can all accept is not going to happen to. It's not going to happen. No, and we don't just have to accept it. We've been told that by our climate minister. No, it's not going to happen. Now, how far from it are we based on the last projections from the environmental protection agency are the ones who do all the sort of the calculations on this. Other bodies do too and universities do too. So there's a fair amount of consensus. But the last sort of firm projections we had and that said, you know, by 2030, we will probably get to 23% reduction, which is a long way off of 51% reduction. And we might not get the 23. So this, you know, it's, it's not even guaranteed that we get that far. We're sort of at the midway mark. We set ourselves these two kind of carbon budget periods. So we split up this decade into two five year sections and we said we need to reduce our emissions by so much in the first five years. We need to reduce it by so much in the second five years. There was a little more ambitious for the second five years, the first five years. It's considerably more ambitious. We said, look, we can't sort of front load this because change happens slowly and new measures have to come in and then we have to transition, you know, in other words, change up our systems, change our transport systems, change our heating systems and that's going to take time. But really, we're probably only, we don't yet have the 2025 figures, but, you know, we're probably looking at maybe maybe a 2% reduction last year and that would have followed a 2% reduction in 2024. And there was a by the 2% production in 2022. There was a big reduction in 2023, but there's a slight, it's, it did definitely reduce, but the reasons why we're particular. And well, we did something slightly unusual. One of our big areas of carbon emissions in this country is just generating electricity. And we are very heavily dependent on burning gas. We used to be heavily dependent on burning coal. We did get a shot of that in sort of 2022, 2023. We shut down money point. So that allowed for a fairly decent fall off in emissions because coal is very, very carbon and intensive. We also got rid of peat burning and that also got rid of that. So we had those two things happening and then we also started importing a big chunk of our electricity from Britain. We have the interconnect with Britain. We used to use it occasionally and then we started importing about 14, 15% of our electricity from Britain. We don't have to count the emissions that they create by generating that electricity. It's a bit of a fiddle. Look, Britain has a good bit of wind, power and it has nuclear. So some of that electricity could well be coming from low carbon and no carbon sources. We don't know. But regardless, we don't have to count it and that allowed for us, that allowed for electricity emissions to fall. And the thing is, maybe it's a little bit of a fiddle, but we are going to have more interconnection. Britain is handy for us at the moment because they're having a little bit of an economic slump. So there isn't massive demand for their energy unlike in Ireland where we're actually struggling to keep up with our electricity demand. So it's there, it's available, it's pretty good value. We're able to bring it in over the interconnector. We know that won't maybe always happen. So we are actually building new interconnectors with France actually and another one with Britain as well. So there will be more interconnections. So it'll be less for fiddle and more of a norm. At the moment, it does feel a little bit like creative accounting though. So I mentioned that these are not just aspirations. This government has lots of aspirations for the number of homes it's going to build and the number of special needs assistance, all these kinds of things. These are statutory obligations. So what does that mean if they're not there? Yeah, this is a real problem. We have a law and people say, well, what is a law if there isn't penalties for breaking the law? And the penalties are very vague in this sense because the idea is that you would have this kind of, by a statutory obligation, it would mean that a minister who's the area for which they have responsibility, be a transport, be it energy, be it buildings as in how we heat our buildings, which is a big issue because it's mainly oil and gas and not so much electricity. That they would be responsible. So if something happened, they should kind of overshoot the budget, if you like. And it's a bit like a financial budget. They're told you have so many emissions you can produce over the next period of time to stay within target. They overshoot that. The idea is, well, then you've got less to play with in your next budget period. Now, that's a little bit like when the hospitals overrun their budget and the ministers get really annoyed and say, well, now because you haven't had sort of that, you know, you haven't been stringent, fiscally and financially. We're actually going to give you a smaller budget next year. What tends to happen is that hospital and reach crisis point and then they have to have a supplementary budget. It doesn't really work as a kind of a slap on the wrist. There is, I suppose there is this idea that you would have this kind of political kind of sanction that the public would be so irate that their minister for such and such fail to meet the climate targets that they'd say out within, you know, and maybe vote them down in the next election. It seems very unlikely. So the other than the other strand of that is it is, I'm going to say this word, wrong judicial, which means that because there is a legal mandate to do this and a legal necessity to do this, that a group, an environmental group or a climate action group could go to court and say, you must meet your targets. And that becomes this very odd and protracted and how to put into practicality. It would be disorder from the court saying, potentially, yes, T-Shuck, you must order your minister to meet that target. What does that mean if you're the minister of transport, does it mean, okay, we can only have half the cars on the road next week. So every car that has an even number at the end of their registration plate can drive next week and everybody doesn't count. And that doesn't, that sounds mad. Actually, it happened in Athens before. It's a terrible, terrible air pollution. Try this and try to do an alternative. How you would enforce that I don't know. But this is all very, you know, it's kind of science-spit-fantasyful. So we do have a law. It does say it's mandatory. It does put responsibility on ministers. And yet how you actually would play out, we just don't know. What these targets always on realistic, they were very ambitious. They were characterized as being extremely ambitious by international standards at the start, giving everything we know about delivery of public goods in Ireland. That seemed like a stretch. There's always an argument, isn't there, that aim for the moon and you'll get halfway there anyway. But has this actually sort of undermined confidence or heart trust in the whole thing? Well, you say technically, these are all very feasible. There's nothing in the climate action targets. And in the way we were supposed to reach those, that is a moon shot. You know, it's all technologies that were already in use in Ireland to some degree, but needed to be scaled up or in use in other countries. So there's nothing new about wind and solar. There's nothing new about district heating. There's nothing new about, you know, really strong public transport. There's just nothing new in that. There's nothing, so to say there were maybe overly ambitious. But the speeders, which they could be achieved very much. This is where it comes into not so much the technology, but the psychology as a country where we're ready to make these changes, where we committed to make these changes. And there were other practical difficulties, you know, so why don't we have, you know, the offshore wind at this stage? When, when, I mean, 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, we were leading the world ourselves in Denmark in offshore wind, with the first offshore wind farm. So again, it shouldn't have been overly ambitious, but we never actually put in place a planning system for getting planning permission to see. We've only done that in the last couple of years, the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority. So even the few, the small, few offshore wind farms that are currently going through the planning process, they kind of had to have this kind of bespoke almost emergency system for putting them through the planning process. They've gone through and bought Planole and now on Commission Planole. The next ones have to go through a different regime, but literally after all those years of what should have been preparation for building up this, we just didn't have a planning system for how do you apply for planning permission to see when you only have a land-based planning permission struck. Why did it take so long to put that in place? They didn't believe it. I sat through in the Ruckters Committee a few years back where there was the old sort of forest forabohar, the pro-foreigners, the industrial development authority and all that. And they kind of laughed at the idea. They admitted that, they didn't really get it that we could be, that we could have offshore wind. I mean, it was a private consortium that put together the one offshore wind project. And it was kind of seen as out there, and at the same time, we were building Pete powered, Pete burning power plants against all kind of sense and logic. So that seemed to be just, it was more, I suppose it was more visible. You could see Pete, you could see it burning, you could smell it burning, you understood the technology. The idea of having offshore wind just seemed a little bit out there. It shouldn't have. Somebody was doing it. They did it all for our clone county, the Danes were doing it. The Danes kept doing it and we didn't. Yeah, the other part of this in addition to Irish legislation is the question of serious penalties from Europe if we don't hit the required European targets. And there's a strange kind of political attitude to this. The one hand, there's these vast fines, which are supposedly hanging over the state's head. And there seems to be a sense maybe that they're not going to happen. Certainly, that's the impression that government is giving us. So a big job of work was done by the Climate Change Advisory Council and the fiscal advisory council. And they did the number crunching on this. And they came up with, you know, over the last few years, there have been numerous kind of warnings about this from various, there's the government economic analysis unit. They also don't some work on this. And they started to look ahead and said, well, okay, if we don't meet our targets, we already had targets. We had 20, 20 targets for 20, 25 targets for different things. And we have had to, if you like, buy compliance. And that means literally the countries in Europe that have done well, that have met their targets and exceeded them, have carbon credits. So they have these like gold stars with the best in class. Who would they be? Like Estonia, for example, small countries like that were actually very good. So they could sell those gold stars, if you like. So we had to buy them. So we've already spent tens of millions. But looking at the bigger targets to the end of the decade, this job of work was done. And they came up with a calculation that we could be required to pay, now you can call them fines, penalties or compliance costs of somewhere between like eight billion and 26 billion. And when those figures came out, we had a rush in government, both the T-Shock and particularly our climate minister, Darro Brian, we're saying, no, don't worry about that. It's very speculative. And that was repeated a budget time last October when again, those figures came up and Darro Brian's actually called it back of the envelope stuff, which I know caused some fury internally in those two advisory bodies. Well, that's for an envelope of his own. Is there an official calculation of the risk? Well, those figures have gone into government briefing since. So there are officials in government who are bringing them to the attention of ministers and saying, look, we can't prove this is exactly what it's going to be. But you've got to pay attention to this. No, there isn't. There isn't. What the minister is telling us is that, look at the mood in Europe and the European Commission. And we are seeing a bit of rollback in the European Commission, I have to say, because there will be other countries who will be in similar positions. They're not going to make everybody pay this money. You know, what they'll do is they'll kind of say, oh, look at, you know, you're all Mr. Targets or a bunch of you have and you really got to scale up. So they won't take money off of you like or they'll make use that money as an investment to crank up our activity. I mean, it is true. There's been a political shift in Europe, a shift to the right generally and certainly more skepticism perhaps about there was a kind of a peak of enthusiasm for climate mitigation, maybe five years or so. So about the European Parliament and the European Commission, which is obviously appointed by different European governments, they've both shifted, I think, to some extent, haven't they? Well, they have. Now, but you have it, a difficulty there, you know, to think maybe it will now be 26 billion. And, but the idea that there are countries that yes, will miss their targets, but it won't be such a big deal for them. If Joni misses its target, even if it had to pay 26 billion, that's small compared to its overall budget. 26 billion would be massive to us. Sure. So, we've been pushing our public, we've been risking our political, you know, futures, we've been put in convincing people, we've been investing and we've got it right. And now you're saying everybody else who didn't, you like behind, there's no penalty. So there will definitely be tensions across the block if there isn't some sort of sanction on those. That's all due. Well, 2030 is the target for a lot of these, these actual emissions, reductions targets. By the time it's done the number crunching on who's missed what? By how much? And really, truly, you're talking about a couple of years before this figure to be verified and then they have to work out a system of, okay, how do we, how do we sort this out? How do we wrap knuckles appropriately? You know, how do we reward compliance appropriately? And how do we not risk, you know, that the European block sort of falling a thunder over this issue? Now, there's a lot of different parts of this including sort of renewables which you mentioned and some other issues are in transport and the airport cap which you might come to in a little while. But the kind of the central point of tension in the debates around this subject in Ireland seemed to me around agriculture and they were during the last government as well as I recall and they continue to be so. And I think it's fair to say that this government is more tuned to the interest of the agriculture sector that its predecessor has. So that accounts for some of the shift we've seen. It does. You know, the agriculture lobby is huge and very, very powerful and very, very effective and very, very successful. And it's not to be dismissed, you know, there is an industry there which has a difficulty in that its core activity or certainly the profitable part of its core activities is emission intensive and that's livestock. But it's just not an easy, it's not an easy fix. They're looking at easy fixes if you like, you know, feed additives and the grass which is obviously the main fuel of feeding our livestock which, you know, feeds the industry. They're looking at different ways of putting less fertilizer on them because nitrogen is a greenhouse gas. And now we're in difficulties after the rain we've had over the last number of the grass growth is going to be very poor this year, it's going to be a father crisis and you can see, you know, even more fertilizers being need to be used on us. So that's going to be a difficulty. Agriculture is, it's one of those areas where we are awaiting what's called the land use review. We're not actually awaiting it, it has been completed, it has not been published. And that is a fundamental look at all of our land use in this country. And if you look at it, you know, I mean, 60, 65%, 68% of our land is in agricultural use and another about 10, 11% is in commercial forestry use. There's very little left. So a lot of, we have a lot, if we're going to change farming to change our emissions, that's a lot of land and a lot of private landowners. That's why it's so influential. Because it's not just about individuals, it is about fundamental shape of our country. What are we putting it? What are we making with the land? What are we doing on the land and how is it affecting our emissions? So it's a big project to try and change agriculture. And also, it's incredibly politically sensitive because people feel that changes are being imposed on them and the nature of our society is that those communities do have a lot of sway politically, which is, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but we saw that over something like the Mercassard deal, for example. Well, we did, but again, there's a big difference between small farmers. There's an increasing, growing number of small farmers who want to do right by the land and they can see the problems that big scale farming has. They do it. They see it, and they don't want to be part of it. But increasingly, we have large businesses, farm businesses, and very, very large, dairy, multinational, international, dairy business that is driven towards international markets. So it's very far removed from what we used to call the farm family and which the government still uses. There's a really dividing line between in agriculture at the moment. And there are definitely farms who want to do better and they do need to be supported, but they are smaller scale. They are lower profit. And those farmers are largely dependent for their livelihoods and subsidies in the first place. So what we're talking about is shifting the subsidies to different activities. Well, also the large scale farmers need subsidies as well. There's certainly a lot of profit in dairy at the moment, but at the same time, a lot of those farmers have huge mortgages because they were told to expand. They bought land. And land is now in high demand and there's a lot of speculative land buying of agricultural land for housing development. So there's all sorts of issues we need to look at there in terms of how real, as opposed is the agricultural profitable model that we have. It's very, most of our agriculture is now an internationally traded commodity. And as we know, commodity markets can be extremely volatile, whether be it coffee, be it oil, whatever it might be, it goes up and down. And so does milk powder, which is essentially where all the profit is at the moment. Yes, beef has certainly improved the last while, but our beef sector had reduced because it was more difficult and more difficult to make a living out of it. So I mean, dairy is where it's at in terms of our big profitable agriculture, if you like. And it's international. So what would need to happen for that sector, which presumably is the one that's responsible for a lot of the emissions, to actually do its fair share in terms of contributing towards emissions reduction? We need to lose livestock. And that is what has been termed calling the national herd as if we're going to go out and shoot them all in the fields. I mean, obviously, that's not what would happen. You would just have less breeding next year and less breeding next year and so on. And more vegetable growing, we have, we import virtually all our vegetables and fruit in this country. So more bespoke farming, more high value, I suppose they talk about that and people say, well, that's the artisan kind of food production that ordinary people can't afford. And there absolutely is an issue there. More organic. And the more organic you would hope the prices would come down. And we're very, very, very, very, very, very, very far towards this. And I'm sure that there are farmers who are interested in making those changes, but there's probably lots of other people who, if they're releasing to this, from a rural or a farming background, do they say, bloody people sitting up in Dublin talking about their artisan butchers, they don't know the reality of what it's like to make a living down here. Absolutely. And the reality is they have very large mortgages because they were encouraged to buy a lot more land to put a lot more dairy. And they're now in a volatile international market and a market that's not compatible with climate targets. They're in a bind and they need help to get out of that. I want to talk about one of the things that has me most be fuddled, which is data centers, but we want to take a very quick break first. Just remember you can contact us at [email protected], just to say we've got lots of interesting communications in about the piece we did with Joe Humphrey's last week about the leaving sir at politics course. And I might return to those a little bit later in the week, but we'll be back after this. And you're very welcome back. And you visited one of these enormous data centers. It was at last week as in West Dublin. That's right. It's a whole collection of data centers. It's the Microsoft data center campus in which they have 13 data centers. It's a city of data centers, lady on its own right. Absolutely futuristic. What's it like? What's it like? What pulls on in there? It's so grey. I cannot tell you how many shades of grey in this building buildings. There's no Microsofts. It's quite funny. You know, one of the things we had to sign was, you know, you won't give the exact address of where it is now. If you go on Google Maps and you look up Microsoft Grange Castle data center campus, I mean, you know, it brings you right to it. And I did get a taxi back from it. And the taxi man did find us. So there are no Microsofts or logos outside or anything like that. But, you know, it's, you know, from a distance, what does it look like? You know, a featureless, featureless warehouses, maybe a power station, you know. So there's antennae and cables around and things like that. You just know it's something very industrial. Actually it isn't because, you know, we think of industry as something clanging and banging and cranking up machinery working. And this is all very static. It's all very stationary. It was designed halls. There's hums. Lots of hums. And they are, you know, listen to your laptop when it gets busy. And you hear the worrying and the humming there, you know, and it's that just multiplied, multiplied, I mean, these shelves and shelves and shelves are what look like the insides of laptops. And they're servers, server racks. And they have many people there is a kind of empty. It, it, because it's so big and the halls are so large, it looked very empty. We're actually told that there were about 600 people employed in the facility. Now it's 24 hours a day, it's seven days a week. So, you know, split that up over the shifts. And there are people in control rooms and there are electricians. A lot of it is to do with the electricity control because it's such an electricity. Gozzling kind of center. A lot of electricity comes in at very high voltage and it has to be stepped down to each facility and so on. So there's a lot of electricians. There's a lot of security. It's a very, very high security site. So, but it did look, I mean, I all throw these long, long corridors. I kept seeing coat hooks, you know, little flexions of four coat hooks. I wonder, I think I eventually saw one coat hung on one, you know. Okay. So, you get the sense like hang on a second is everybody on holidays and we're told no, it's just such a big facility and people are kind of, there are people in it. It's in each data center. There are by four or five data halls. So, you have people in those, you have people in control rooms, you have people in security and then you people probably in other places, we didn't get next no near and all in all, it employed by 600. Now, the big thing about this though is the amount of energy which it consumes and the stats on the growth of data centers and the proportion of islands overall energy consumption are just extraordinary. They are extraordinary. So, if you think the data centers around the country are using at the moment, 22% of all the electricity that's used in the country, in Dublin, Mese where most data centers are, they're using 50% of all the electricity that's used in Dublin and Mese, you know, two very highly populated areas, obviously. And that is forecast by air grid controls and national grid to be about 30%, 31% by 2030, 2031. And that's for the data centers that have permission already. So, the ones that have permission to expand, there was kind of an expansion put on hold there because it was just issues getting the electricity to them, getting enough electricity to them without compromising the overall electricity supply. Because we know there is a problem with our grid and capacity. There is absolutely, but particularly. Well, it might be due to these data centers, of course. In these areas where they want to be and want to position themselves, basically, Dublin, Kildare, Mese, there are huge, huge drains and strains on the electricity supply. So that brings up to about 30% of all usage. And then of all this. So, one third of the standard is, how can you on the one hand of statutorily obligations to address the way that you consume energy? And the other hand, have this massive expansion and energy consumption at the same time? Yeah, and it drives people in, you know, on the sort of the environmental and climate side kind of mad because they're saying, look, we're supposed to be decarbonising the electricity, that the existing electricity demand. So, we know that about about 40% under 40% of all the electricity produced in Ireland is from wind and solar. We need, we have to get a target. We're supposed to double that by 2030. That's five years. How do we double it if, you know, every time say a new wind farm comes on stream, you know, the amount of electricity it's generating is pretty much used up by another data center, data center expansion. And new regulations were brought in or announced in December by the energy regulator after considering this for a couple of years. And they've said, okay, new data centers can now be connected up to the grid, okay? But they have to supply, they have to match the amount of electricity they use by bringing more power to the grid. So they have to become electricity generators themselves. And they're saying 80% of that has to be renewable. So, now, even if 20% can still be fossil fuel, basically gas, mostly gas, still some oil though. That's still going to be a fairly heavy extra fossil fuel usage at a time when we're supposed to be reducing it. And the problem is, how do we get the other, the 80% that they say they'll bring on? Then, you know, they're all clustered around Dublin, Mee's, they're not going to build a wind farm. They don't have space to build wind farms. So, where will they get that represent renewable farm? Well, they're doing what they call corporate purchase power agreements with wind farms, you know, down the country. Because they don't have to, if they build a commission and do a contract with an energy company to build a wind farm, train west Mee's, they don't have to build a cable for that to bring that particular electricity or the way it'll be. It feeds into the national grid, as long as it's producing as much electricity that matches what the data center uses. But you're all there doing then, it's just buying up existing renewable energy sources, which so the overall figure is still going to be problematic, because they're just buying it up. Well, what it tends to mean is that there are a lot of new onshore wind facilities that are, you know, are in the planning process, they are getting planning permission, and a considerable number of those will be being built privately on the basis of a contract that has been struck in advance with the data center. Right. There was an interesting letter in the Irish Times, I don't know if you saw it in the last couple of days, by somebody who was querying the fact that the minister for transport is also the minister for climate and suggesting that there's a conflict of interest there. I mean, that's probably particularly heightened, I think, by this issue of the passenger cap in Dublin Airport, which is going to be removed. Yeah, and he's also the minister for energy, and we've been speaking about that. So there's a lot of potential, either collaboration between all those areas. If you're the one minister over all of them, and obviously-- The same was true of his predecessor, Amon Ryan. Amon Ryan deliberately, and probably stretched himself very far, he deliberately wanted all those areas of responsibility, because he felt they all feed into each other, they're all interconnected, and if I can change one, I can change them all. It's slightly different with this minister, because Amon Ryan kind of staved off, if you like, decisions on the airport cap, and staved off decisions on LNG, liquefied natural gas. So he was using this big portfolio the other way? He was. He was. Here's agenda. Absolutely. You're trying to drive them all in a certain way. Why does that robots, generally? Well, he means-- as he says, I grew up by the airport. He wants it to be air-procrow. He wants it to be an air-procrow. And that means lifting the passenger cap, and that means we do not have clean airlines at the minute. We do not have clean aviation fuel at the moment, and we won't have for quite considerable time, so that just means more fuel, more carbon emissions. Will we have it at some point? We did have it. Believe it or not, during World War II, we go way back when fuel was short. They did create-- these were small planes, fighter planes, and all the rest, but we did create artificial fuels, if you like. It could be done. It's expensive. It can be done, but it's expensive. There are airlines looking at solar. There will be solar flights. There possibly will be solar flights before there will be clean fuel flights. But obviously, you need batteries. And that puts weight on the plane, so then how many people can you actually get in a plane? There are-- look, we have-- there are solutions out there, and there are people working on solutions. But they do cost. And we've got used to cheaper and cheaper and cheaper flights. You're not going to get people to pay higher flights because their airline is doing the right thing. And people say Ireland is an island. It's absolutely vital for people to get off it, particularly when it's just rains nonstop for two months. But also for business reasons, in word tourism, all these kinds of things. On the other hand, I know because when I was a student, I used to work in the airport. And the size of the place now compared to then is just extraordinary. You know, it's increased by a factor of five or six. I think we've redefined what's necessary. I mean, we've just been talking about data centers. People can do a lot of work online. They don't have to travel from boardroom to boardroom anymore. It's useful, and it's actually very important in some cases and negotiations. And people say, why doesn't the EU all meet remotely well? Because when you have 160 or 200 or odd people sitting around, do you need to get them together? They sometimes they need to go eyeball to eyeball. We don't have to, we have definitely redefined what we regard as necessary. I'm conscious. By 2.5 million passengers in Ireland, Spain every year. Yes, and it is possible to go by ferry. That's a lot, too long route. And we do have a different population now. We have 5th to the population, possibly more, who are now born here. And you get it. They have family abroad. They want to get home and see their parents during the summer. They want to check up on people. So there's different kinds of travel there that's very hard to be grudged people. I think there's a lot to say. I don't know what this specific Irish numbers are. But generally in Western countries, it's quite a small slice of the population who are responsible for the great majority of the flights. Yeah, I mean, most people actually can't afford to fly. You know, there's a French-ungal population can't afford to fly ever. There's a small chunk of the population will fly once a year on the family holiday or a visit back home to check on the elderly parents in some other country. And then there are people who fly like others hop on the bus. And there's definitely a problem there. I want to ask you about one other thing, which is this proposal for liquid natural gas terminal, which is going to go ahead, I understand. There is an argument here, which is that Ireland, set aside for a moment, are focused on climate today. But that Ireland is very vulnerable to energy shocks of one sort or another. And also that it is argued, I think, in some quarters that as one becomes increasingly renewable, renewable dependent, one needs to have some kind of a fallback when renewables don't deliver as is sometimes the case with renewables. Yeah, I mean, we still, most of our electricity still comes from burning gas. And most of our gas comes from abroad. So it's coming through the under-of-sea pipe line from the North Sea through Scotland to ourselves. And there's this growing kind of concern, what if something happened to pipeline? There's actually two pipelines. So there are arguments around what are the chances of them sabotaging both of them. But how stock would we be? We would be stock after a few days. We would certainly have shortage for generating electricity. This LNG terminal, the concerns around it are that liquefied natural gas. It's a brand new fossil fuel for Ireland. It will require brand new infrastructure. And is this the time to be investing in something brand new, which is supposed to be used only in emergency, but the reports are there. This, you cannot have liquefied natural gas sitting in a terminal, indefinitely, because it started to return to gas. It's been super, super cool to liquid. And then gradually it starts to become gas. So it has to be released. You have to use it. So it has to be a continuous kind of outflow of the gas. So then we have this extra gas going into the system. And obviously it's going to be used. And then you have to have another shipment come and replace the stuff we've used. And it's never, maybe there never has been a crisis or a shortage. We just have to keep using it. And once you've got it into the system, it's very hard to get it back out again. It's going to be costly. It's costly to the taxpayer. And the concern is, well, eventually maybe because it's going to have to be used and you're going to pay for it commercially, then you enter into a commercial arrangement. And business gets used to it being there. And there's concerns about all of that. So from a bottom point of view, would you not be better off with a nuclear power station? That's the next thing. We can, yeah, there's a lot of talk around that. I've seen kind of a progression from obviously, onshore wind farms. There's a lot of communities feel they have too many of them, so they want to push it off short. Okay, and we are developing the offshore. And there's a lot of people that are on the coast, we're beginning to say, we don't want to be looking at those offshore. So let's have floating offshore wind, which is further, further, right? And particularly before the last election, there was a lot of discussion. Why are you foisting these offshore wind farms close to scenic areas off our coast? When they could be floating way offshore wind-borne seas, that is overly simplistic because, yes, there are floating wind farms around the world, no, there are none in the Atlantic, where they're incredibly difficult to build, where the sea floor falls away to nearly a bus, you know, depths at points, and they do have to be anchored. They're not entirely floating. So it's a very complicated, it will happen. But I see very swiftly, then, it moved on from when we should have floating offshore wind to, we should have small modular nuclear reactors, because they're the incoming thing, and they're in place, and they're not in place. There's demonstration models being built, while I was at the data center with Microsoft, because they do have these climate targets. Well, the tech company is very keen on the market. Well, I ask them, are you going to use small and modular reactors, and at the minute, no, they're looking at it, they're keeping an eye on the technology, but no, they're not. A couple of places have actually commissioned some in the US and Canada, they're very expensive, and obviously, it's not to say it will not happen here, but there is no model that we can say, we'll have one of those, thanks very much. Can you commission that? There is an argument, and it's just moving beyond the theoretical, that might be the best solution in terms of a backup in a renewable dependent society. Yeah, and there isn't a great backlash, even among environmentalists, to that, they're just saying, well, it's not ready. It's not ready in the next five years, 10 years, 15 years. And also, where's it going to go? And if you think we have, NIMBY is in this country, and I hate reducing it, because often people are very, you know, real concerns to raise, and that should be amplified and explored, where are you going to put a small modular reactor in this country that does not have a lot of faith? Our interconnective from the UK is already taking power from nuclear power, and if we have an interconnective to France, they're largely nuclear dependent. Yeah, and I don't even think it's sort of a philosophical, you know, opposition to nuclear. It's simply, you know, if you've got wind, and we people say, oh, you know, lightning can strike a wind turbine, it will go on fire. And well, yes, and that's probably the height of it. You know, something strikes a nuclear power plant, what happens? Those concerns are still there, maybe less so with the younger generation, because, you know, they don't, but, you know, I was in Chernobyl six years ago, and I saw the huge container that they built over. So it's circumference? Yes, and I was told, you know, it's going to withstand, it withstands third world war. There are cracks in it at the moment, because Russia's been hitting it. So suddenly, something that you felt, well, okay, you know, we fixed that, and we won't ever make those mistakes again. And yes, it's a different form of, you know, small modular actors are different from those big, giant kind of old nuclear power plants of old. But, you know, there's getters in this country, I think, still largely right, nuclear. And it's just the practicality is it's really, really expensive, and it's not here yet. It's not available. There's nothing we can say. There's not that there isn't a plan that we can say, can we have one of those? Please can we have it in blue? The other part of this, there are so many things in this conversation that are complicated and expensive, but the other part, which we've really confronted, I think, over the last few weeks in Ireland, we've seen evidence of it, is climate mitigation, you know, as the country, as storms get heavier, as sea level and water levels rise, we have to look at defenses against those things. We seem to be well behind on those. Yeah, and, you know, it hates to use terminology. It's actually climate adaptation. Mitigation is reducing the greenhouse gases, actually, and, you know, Oh, I got the wrong way around. Yeah, no, don't worry, you are, you are in the absolute majority in confusing the terminology. Climate adaptation, you know, simply means the extreme weather that we have, the extreme weather that we can expect, the changes that are baked into our climate now, how are we adapting to them? And that's a measure of, you know, a government's climate action, if you like. And it's one of those ones that kind of got left behind a little bit because it's presumed, well, you know, we're used to, we're used to rain in this country. Well, you know, we have a plan for flood defenses here, there and everywhere. The speed at which we now need to deploy those has definitely accelerated. And we've seen that in the last few weeks. And the plans we have are very long term. We have the added issue of what really are not addressing, which is sea level rise. So what do sea level rise do? Hey, it just comes up in over the land that exists. It also, when storms come, it inflicts more damage. We're going to lose land around our coast and most of our towns and cities are built around the coast. And a lot of wonderful, you know, aminity, you know, golf courses, fishing industries, small villages. And we're, we're, we're very slowly looking at those issues. So those, but it's not even those, those big sort of things. I say there's going to be a father crisis this year. Our farmers are going to be in trouble. And there's no grass growing. Cows should be out of sheds now. The, it's gone mild this week. The milder weather will be kicking in. They should be out in the field, can't quite in the fields. They'll be up to their ears in mud. There's no grass. So there's a father crisis. There's been a lot of father crisis. We had a couple of years there, where the rest right and the grass didn't grow. If that was on year from year, the government tends to step in with emergency measures and pays for the importation of feed, feed stuff. But the prediction is that this will get worse. But if you can't always do an emergency reaction, it's the same as the floods. Um, that the flood payments have gone up. Um, and there are decent flood payments for people affected in the last few weeks. You can't always be reacting. So we do need to adapt everything we do. We saw it in storm A.O.N. For several years, the climate change advisory council was saying, our telecommunication systems and our power systems are very vulnerable to major storms. What happened in storm A.O.N.? People were blacked out for weeks and end. We didn't adapt. They're now talking about changing, you know, reinforcing them, changing the way we do things. That's adaptation. We need a lot more of that. I imagine if we had Dara Brown in here, he would point to the fact that, you know, there are a number of major infrastructure projects both in terms of energy and drainage and infrastructure, which are all important in terms of, in terms of development and a sustainable way, and also investment in major transport projects, like Metro and things like that. But I think the balance has changed. Has it the public transport, private transport, public transport versus roads, balance has changed under this government? It has a little bit. Yeah, they're putting more emphasis on roads. You know, there was, road projects not come to a halt under the previous government. You know, there were plans for, particularly bypasses of smaller towns that are completely traffic-choked. You know, they were getting support. But, you know, the likes of the goal, we bypass will be one of those big, there will be a lot of focus on that, you know, if this government goes ahead and that they're basically saying, you know, more roads and more cars are the answer to congestion, as opposed to more public transport. Have we just gone so far down the road if you're part in the pun that, you know, I mean, you look at a place like Go Away, which is just a classic example of ex-urban sprawl, isn't it? And that's the way it is now. It is. Go away is absolutely choked, and it's, it is horrible. It does need help. And it's also the way the city is constructed, two sides of a river, and so on. There's only so much you can do in terms of creating new routes through and the old city. But yeah, there is urban sprawl, and it does seem to be, look at the map, you say, yeah, let's just do a big ring road right around it. But as we know, when you bring a ring road, the land around it becomes open for development, more traffic pours on to it. The ring road, which is supposed to be a relief road, becomes just another choked road. Hmm. It's, that's my worry, is my question of despair is, you know, these decisions are to be made, not just over the last five years or 10 years, but the last 20 or 30 years. And in a way, are still continuing, aren't they? With Dublin sprawling out to these commuter counties, 50, 60, 70, 100 kilometers away, with very little in the way of public transport to move people around. Yeah, we're still in a cycle of, you know, looking the next few years ahead, what can we get achieved? What can we get achieved? And it's, I hate to be cynical about politicians, but, you know, they do work in that kind of brief, short political cycle. What can I, you know, when the next time, when the next election, what can I go, no, don't, don't, say, look what I achieved in the last few years, you know, and be it a new housing, be it, you know, those big ideas of thinking 10, 20, 30 years ahead. Unfortunately, it hasn't happened in the past. And now we don't have 10, 20, 30 years. Now we need things that are really going to make a massive change in the next five years. There also seems to have been a tonal shift. Has there been this government in terms of the way they talk about these issues? Yeah, there are, yes, 100%. And I think it was, you know, summed up, you know, Tontius Simon Harris was on RT last Sunday, Sunday, previous week. And he was at the end of, you know, the conversation he was asked a little bit about climate and about potential for fines and so on. And he kind of kicked those aside and then said, you know, you know, approach to climate has been too luxury. And I'm going to say that carefully, lecturally. Yes, thank you. Just in case. And I think, well, what does that actually mean? Who's lecturing you, Simon? You know, the Climate Change Advisory Council, lots of very well-meaning, very well-versed academics who are far more comfortable staying behind the scenes, writing reports and hoping God you read them, have been coming out and speaking more vocally. Some very, very, again, climate, and legal people, you know, the climate environment people, climate science people, you know, flood hydrologists, lots of people with expertise. Are you complaining that they're lecturing? They're actually raising the alarm here. And have been for years and have been ignored, largely ignored. I know that there's a sense that it comes from, you know, it has come from the farm lobby. I'm not going to say it comes from farmers because I've talked to farmers. I know there are farmers who want this system to change. But the farm lobby will say, you're not talked down to what's not talked down to rural Ireland. Now, rural Ireland is a lot more than farms. There are, you know, so few actual rural families, they have maybe part-time farming and mom and dad are both working in biotech somewhere, you know. So, you know, they can see things from two sides, you know. So, I don't know what they mean by lecturing. And I don't know what it means by, you have to bring people along. Absolutely, I can say, well, that means incentives. That means, you know, keep up the, you know, the EV grants or, you know, improve the retrofitting grants, which they have done. Still slow, though, in both ways. It is slow. The EV targets seemed widely ambitious to me when it was an answer. We're certainly not going to get anywhere near it. Well, again, why would it be ambitious? The cars were there. And what wasn't there is obviously the charging infrastructure. And it's still not there. You know, it's great if you have a, if you have a driveway and you can, you know, charge it home. But obviously, we're increasingly using, you know, we're increasingly building apartments and there are problems for people there. So, again, there's no reason why it should have been overly ambitious. And if you explain to people the reason why Dublin is so congested, the reason why the M50 is a car park is that, you know, it's not even just about, you know, getting electrifying cars. The more cars we put on the road and the population is growing and the amount of cars we have is just growing all the time. The less room there is, four buses and trains and loses and trams and all that kind of thing. So, you know, we need to talk to people about that, but that's considered lecturing. You know, if we're trying to explain to people why you need a bus lane, you know, is that lecturing or is that actually, I don't know. I can, I have a little concern about the tone that suggests that if you're trying to raise the alarm and something, if you're trying to suggest a better way of doing something, that is easy to dismiss you. But that tone kind of suggests to me as well is that politicians like Simon Harris feel that they don't need to be as signed up to some of these measures as they might have felt. Yeah, well, look at it. It's kind of a vicious circle. Yeah, I mean, I will say, like, politicians will say to me, but nobody raises that the door. Nobody raises that. So therefore we're not going to raise it as an issue. So if we don't raise it as an issue, then people don't think it's an issue. They don't raise it at the door and you're going to run and run and run the circle. So, you know, I mean, people are saying, well, what can I do? I'm nobody. I say the next time you see a politician ask them about their climate policies, because they say nobody talks to them about it and nobody's concerned about it. And that allows them to not be concerned about it. Just one last question before we finish up. There was an interesting court case in awfully a few weeks ago where a wind farm, a decision by, I think, I'm right in saying a commission plan all I was, was overturned because the decision not to proceed with the wind farm was not in accordance with the legislation which we discussed earlier. I mean, is that a possible route for kind of for accelerating some of these measures if they're, you know, if you end up in court? It's very significant. There's a section within the Climate Act that says all public bodies must and all public spending must take into consideration the overriding climate targets. So what happened here was you had a county development plan that said this area is kind of off-limits or ideally off-limits for a wind farm because it's it's scenically important and so on. And that's on that that's the basis on which the wind farm was refused permission. The developers of wind farm went to court and the court said, look at, you know, views are brilliant and all the rest, but here's the more important thing, the climate targets. And by the way, it's actually says in section 15, you're supposed to take that into consideration. You didn't even think about it. You didn't take it into consideration. Now the judge in that ruling was very clear to say, this is not a one clause to solve all your climate problems. This is not a magic bullet. You have to, it doesn't override everything. It just says you absolutely have to look at it and say, did we properly consider the climate implications? Or did we just say, no, we have a county development plan that says that is really nice. We don't want to wind farm in it. So it's not going to be the solving of everything, but it is going to have to require them to have a look at those that issue really carefully. You can meet current identities coverage of science and climate issues in the Irish times every week. Caroline, thanks very much for joining me. You're welcome. Thanks also to our producer, Declan Conner. We will talk to you very soon indeed. We will talk to you then.