Not for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has highlighted the serious dangers faced by Ireland as a result of global climate change in terms of rising sea levels, flash-flooding and significant variations in temperature, rainfall patterns and the growing season.
What is alarming is that these dramatic changes are largely inexorable; all we can do is try to mitigate the worst effects by taking precautionary measures as soon as possible. As the EPA's director-general, Dr Mary Kelly, said yesterday: "Decisions about what crops to grow, what landscapes to protect, where to build transport corridors in coastal zones and, perhaps most importantly of all, where to build new residential areas urgently require to be 'climate change-proofed'."
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, described the EPA's latest assessment of the risks, published yesterday, as "credible and worrying". But he went on to make what is surely the central point in dealing with the problem - that Ireland's own emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for causing climate change are "simply unsustainable". Indeed, at 18 tonnes per capita per annum, Ireland is the world's fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, on a league table headed sequentially by Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand. Our prodigious emissions are way ahead of the average 10 tonnes per capita for the European Union as a whole and just two tonnes per capita for the developing world.
The bald facts are stark. In 1998, as part of an EU-wide deal to implement the Kyoto Protocol, Ireland agreed to cap the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions at 13 per cent above their 1990 levels in the period 2008-2012. Yet the latest figures show that emissions are already 31 per cent higher and are projected to rise even more unless resolute action is taken to rein in the worst offenders. Failure to do so will have serious consequences, amounting to €300 million a year in fines or penalties over the five-year period - a total of € 1.5 billion.
The Government acknowledged that climate change is the most serious global environmental problem facing us and future generations, when Ireland ratified the Kyoto Protocol on May 31st, 2002. Action must be taken. And while there is no "magic switch" to control emissions, as Mr Cullen conceded yesterday, a new EU Emissions Trading Directive - due to be implemented from January 1st next and greeted with alarm by IBEC - will help to curtail the carbon dioxide output of industry and electricity generation.
The Government must supplement this EU-wide measure with a range of carbon taxes aimed at weaning us off our addiction to fossil fuels. The imposition of such taxes, repeatedly advocated by the ESRI among others, has been postponed for too long. Even if the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, bites the bullet on this issue in the Budget for 2005 - as he promised last December - it may be too late to make much difference.