If there’s a ticking clock in the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment, someone must have put it on mute.
For while the countdown to 2030 and the legally binding climate targets it brings is well and truly under way, Minister for the Environment Darragh O’Brien is behaving, outwardly at least, as if he is working in a different and far more relaxed timezone.
He hasn’t produced an updated Climate Action Plan for 2026 and won’t have it until sometime after the first quarter of the year.
He says he can’t produce the plan until he finalises the next set of carbon budgets, and they are also delayed.
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The Climate Change Advisory Council produced proposed budgets back in December 2024 but the Government must approve them, and Mr O’Brien says work on reviewing them for presentation to his colleagues is still going on.
Carbon budgets set the quantity of greenhouse gases that the country can emit over a given period without breaching climate targets.
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They are important because once the overall budget is set, work can begin on dividing up the share to be given to each sector of society and the economy – sectors such as agriculture, transport and electricity generation.
These shares, called sectoral emissions ceilings, determine the emissions cuts each sector must make and influence the measures Ministers must introduce to ensure their sector complies.
Those measures are set out in the Climate Action Plan, the roadmap of actions that underpin emission-cutting efforts.
The Climate Action Plan is meant to be updated annually, generally before the new year, so that actions can be tweaked, reprioritised or ramped up depending on what progress was or wasn’t made in cutting emissions in the preceding 12 months.
The budgets currently being worked on are for the 2031-2035 and 2036-2040 periods. These may seem distant but they are inextricably tied to the budget period just ended and the new budget period that has just begun.
We didn’t stick to the 2021-2025 budget and the Minister himself said last week that we were on track to dramatically overshoot the 2026-2030 budget.
That means we must considerably tighten the proposed budgets for the following two periods, or deploy some major new, rapid emission-cutting measures right now to try to come in under the current budget.
The latter would mean reducing and redistributing the sectoral emissions ceilings, which were only agreed after much political argument.
So it’s an admittedly tricky task with much policy to decide, agreements to be reached and measures to devise.
But the current chicken and egg scenario of actions determining budgets and budgets determining actions leaves the country without a fresh plan and a rapidly diminishing timeline to implement whatever measures it may contain.
