If Irish business made an effort to invest in renewable energy, it wouldn't threaten job losses over the cost of dealing with climate change, writes Pat Finnegan
A year ago today, after seven long years of political wrangling, including some very determined attempts to smother it in the cradle, the Kyoto Protocol finally entered into force.
Part of the difficulty in generating political responses to climate change is that there is a thermal lag in the atmosphere that ensures climate impacts follow the emissions that cause them at a delay of, on average, many decades.
Thus, even if we were to stop burning fossil fuels altogether today and reduce emissions to zero overnight - something entirely unachievable - we are already committed to a global temperature rise of about 1.50C over normal levels. We have already put on about 0.80C and are committed to a further 0.70C whatever happens. There is increasing acceptance that anything more than a 20C rise means a potentially catastrophic breakdown in ecosystems and agricultural services.
Recently, climate forcing has accelerated as a result of atmospheric saturation and we are now putting on 0.20C per decade. Go figure why some of us think we need to reduce emissions substantially, and soon.
The basic objective of the Kyoto Protocol is to trigger policy capable of delivering these reductions. One year on, how are we doing? Well, based on an opinion piece in these pages last Monday from Donal Buckley of the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation, there are grounds for concern.
While claiming "it was commendable of the EU to lead in addressing climate change" Ibec neglects to mention that one of the first EU attempts to get to grips with the problem - a proposed directive for a community-wide carbon tax as far back as 1991 - was comprehensively smothered by one of the most aggressive and concentrated business lobbies Brussels has ever seen.
The force of this campaign can still be seen in Ireland. Our own proposed carbon tax - one of the fundamental planks of the National Climate Change Strategy - was similarly snuffed out two years ago in a concentrated lobby led by Ibec.
Yet, the case made by Ibec this week is that government has no climate policy other than a "micawberish" hope that "something will turn up". How will "something" ever turn up if business in Ireland won't allow it to?
Ibec opposed the carbon tax on the grounds that it was more expensive and less efficient than emissions trading. Having killed the tax, it is now complaining that emissions trading is now also too expensive. The scare story is that it will lead to job losses as business flees Ireland to relocate in economies outside the European and Kyoto emissions trading regimes.
This makes no long-term business sense. Business in Europe is currently holding EU emission permits to the value of more than €50 billion as a result of European implementation of the protocol. In Ireland the figure is €513 million. In order to implement emissions trading, Ibec's members received these State-owned assets gratis.
If members of Ibec wish to cash in these chips, trouser the profit, relocate to China or India, then re-import goods and services back to Ireland using fossil-fuelled transport, then Ibec's claimed commitment to both sustainability and Irish business is just hot air.
Donal Buckley also claims "reducing emissions in a modern, energy-efficient economy is difficult and expensive". But suppose Ibec considered a more sustainable business case? Suppose it invested some of its €513 million in renewable energy at home? If it invested it all in wind power, in very approximate terms, this would amount to some 500mw of installed capacity (roughly double the current amount), capable of generating about 2TWh of electricity per year (about 9 per cent of supply) worth €280 million annually at current domestic prices.
You don't have to be particularly economically literate to see that in this admittedly simplified case, the investment has recovered its costs at the end of year two, and is in a pure profit situation (no fuel costs) for the expected next 18 years.
This is before you even begin to consider the roughly 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 abated annually by reference to existing electricity or the fact that this would be worth about €27 million per year at current prices for carbon - a yield of 5 per cent per year on the carbon value alone.
Yet, the most politically worrying of Donal Buckley's arguments is that Ireland was hard done by with our plus-13 per cent (of 1990 emissions) target. In fact, as a member of the EU, our target should have been minus-8 per cent.
By arguing the "Kuznets curve" case within the EU - that wealth is needed to ensure clean development - we negotiated an increase in our initial allocation of plus-21 per cent.
Thanks to the almost entirely fossil-fuelled "Celtic Tiger" years, Ireland is now so developed it is, according to the UN Development Index, the second wealthiest country in the world on a per capita purchasing power basis.
Non-coincidentally, our per-capita emissions are by far the highest in the EU and the fourth highest inside the Kyoto Protocol - far closer to levels in the US than in the EU.
To now start claiming - as Ibec has this week - that we still cannot afford to reduce our emissions at home is to effectively renege on one of the key provisions of the protocol.
This accepts the Kuznets theory and requires the wealthiest countries to reduce their emissions before poorer countries have to accept targets. The fact that many of them currently don't - because very few wealthy countries have taken any action at all - appears to be as much an irritation to Ibec as it is to that well-known Kyoto Protocol enthusiast, George W. Bush.
Will anything ever come up for Mr Micawber? Not, it seems, if Ibec has anything to do with it.
Pat Finnegan is co-ordinator of Grian - the Greenhouse Ireland Action Network (www.grian.ie).