EMISSIONS TARGETS:MINISTER FOR the Environment John Gormley has requested that the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) stops buying carbon credits abroad on the basis that Ireland will now meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol because of the recession.
The agency has purchased 5.25 million tonnes in carbon credits from developing countries over the past 15 months to offset emissions here, at a cost to taxpayers of €73.3 million. It also agreed to buy a further 3 million tonnes through international agencies.
The cost of these purchases, via the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has not yet been finalised. However, it is certain to bring the total investment in buying carbon credits abroad to well over €100 million.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, Ireland is legally obliged to cap the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions at 13 per cent above 1990 levels in the period 2008-2012. And with emissions rising rapidly during the boom, credits had to be purchased abroad.
Mr Gormley has now been told by his officials that the 8.25 million tonnes in credits is likely to be sufficient to meet Ireland’s Kyoto target for the five-year commitment period – due entirely to what the Minister termed the “rapidly changing economic outlook”.
This was confirmed in the most recent analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which assumed that Ireland’s GNP would contract by 7 per cent between 2007 and 2010.
But Mr Gormley said it was now clear that even these projections were out of date.
“Indeed, some commentators have suggested that we may now achieve Kyoto compliance without any recourse to carbon credits,” he told the Dáil yesterday. “Definitive judgment in this regard must be informed by further analysis by the EPA.”
In the meantime, his department had “asked the NTMA to put its programme of carbon purchasing on hold for the foreseeable future” as the credits already purchased “should certainly be adequate to meet whatever need is likely to arise in the Kyoto period”.
However, the Minister cautioned against complacency, saying it would be “a profound misunderstanding of the realities of climate change to see these recent developments as a reason to ease off on our efforts to drive down emissions across the economy”.
Under the new EU climate package, as he noted, Ireland must reduce its emissions by 20 per cent from the 2005 level by 2020, and it was likely to have an “even more ambitious target” if a new global agreement was reached on combating climate change.
“Every crisis must be turned into an opportunity,” the Minister said.
“Our response to this crisis must ensure that, when economic growth resumes, it will be on a low-carbon trajectory” – including initiatives on home insulation, electric cars and other green technology.
He also announced that the commitment given in the programme for government to introduce an “environmental and sustainability pillar” into the social partnership process, saying that the absence of such a pillar during the boom years had been a “grave oversight”.
If environmental groups had been involved, “we could have avoided the worst excesses of the Celtic Tiger when it comes to planning and transport”, he said.
But from now on, they would “ensure that economic decisions have at their very core the concept of sustainability”.