Consideration of the choices we face and the allocation of resources shouldn’t be outsourced by politicians
COLM McCARTHY and Peter Löscher have probably never met. Both made headlines in their respective countries last week for doing their jobs and both are worryingly symptomatic of a largely unacknowledged flaw in how our societies make decisions. Our Minister for Finance tasked Colm McCarthy with drawing up a list of potential savings in Irish public expenditure. Peter Löscher is the chief executive of Siemens.
The desirability or effectiveness of the McCarthy proposals will be much debated but two elements, one general and one particular, stand out. The general element is that it is a damning testimonial to the clueless incompetence of Irish governments, especially the current one. The particular is its proposed radical reform of local government.
When our current Taoiseach was Minister for Finance he apparently took to calling the Department of Health “Angola” due to the daunting number of unexploded financial landmines. Brian Cowen’s reaction to these petards was to abdicate his ministerial responsibility, ignoring them in the hopes that they would detonate after his term. Being hoist with one’s own petard can rarely have been so devastatingly illustrated.
The normal reaction of governments in general, and the last three Irish administrations in particular, to problems has become to ignore them or fob them off on to some hastily created specialised agency.
The McCarthy report proposes abolishing a swathe of town councils while amalgamating a number of urban and county authorities. Many valid arguments can be advanced in support of extensive local government reform to create a tier of government closer to citizens, and one with clear responsibilities and resources. In the context of growing globalisation of many governmental functions, the need for local democracy is reinforced. It was in recognition of this need that the EU revived the former Vatican term of “subsidiarity”, whereby decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level possible.
All of which brings me back to Peter Löscher. Last Monday in Munich Siemens was one of around 20 signatories to a memorandum of understanding which created the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Other signatories included such heavyweights as Deutsche Bank, energy firms RWE and E.ON, and the Munich Re insurance group.
Desertec plans to build a series of solar thermal power plants in the Maghreb region of north Africa using mirrors to produce turbine-driving steam, transmitting much of the power via a new grid of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines under the Mediterranean to Europe.
Around 630,000 terawatt hours of unused solar energy falls on the states of the Middle East and north Africa every year. Europe’s annual energy consumption amounts to some 4,000 terawatt hours, or 0.6 per cent of that unused solar energy. Desertec participants plan to exploit a fraction of this energy through a €400 billion project which, said Löscher, will “provide carbon-free energy that could supply up to 20 per cent of European energy needs by 2050”.
Siemens, he went on to point out, has already “connected Tasmania with the Australian continent” (240km) and is currently laying the “250km undersea cable supplying Majorca with electricity”.
Last month the European Academies Science Advisory Council submitted a plan to the European Commission for the development of a European super-grid to transmit electricity across the EU. Such developments dovetail perfectly with the ESB’s investment in wind and the more ambitious wind generation/local pump-storage proposals from the Spirit of Ireland group. Estimates suggest that such investments could create tens of thousands of jobs, save us €30 billion in fuel imports, and add up to €50 billion to the Irish economy.
The development of a European grid has enormous economic implications for Ireland. As it becomes possible to transmit significant quantities of electricity over long distances, a very different continental energy picture would emerge. Nordic surpluses of hydroelectricity could mix-and-match with Irish surpluses of wind and wave electricity and solar surpluses from the Mediterranean.
There are no scientific or technological obstacles to such developments, this is real world business, otherwise Siemens, Munich Re and the ESB would not be investing.
Like the hard-nosed McCarthy proposals, electricity investments may be primarily technical but their effects are political.
Increasing class sizes, cutting research investment, or reducing social welfare payments will all impact very directly on the kind of country we wish to see five or 10 years from now. Building a European high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission grid could fashion the shape of Irish and other economies.
The more than slightly alarming reality is that debate on these intensely political choices is launched, and to a considerable degree conducted, by people like Colm McCarthy and Peter Löscher. Competent and intelligent people that they undoubtedly are, they hold no political mandates.
There is nothing unreasonable about experts proposing and chiefs executives investing. What is unreasonable and unacceptable is when those who hold democratic mandates to make such decisions abdicate their responsibilities to experts.
Debate about the choices we face as societies and the consequent allocation of resources should form the essence of politics.