Key climate plan targets ‘not credible’, warned senior official

Key planks of the Government’s climate action plan are “not credible” and it should have proposed cutting the national farming herd rather than “ignoring” agriculture emissions, one of the State’s most senior civil servants privately warned.

The Government’s plan launched last June included a range of ambitious targets, to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

However, correspondence seen by The Irish Times shows Robert Watt, Department of Public Expenditure secretary general, raised serious concerns about the plan’s credibility.

The revelations come as the Green Party begins talks on a possible programme for government with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, with the party’s demand for a 7 per cent cut in emissions one current sticking point.

Given agriculture accounts for a large portion of Ireland’s emissions, it was “not credible” the climate plan did not consider more reductions in that area, Mr Watt said.

The criticism was contained in a letter dated April 16th, 2019, to Mark Griffin, Department of Communications and Climate Action secretary general, based on a draft of the plan.

“Analysis suggests that a 5 per cent reduction in the national herd would deliver more greenhouse gas emissions savings over the decade than the delivery of the entire energy efficiency component,” of the plan, Mr Watt said.

It would be more cost effective to cut the farming herd by a “negligible” 5 per cent, while increasing farm incomes, he said. “Ignoring agriculture increases the costs for other sectors and for the economy as a whole,” Mr Watt said.

Any move to reduce the national herd numbers would be highly contentious given likely strong opposition from farmers.

One major element of the plan to retrofit 500,000 homes to a high energy standard and install 600,000 heat pumps instead of oil and gas boilers was “not affordable”, Mr Watt said.

‘Limitations’

The analysis underpinning the plan from consultancy firm McKinsey had “limitations”, and assumed people took “the full lifecycle cost of a purchasing decision into account”, Mr Watt said. It did not account for the fact upfront costs carried a “much higher weight” among consumers and businesses, he said.

“Placing the burden of the achievement of targets on to influencing millions of individual purchasing decisions is not a credible approach,” as shifting individual behaviour on that scale would be “tremendously challenging”, he wrote.

The letter said the plan’s aim for public bodies to have a near-zero carbon investment strategy was “incompatible” with the Government’s own national development plan , which has committed to invest billions of euro in road projects across the country.

In response, Mr Griffin said the plan recognised the “longer-term requirement to restructure” the agriculture sector. If the home retrofitting targets were not met other measures would be “significantly more costly”, he said.

A submission from Department of Finance officials was also sceptical of a key target to have 700,000 electric vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2030. Previous targets to increase uptake of EVs had “suffered from an endemic over-optimistic bias” and fallen far short, the submission said.

National herd

In the final plan, targets for EVs were increased to 950,000, targets for heat pumps were lowered to 400,000, and there were no cuts to the national herd.

The records were obtained by Green Party Dún Laoghaire Rathdown councillor Séafra Ó Faoláin, via an Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) request.

Mr Ó Faoláin said the serious reservations about the plan were “wilfully ignored”, and questions over its credibility meant commitments in any government formation talks “must be concrete and irrevocable”, as targets were “useless without appropriate policies to achieve them”.