AN undoubted highlight for me, not just of the last week but of the year, was a Courtesy Call on September 18th to Áras an Uachtaráin to present President Michael D. Higgins with a copy of ‘The Lie of the Land’. After the photos, introductions and formalities, we sat down for coffee and conversation for nearly a full hour.
President Higgins receives John Gibbons who presented a copy of his book “The Lie of the Land” , a game plan for Ireland’s the Climate crisis…….. Pic Tony Maxwell 18-9-25
President Higgins is extremely well versed in climate and environmental issues, and came armed with a heavily dog-eared copy of my book, which he had clearly read in full, and questioned me closely on many of the points it covered, especially around agriculture and food policy. The conversation ranged widely, to include the history and evolution of agriculture in Ireland and globally since the mid-19th century, and the role and impacts of industrial farming in particular.
I was accompanied on the morning by my daughters, who too were delighted at the unique opportunity both to visit the Áras and also to meet the head of State just weeks before the end of what has been a highly consequential 14-year stay.
Later that day, I joined Matt Cooper in studio for my weekly Last Word on the Environment, which he introduced by noting that the official account of the President of Ireland had tweeted out details of our meeting, including the above picture. Earlier that week I got confirmation that the book had reached No. 3 in the national non-fiction bestseller list, a rise of six places since its first week of launch.
Early last week, The Currency published an extremely positive review of The Lie of the Land. “As much as the book is a devastating critique of what Gibbons calls “dishonest discourse” from agribusiness lobby groups and in the media, the book also offers an unsparing review of the role of policymakers in bringing Ireland to its climate-vulnerable position”, Niall Sargent wrote.
And on Saturday last, I was beyond delighted to read an effusive in-depth review of The Lie of the Land in the Irish Examiner by Jack Power, headed ‘Greed and duplicity pollutes our politics and environment’. The book, he wrote, was the first he had read in the last 27 years that “kept me awake at night”. The review of what Power called “this shocking book” concluded as follows: “John Gibbons has indeed done the State and generations as yet unborn some service”.
A very positive note indeed on which to conclude what had for me been an extraordinary week. The recording of The Last Word on the Environment as mentioned here is linked below:
The date – September 4th – had been etched in my mind for at least the last two months. That was the official launch day for The Lie of the Land, and as it drew ever closer, I was filled with a mixture of anticipation and, to be honest, dread.
All the usual stuff, really. What if nobody shows up and the room is half empty? What if the venue is a disaster, the caterers fail to appear, there’s a power cut, etc. etc. In a rush of optimism, I had gone for a bigger venue – the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin’s Dawson Street – which realistically needed upwards 75 attendees to look reasonably busy. As the date approached, my anxiety intensified as I scrambled to complete a series of last minute tasks related to the launch.
As tends to happen, the day did indeed come around. I completed my usual weekly Today FM slot a little earlier that day, and made my way to the RIA for around 5pm, an hour or so ahead of the event kicking off. Even before 6pm, there was already a good crowd gathering, and by the time the speechifying kicked off at around 6.30, it was standing room only, with the crowd of around 150 overflowing into the adjacent hall.
My commissioning editor at Penguin, Brendan Barrington, introduced the event and explained their rationale for choosing to publish what they believed would be an influential book about Ireland and the climate emergency at this time, and also, why they chose me to write it.
Matt Cooper, a man alway in heavy demand for his skills as a chair, agreed to be MC for the launch, and delivered a characteristically sharp and on-point speech, which was very generous indeed towards both book and author (he penned a piece around the event as part of his Business Post column three days later, text included at the foot of this article). My own remarks concluded the formal part of the event. I had lots of people to thank, and was delighted to do so, but overall, I kept it (at least by my standards) fairly short and to the point. The previous speakers had already covered much of the ground, so no need to keep people any longer than absolutely necessary.
The rest of the event was a blur of faces, book signings and general good cheer. There was a sea of familar faces, from family, friends and work colleagues to politicians, media colleagues and many people from both academia and the environmental community.
By 8.30pm, the stragglers were being ushered out of the RIA and we headed across the street to Cafe En Seine, where the after party continued until the wee small hours. Despite my earlier concerns, it was to be an evening to remember; one of the most enjoyable, even joyful events of my entire life, one I was hugely privileged to share with so many people.
Meanwhile, the book garnered a lengthy and very positive review in that Saturday’s Irish Times, with another equally positive review in the Irish Independent the following Saturday, and lots of media work, from interviews to podcasts and articles in between. I was absolutely delighted to see the book hit No. 9 in the Irish non-fiction bestseller list in the week to September 9th (UPDATE: the book rose to No. 3 in the bestseller list for the week to September 16th).
Where it goes from here, I have no idea, but it’s hard to describe just how good it feels, after a mostly solitary 18+ month slog, to emerge blinking into the daylight and take the fruits of that effort into the public domain.
The Land, the Lie, and the Climate Fight
On Thursday evening I was invited to make a speech at the launch of The Lie of the Land, a book about Ireland and its response to the climate crisis by John Gibbons.
A well-known journalist who has written for many publications, including this one, Gibbons is a weekly contributor to The Last Word on Today FM, where we spend between 12 to 15 minutes discussing environment stories of the week every Thursday.
We have done so for over four years now and I regard his contributions as essential to our editorial content.
I know him to be passionate, principled and pugnacious, features that come across strongly in this well-argued and well-written book, one that is loaded with facts to buttress his arguments.
That approach can be regarded as a problem in an era where facts and expertise are derided by those who prefer to believe the deniers who can be found on the internet, many of whom may be promoted by those with nefarious intent.
Gibbons is consistent and determined, especially in calling out the hypocrisy of corporate greenwashing, and he is strong enough to take the abuse he gets in return, although it can’t be pleasant.
The vitriol that is present in many of the comments we receive about his appearances on the radio show can be shocking, and I don’t show him all of them.
Some people simply don’t want to believe what he is saying because it is too uncomfortable for them. Some ignore him but others attack. They deny his facts, they deny climate science, and they are angry that the change he wants will led to a diminution in their standards of living.
Farmers get upset when he points out that farming is responsible for 38 per cent of Ireland’s greenhouse emissions – and only 7 per cent of gross national income – which he repeats with force in the book.
“There is a storybook image we love to sell to the outside world and to ourselves: that Ireland is a green and pleasant land, all fertile fields and rolling hills – but this image obscures the reality of biodiversity loss, nitrogen-polluted lakes, and the fact that we are far away from meeting our climate change commitments,” he writes.
He claims that Ireland’s “dramatic shift towards the most polluting food sectors – driven by a small number of agribusiness giants and facilitated by the state – benefits the few while imposing huge costs on the many”.
He proposes that we can “embrace a low-emissions farming model while preserving farmers’ livelihoods, making the countryside a better place to live, and delivering something Ireland conspicuously lacks: food security”.
Gibbons argues that where once politicians regulated the sector, they are now largely consigned to the role of cheerleading and funding industry plans. Another strand of that story, he contends, is the spectacular rise of the billion-euro agribusinesses as powerful players in shaping agri-industrial policy in Ireland.
He condemns the “wishful thinking and outright dishonesty that have propped up the status quo in Irish agribusiness”, and is particularly critical of how the decision to lift the EU milk quota in 2015 caused agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket.
“Any intelligent and responsible strategy for the future of Irish agriculture has to be rooted in an acceptance that it is senseless to continue with a food production model dominated by meat and dairy,” he writes. “Even those who do not accept the moral and economic reasons for this will soon have to bow to the reality that the Irish agricultural model simply cannot be sustained.”
For all of that, I suspect that the chances of him having his way are slim to nearly non-existent. Any change will be gradual, incremental and limited. There are too many people who depend on agriculture, in many guises, for their livelihoods.
That is their picture, not the bigger one that Gibbons espouses. We will see that in the debate over the Mercosur deal the European Commission wishes us to ratify in the coming weeks.
Recording of my Last Word on the Environment with Matt Cooper broadcast on September 11th is below. We began by discussing controversial new plans to cool the global atmosphere artificially, using a range of possible technologies. As I explained, given the complexity and interconnectedness of Earth systems , the scope for unintended and frankly catastrophic consequences by tinkering with the system is massive.
No surprise then to see the UK government, among others, spending tens of millions on such projects, which Cooper described as “a frankly mad idea”. Apart from the colossal risks involved, the critical thing about these projects is that they distract from what actually needs to be done urgently, and that is to phase out carbon emissions by scrapping fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Small wonder this dirtiest of industries and its political allies are rushing to support untested, unproven and risible projects to distract the public and media into believing this is some form of meaningful climate action, as all the while, tens of billions of tonnes of carbon emissions continue to be dumped into the global atmosphere, altering its fundamental chemistry for thousands of years into the future.
We also discussed the uncanny accuracy of global sea level projections over the last three decades. Based on satellite measurements that began in the early 1990s, SLR projections dating back to the 1996 IPCC report have been borne out by direct observations. We concluded the segment by discussing alarming declines in global phytoplankton, and the vulnerability of these keystone marine species to rapidly warming waters.
The link to the recording of the segment broadcast on September 11th is below:
On Wednesday, September 3rd, I did my first broadcast interview to discuss the launch of my new book, ‘The Lie of the Land’, and chose The Last Word on Today FM to do the piece, given that the show and presenter Matt Cooper have given me a weekly platform for the last four and a half years to discuss climate and environmental issues in a systematic way, rather than simply covering them around a specific event, as is the norm.
You can listen to our conversation here, and the transcript is below:
Matt Cooper Over the last four years, this programme has given a commitment to using John Gibbons on a weekly basis to talk about environmental issues. He has now extended into another branch of media, you could say, by the publication of his first book, The Lie of the Land, which has the subtitle, a Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis. ?John Gibbons, thank you very much for joining us. The title, The Lie of the Land. ?There’s a double entre there. Explain what you mean by it.
John Gibbons The first thing as the name suggests is to lay out the situation. ?Where do we stand, how do we get here, and where are we off to? So really that that’s the lay of the land. Obviously, inside there, there’s also a double meaning, and that is the lies that we tell ourselves and one another about our relationship with, for example, the land. ?That very fundamental relationship is one that I examine in some detail in the book. And I suppose my own background coming from a farming background gave me some insights that I wanted to explore and to sort of really tease out. So that’s really where where that comes from.
Matt Cooper ?I was quite surprised to read that there was a time when you would have taken a shotgun out and you would have been killing animals on the farm.
John Gibbons Yeah, well, that was what we did. I was regularly dispatched, a shotgun or sometimes, a .22 rifle another time, a hurley the odd time. Basically, I think the way I describe it is that that in our farming life, there were two types of animals that you encountered, one was livestock, and the other was what the generic term was vermin. And essentially anything that wasn’t livestock was fair game. And that was the reality now, maybe there’s other farms where that didn’t happen. ?But certainly I don’t recall anybody saying it was unusual at the time, nor did I ever hear anybody remark on how strange it was. To be honest with you, in hindsight, it’s pretty strange, but at the time, that’s what I grew up with.
Matt Cooper But do you regret it, now? ?Or do you think that that is just part of the natural process that has to be done in farming?
John Gibbons Yeah, I do. I have regrets, for sure. ?I think when you look back at that kind of context, you know, obviously I was young, I wasn’t in a position to know what was good or what was not so good. But yeah, I would have regrets. The idea of shooting animals like that – is it’s pretty unpleasant. ?Also, that sort of antipathy to nature, which really was part of what was drilled into me, I regret that too. I think, you know, that was considered to be progressive farming. I think maybe we’ve had that with the passage of time, we’ve all had an opportunity to reflect on the fact that farming has to happen alongside nature. ?It can’t be one or the other. And I think we’ve seen that really with the major declines in wildlife in Ireland, in biodiversity and pollution and so on., we’ we humans have taken a very heavy toll on the landscape and obviously farming by dint to the fact that it occupies so much of our landscape, is very much part of that, and I suppose part of the purpose in writing this book, maybe is to be honest about it, Matt, look it in the eye, call it as it is, and say, okay, this is where we are, this is the reality of the systems that we’ve developed. Now, can we do better in the future? ?And my argument, of course, is that we have no choice. We’re going to have to do better, we cannot continue. with business as usual, across a range of areas and subjects.
Matt Cooper But do people want that? ?Isn’t this part of your problem and that you have maybe as well, for readers of the book as well as you might have on the radio on a weekly basis, that people don’t necessarily want to confront these issues. They want to believe that solutions will come up that won’t impact on their existing ways of life.
John Gibbons ?I think you’re right. I think there is a belief, and I refer to, say, Ireland, as this Goldilocks country. The idea that we are climate that’s not too hot, not too cold. ?And I think that has lulled us in this country in many respects, into the belief that the climate emergency is something happening elsewhere that will impact other people severely, and nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, Goldilocks basically is dying. We are exiting that phase of temperate, moderate climate. ?In Ireland, we’ve already seen it across Europe and so on, so we’re exiting that, and we need to face that honestly. And I think part of my reason for wanting to write this book, Matt, is I just believe that much of the public conversation around climate around is it just beats around the bush. and it’s very noncommittal. And I think every time we encounter a vested interest group, it’s well, we can’t upset them, we can’t offend them. ?And I think our politicians in particular have been very cowed, no pun intended by the lobbies here. They’ve backed away from difficult decisions and the issue really here is that sometimes you have to take tough decisions now in order to safeguard our future. and we know that we look into our own history all the way back to Ardnacrusha, a plant which was commissioned a century ago this year. These were difficult decisions made by a young government that needed energy independence. ?And I think that type of strong radical thinking, it just seems to have seeped away from our politics. Now it’s full of fear. It’s full of looking over our shoulder at which lobbyist is going to give me a belt of a stick, and we need to keep clear of them. ?And I think that fear fearfulness, we see it in our planning system, we see it in ridiculous things like opposition, for example, to solar farms, to greenways. We just see a kind of a NIMBYism and a fearfulness. And I think what is missing in my opinion, even, from the discussion is an honesty. ?And that honesty is that we’re in a time of radical climate change and the most radical thing you can do in a time of radical change is nothing. The era of business as usual is already over. Many people may not have noticed this, but it’s over. ?We’re heading into a a much more dangerous future, a future, for example, where our energy systems are threatened, where our food systems, our food supplies in Ireland are threatened. And that’s something, Matt, I think that you and I have talked about here, many times over the last four years, but I still think people are incredulous. We’ve convinced ourselves part of that lie are referred to in the opening. ?We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re uniquely good at food production, for example.. and you hear people like the Taoiseach saying that we’re feeding 40 million people. That’s another lie, and that’s a lie I explore in some detail. We’re doing nothing of the sort. ?In fact, overall, Ireland is a net food calorie importer. We are actually drawing food resources away from the rest of the world to feed our small population. And that, quite frankly, is disgraceful. ?And yet that has happened because we haven’t been honest about it.
Matt Cooper There’s something that you haven’t addressed in the book to the rest of my knowledge, and excuse me if I’m wrong with this, but I didn’t see it. It’s in the news today, the Mercosur Agreement, for example, and this is an agreement that’s going to take place between the European Union and Latin America in relation to trade. ?And farmers are up in arms about it, but don’t they actually have a point in the sense that if farmers in Ireland are being asked to reduce their output for environmental reasons, what’s the point in doing that when suddenly we’re going to have lots of cheap foods imported from Latin America, which is produced as well without any real environmental concern?
John Gibbons There certainly are concerns with the Mercosur trade agreement, I would agree with you, but I do think it’s a little rich for the Irish agricultural lobby to criticise Brazil, for example, for its destruction of biodiversity. Huge tracts of Brazil, are intact biodiversity. ?Ireland, on the other hand, is largely a biodiversity desert. So I do think it is rather rich for us to criticise the Brazilians, for doing with their land, what we’ve already done with ours. Now, of course, we don’t want that to continue. ?We need to stop it, but I think there’s an inherent hypocrisy in this. I mean, is somebody, for example, who’s concerned about the loss of Brazilian biodiversity, are they prepared to put their hand up and say that they will support rewilding here in Ireland, for example? I haven’t heard a single voice from that lobby support that. ?So I think it’s really, it’s more hypocritical to say, we’d like the Brazilians to clean up their act, but don’t ask us to do anything.
Matt Cooper And one of the things that came across as well about your own regrets of the family farm that you grew up in was that you had one particularly large field, I think it was called the Big Seven, because all of the hedgerows and gaps had been literally been taken away to provide for this big piece of land.
John Gibbons That’s right, when my father bought this farm, it would have been back in the 50s, essentially, he was a progressive farmer, and part of that involved making fields much larger. So the Big Seven, as we called it, there’s an old map at home, which shows the original layout of it. So there was miles of hedgerows were dug out using excavators to make this large field that was suitable for large machinery. ?We also extensively drained the land to improve it. And all of these things were, in many respects they were improvements, and certainly in terms of productivity, but probably the thing that I, again, I look back on with some regret, is there was really no discussion around the fact that, in Ireland, given how little space there is for wild nature, our hedgerows are probably the only places left for biodiversity to cling on. So when we remove hedgerows, as we did, and as many other farmers have done since and are still doing, you’re destroying that last toehold for nature because there’s very little room for nature, for example, in our current monocultural ryegrass set up, which absolutely dominates the landscape in Ireland. ?We have a remarkable lack of diversity in our agricultural system, and that’s the issue here. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have livestock, we shouldn’t have dairy. What I’m suggesting is we need to have a balanced agricultural system that is part primarily focussed on meeting the food needs of the population of Ireland, not the export desires of multinational PLCs.
Matt Cooper However, is there not an issue for you again, another problem in that the book is full of facts outlining your arguments, but do we tend to live at present in what is largely a fact free environment, that for an awful lot of people, it’s how they feel. ?It’s emotions that seem to get the attention rather than facts or things for experts and experts are denigrated.
John Gibbons I take your point entirely, Matt, and I think that’s probably why I broke my own rule of the last 20 years, and I put myself into this story, because you’re right. Facts can be very dry and very hard to digest. ?So I did inject my own perspective, my own experience into the story. I hope to make it a more palatable read, something much more accessible, and something that I hope brings a sort of a town-and-country flavour to it, because I’ve lived my early life in the countryside, in that farming background, and the rest of my adult life, really has been spent away, and obviously a good chunk of that as an environmental commentator. So I’m trying to meld those messages together and to sort of offer an overview that is, I hope, sympathetic, I certainly hope readable, and of all those stats that you refer to, I think it’s important that we have a factual basis for our discussions, whatever our political positions. ?So, yeah, I make no apologies for putting in lots of facts, but I hope I’ve done it in a way that doesn’t impede people’s ability to catch the flow of the story, because I am trying to tell a story, I guess it’s framed through my own experience, for sure, but it’s also the story of the evolution of modern Ireland, in the era of climate breakdown.
Matt Cooper One last one, John. As you know, when you’re with us every week, we get lots of text messages and WhatsApp messages coming into the programme. ?We get a lot of people who are very supportive of you. We get a lot of people who are highly critical. If the highly critical people, many of whom are farmers, were to pick up and read this book, do you think might have changed their minds?
John Gibbons I would like to think so. I certainly hope so. I think if people approach it with an open mind – a colleague sent me a text text the other night, having read an advance copy of it, and basically said, look, the arguments are solid, and if people approach it with an open mind, then they’re open to be persuaded. ?If people simply want to project their own views on it, well, of course, we’re not going to meet in the middle. So I hope I’ve tried to frame it in a way, Matt.
IT’S ALMOST two years since I was approached and commissioned by Penguin to write a book – my first – about Ireland and the climate emergency. While genuinely chuffed to be asked, I did also have something of an inkling – or premonition – about what I might be letting myself in for. Well, I thought I did, but it still turned out to be one of the toughest tasks I’ve ever undertaken.
After all the preliminaries, including sketching out and agreeing a detailed briefing document and book plan were completed, work got underway in earnest in January 2024, with delivery of the first draft originally slated for October of that year. This turned out be a rather optimistic schedule. In short, 2024 was a long, long year.
By December last, I was still writing, and the original target word count of around 80,000 had ballooned out towards 130,000, as I scrambled to throw my net as wide as possible, and to cover off every possible angle, including almost 1,000 notes and references. This approach, it turns out, works far better in academia than when trying to craft a book for a general audience that is actually likely to be ever read.
While I may not have appreciated it at the time, my Penguin editor ripped away over 50,000 words and restructured the chapter sequence to make it flow more logically. By early 2025, the chrysalis was being gradually shed and the book was beginning at last to take shape.
The rounds of editing, stretching over around three months, were brutal, as we argued back and forth, as I fought (usually in vain) to have some pet theme or sidebar spared from the spike. I won a few battles, but then again, too few to mention. By the second quarter of 2025, lots of my references were already out of date, and so part of the process was to update as many as possible with the latest available data.
By definition, any book is going to represent a snapshot in time, but at least you want its shelf life to last as long as possible. Finally, and after some delays in the printing process, a box with 10 advance copies finally landed in my hands on August 14th, a slightly surreal moment.
The book, which is billed as a ‘bracing critique of the bad decisions that have put Ireland into such a vulnerable position on food and energy security as well as climate mitigation and adaptation’. Part of this, as I explore, is down to complacency, at political, state and media level, about the real risks that face Ireland, while this is also a story of how vested interests have stymied and blunted Ireland’s response to this unfolding tragedy.
Names are named. Feathers are ruffled and the status quo is called out for the dangerous sham that it is. Unless they manage to ignore it entirely, expect the Usual Suspects to be up in arms over their warts-and-all portrayal in this book. Given the amount of soft PR and endless media space they already enjoy, I make no apologies for putting the boot in firmly.
There is also a bracing critique of our media and how it has, with some honourable exceptions, failed utterly to sound the alarm on the climate emergency. As the state broadcaster and given its large budget and public service remit, RTÉ comes in for close – and largely unflattering – scrutiny. In unrelated news, there has been an eerie silence emanating from Montrose in terms of any of their talk or current affairs programmes wanting to discuss the book or do an interview. Guess this climate nonsense is yesterday’s news, at least as far as RTÉ is concerned?
The book is formally launched on Thursday September 4th at an event in Dublin, and will be available in bookshops nationwide from that day. I also recorded an Audiobook version of the book over the summer, and this will also be released on services like Audible, Spotify etc. from September 4th. If you’d like to have my dulcet tones in your ear for nearly seven hours, now you know where to go. Will discuss the actual content of the book in more depth in future ThinkOrSwim postings, but in the meanwhile, do hope you’ll consider picking up a copy and giving it a read.
Pod of the latest Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 31st is below. We discussed the workings and finances of the hugely popular deposit return scheme for cans and plastic bottles, plus the impact of light pollution on the natural world, and what steps can be taken to reduce the harms. Finally, we discussed the continued boom in air travel, with record numbers of people heading through Irish airports over the Bank Holiday weekend. Climate crisis, what crisis?
Transcript below:
Matt Cooper: John Gibbons, I know you’re fan of the deposit return scheme to get people’s plastic bottles and cans and things back for recycling. ?But what’s this about 67 million euro or so of the money that people paid when they bought their cans or bottles not being reclaimed?
John Gibbons: Good evening, Matt. Let’s take it from the top. ?This scheme has been a huge success. Since its launch, we’ve got about 1.6 billion bottles and cans returned. They reckon that’s about three quarters of all the bottles and cans that are put out there are being returned. ?Now, some people just simply shove them into the machines. They get their voucher and they don’t cash it in, or they’re just using it as a way of getting rid of them, which is fine. That’s their entitlement. ?Some of these machines are also connected to charities, Matt, so that it’s a good way of making a small donation to a charity. But what we’re seeing is that the company that operates this return, they have €103.2 million in unredeemed deposits on hand by the end of 2024, which is enormous. Now, I was doing some back back of the envelope calculations here. ?And my estimate, when you consider that the return rate is between 15 and 25 cents, depending on the size of the container, I give it a median of about 20 cents. That means for every billion bottles and cans returned, that’s about €200 million in levees? So what we’re seeing here is that the company, which is a not-for-profit organisation operating with the approval of the Irish government, essentially it’s piling up cash because a lot of these cans are coming back and people are not making the claims. ?And of course, what’s important to emphasise here is that if you buy a can or a bottle from a supermarket, you will pay your levy. Now, if you throw that in the regular bin and it’s never returned, that 25 cent levy goes to Re-Turn anyway. And to my mind, it’s a slightly perverse incentive, and I’ll tell you why I say that. you know, in a way way, Re-Turn are getting paid for you not returning, which is a strange one. ?So, if the return rate, for example, falls, in a way, it doesn’t really matter to them. Because they’re collecting the money anyway. So I’m not sure whether this was necessarily fully thought through. ?Maybe somebody can correct me on this, but I would prefer to see a return scheme where they had a strong incentive for success, but whereas in this, the money pours in whether or not the returns are coming in. So that’s something to consider.
Matt Cooper: But I presume this company doesn’t get to hang on to the money. ?You must return it to the state for environmental use.
John Gibbons: Well, this, I guess, whether the funds are ring-fenced for that, that’s another day’s story. I think what’s important, probably to stress here, Matt, that this is a good news story. ?I don’t want to nitpick it unduly, and I certainly don’t want to put people off using it because I use it, many other people use it. It’s a great idea. ?You see the machines everywhere, this is the way to go. And probably like with all of these things, you have a certain amount of, shall we say, administrative hiccups to be gotten through. But the key thing here, this is getting bottles and cans that would otherwise be waste back into circulation.
Matt Cooper: ?Another listener says, I’m saving all my return receipts from my Christmas shop.
John Gibbons: There you go. That’s, you know, that could accumulate quite a lot over the char hours of the year, okay?
Matt Cooper: ?Another person says, I wonder how many people just continue to throw them into the green or black bin?
John Gibbons: If they do, Matt, they’re throwing the money away. So if you want to do that, nobody can stop you, but you’re throwing your own money away.
Matt Cooper: Okay. My biggest shock says listen, I wasn’t in the volume of plastic bottles were in return to the amount of money not collected, but the sheer volume of plastic bottles, we bring return and that we use.
John Gibbons: That’s right. ?If you think about it, we’re a tiny country, five million people, and here we are dumping a billion bottles and cans. And remember, all of these are essentially designed to be single use. Now, we’re trying to extract multiple use out of them. ?For example, aluminium can be recycled indefinitely. But these plastic, so called PET plastic, the maximum number of times you can recycle this plastic is about five to seven times. After that, it has to be landfilled or incinerated. ?So what we need to be doing here is reducing the amount of this stuff in circulation. Now, it is better not to be throwing it out, yes, but I think your listener as has hit on something there. The big underlying issue here is we’re absolutely overusing these resources.
Matt Cooper: Robert says, the only people who recycle it are the people who recycled anyway, the amount of people I see throwing away the so-all returnables didn’t ever and never will recycle. Tell us about this new study into night-time light pollution.
John Gibbons: That’s right, Matt. First of all, what do we mean by light pollution, I think a lot of listeners would be surprised even to hear the term light pollution, like what’s wrong with a bit of light. I suppose the key thing to understand is that for aeons of evolution, nature operated through daytime and nighttime. So, for example, we have many nocturnal creatures, insects, birds, etc., who they only come out at night. ?And they depend on the signals, for example, moonlight. And you have birds, migrating birds, for example, that hunt and navigate by starlight. Now, all of that is fine, except when the current atmosphere or environment, especially around urban areas, is so heavily polluted with light pollution, that these animals are losing their signals, their abilities to detect, for example, the difference between night and day. ?Why this matters matter is that their signals, for example, on reproduction, on breeding, on nesting, on even their timing of hunting and so on. Those signals are essentially messed up when you flood the night time with light. The hunters are unable to hunt and the prey are unable to conceal themselves. ?So what we’re doing, I suppose, essentially, is we’re sort of turning night into today with the extensive use of lighting. This study comes out of University College, Galway. And one of the interesting things about to emerge from it is that they found that probably contrary to people’s expectation, that street lighting wasn’t actually the main source of light pollution. ?It was, in fact, the light coming out of our own windows, which is kind of surprising, you know, and the suggestion, I guess, is that we should, first of all, at night, if you have curtains, pulled them.
Matt Cooper: So you say, if you have curtains, everyone used to have curtains; they’re not as common as they used to be.
John Gibbons: That’s right. ?And there’s another kind of a little paradox built in here as well. And that is the fact that in the last decade, we’ve had the welcome introduction of LED lighting, which, of course, has been a huge boon from the point of view of carbon emissions and so on. But the flip side of LED lighting is that it’s so cheap that it’s everywhere. ?People are flooding their gardens, they’re stringing them around their trees. Across the road from me, somebody has got four of their bushes and trees permanently illuminated at night. This this is right now. Not just Christmas. This is in July, Matt. ?And you see this. Also, you have people who fill their gardens with these little solar panel night lights that are everywhere. And these might look cute and dainty, but they’re disrupting animals going about their business. ?So it’s one of these things, again, where it’s only when we stop and really have a think about the impacts that we’re having in the natural world. And again, once people are aware of it, generally speaking, most of us want to do the right thing. And I think the key thing here is to try to reduce the spill of light pollution. ?Give you a small example. If you have one of those floodlights in your back garden or your yard, turn it off, or put it on a not too sensitive motion detector. Do not have that blasting away all night. ?It’s not good for your neighbours and it’s not good for nature. The other thing, Matt, about this as well, of course, we we’re part of nature. So the human endocrine system is also disrupted by light at night. ?So you find, for example, our Circadian rhythms, our ability to go into deep sleep; light is another form of pollution, and we need to rest deeply at night, and light pollution can interfere with that, just as effectively as noise.
Matt Cooper: Okay, I noticed today on LinkedIn Kenny Jacobs, the head of the Dublin Airport Authority, put up a post saying that it would be the busiest week ever for Dublin Airport, with over half a million passengers this bank holiday weekend. He said, we’re making some progress through our planning applications this week. ?We applied to extend the end of Pier 100, mostly for Ryanair. He also said that Cork airport welcomes over 90,000 passengers this weekend. He said his own family would be four of them. ?He described as Ireland’s fastest growing airport. So basically, our airports are getting busier and busier and busier and the reason there is because more and more people are flying.
John Gibbons: Yeah, he’s entirely correct. ?And we were talking about Re-Turn earlier as a state or quasi-state agency. DAA is certainly a semi-state agency. And the last time I checked, it is national policy, it is the state’s policy to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors. So here we have the chief executive of DAA bragging about reversing that and increasing carbon emissions.
Matt Cooper: No, no, in fairness now, he made no mention of increasing carbon emissions. ?He’s arguing he’s providing facilities for people to travel because they want to travel. And he’d also say that an enormous amount ofwork has been done at the airports to make them more carbon friendly. carbon emissions friendly.
John Gibbons: Yeah, they were actually pulled up by the advertising regulator over this recently, Matt, as you know, where they put out an ad. ?I think Marty Whelan was voicing this particular ad talking about all the amazing carbon reductions they were doing at Dublin Airport but the little bit they omitted to mention is they were only talking about emissions from the airport itself, which apparently would constitute a fraction of 1% of the emissions associated with the aircraft that fly in and out of Dublin airport. So we get a huge amount of sophistry here. I know this is another favourite subject of ours. ?Dublin Airport is pushing for about a 20% increase in the number of flights or passenger movements through the airport, and they themselves, in their own planning application, say that that will increase emissions by 22% Matt. So Kenny Jacobs knows exactly what he’s doing.
Matt Cooper: But isn’t the point, John, is despite all the conversations we have and despite the contribution of aviation to carbon emissions, more and more people want to fly.
John Gibbons: I completely understand that. And I don’t blame people, by the way, for wanting to fly, because flying is one of those areas of life that we have absolutely failed to regulate. We’ve taken an incredibly valuable resource and we’ve cheapened it. ?And what we do is, with cheap aviation, we outsourced the real costs of that, the climate damage, the ecological wreckage. That’s outsourced to other people in other parts of the world. But of course, as we know, it isn’t long before that climate bill comes home to roost here in Ireland.
Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 24th is below. We discussed the landmark International Court of Justice ruling on climate, plus a new study on the ‘boiling frog syndrome’, which may explain why public reaction to ever worsening extreme weather events remains so muted. We also looked at sharp rises in global food prices driven by climate-fuelled weather disruption.
Transcript is below:
Matt Cooper: John Gibbons is with us for a weekly last word in the environment. And for all the people who give out about you every week, you know, saying the impact of climate change is nothing like you say. I wonder how they feel about the realisation that it’s making their food more expensive.
John Gibbons: Yeah, I think food prices are something that everybody can agree on. They’re going up.. We’re seeing it dramatically here in Ireland. But a new study has tracked this trend globally. And what we’re finding, it’s not exactly a shocking conclusion, but this has really been laid down in clear measurements, is the direct correlation between the sharp rise in extreme weather events in recent years and food prices, because I guess food production, as anybody involved in agriculture knows, happens within very, very tight margins. The difference between a fertile field and a drought ridden field, or indeed a waterlogged field – these are fine margins. We’ve seen that, for example, recently in England. They had, I think, the wettest autumn in probably 50 to 100 years, with the result, of course, that the harvests are depressed the following year and so on and so forth. But to give you a few examples. This study tracked how the price of vegetables rose in California and Arizona, in the US in 2022 by 80% as a result of extreme heat and water shortages. They tracked similarly olive oil prices in Europe in 2024 rose by 50%, following a prolonged drought in Italy and Spain in 2023. Rice prices soared by almost 50% in Japan during 2024, again, as a result of a heat wave. Moved down to Africa, we saw Ghana and the Ivory Coast. These are big global producers of cocoa, and we saw prices, cocoa bean prices rise by 280% in 2024.
Matt Cooper: So fluctuation. So it’s the supply issue. The reason the price goes up is if the supply is damaged in interruption to the production of the crops, then the lower supply means higher prices.
John Gibbons: That’s one part of it for sure. So extreme weather hits yields, no question about it. The second thing, of course, is that supply chains are also vulnerable to climate impact. So the supply chains that get food in good condition from the field to the fork, the ability to store food, the ability to transport it, and then to move it in good condition, maybe halfway around the world. With extreme weather, what we’re getting is more spoiling of food, more food being lost and discarded along the way. So it’s a dual pressure, but the single greatest pressure, undoubtedly, is extreme weather conditions, be they drought, be the heat waves. And for example, it’s very difficult to farm in the traditional way if your field is under a foot of water. This is basic stuff and we’re seeing it, again, torrential downpours that are making farming incredibly difficult. We’ve seen it here in Ireland in very recent times. The inability, for example, of farmers to get crops out of the fields when they’re waterlogged. This summer, on the other hand, as somebody who grew up in a farm, I don’t think I’ve ever seen wheat fields, mature, ready to cut wheat fields, probably in late June in Ireland and into early July, at least a month ahead. So again, that gives you a sort of a bounce that obviously meant a very good season for cereals in Ireland, but it’s the luck of the draw, it’s the spin of the bottle and the roll of the dice as to whether you get that positive effect. But what we’re seeing is that for every positive effect, we’re seeing 10 or 20 negative effects. So the net effect is declining food, food production, declining reliability of food production. And, of course, that knocks over into rapidly rising food prices, commodity prices.
Matt Cooper: Okay, tell me about what’s causing the boiling frog effect.
John Gibbons: I suppose, people will be familiar with the analogy of the frog sitting in the pan, and it gradually warms and the frog adjusts to the warmth and eventually the frog boils. Now, I’m happy to report, by the way, that this is indeed a myth. Frogs, if you put them, and I’m sorry, somebody’s actually tested this out. If you put a frog in a pan and you slowly warm it up, it’ll jump out before it boils. So it’s a bit of a bit of a myth. However, the analogy applies far better to humans than to frogs. We’re very susceptible to what’s called the shifting baseline syndrome. And what that means is we tend, it’s maybe one of our most successful characteristics as a species, is our incredible adaptability. Humans adapt to the circumstances around them. So what this study looked at is that there’s useful adaptability and there’s not so useful adaptability. And what they’re finding is that humans are adapting to extreme weather conditions by normalising it and by believing that it’s always been like that. And what’s really incredible, and this came out of this study is how quickly people normalize the weather. For example, even in the length of time this slot has been on the air, which is less than five years, global climate and weather systems have changed in that time. Yet, for all the time, Matt, that we’ve been talking about that, we’ve been talking about extreme weather pretty much on a weekly basis. That would lead your listeners to believe that extreme weather is a normal fact of life, that you get these droughts, you get these heat waves, because we’re getting them year after year after year. And what the study found is that in periods as short as two to eight years, even two years is enough for people to reframe their idea of normal. And if I can give an example of this one that I came across in a book by a historian of science called Jared Diamond. He had lived, he grew up in the American Midwest and he moved away from the Midwest for about 30 years. And then he came back, all those decades later. And the first thing he noticed was that he lived on the foothills of the Rockies and he was saying to people in his local town, what happened to the snowcaps? And they said, what snowcaps? And he said, but, you know, when I was a kid, the Rockies were snow covered and now it’s just the tips. And they said, no, no, that changes every year. So he went back and did the analysis. And sure enough, in certain years, they went up, in certain years, they went down. But over the 30 years, the snow cover steadily disappeared. But the locals didn’t notice because they were the frogs in the pan. They failed to notice the change because they were seeing it every year. And of course, within the climate and weather systems, as we know, we get a lot of variability from season to season and from year to year. And that variability makes it very hard, unless you’re looking at this through a scientific lens, it’s incredibly easy to be misled about the underlying pattern. So I guess that’s what science does. It looks at the underlying patterns to try and distinguish them against the noise of sort of short term variability. And the key finding, I suppose, that this study, in terms of applying it in a practical way, they’re saying that science communication that shows people charts that are slowly rising, is having no effect at all. So their advice to climate communicors is to show it in much more binary terms. In other words, show first, for example, an ice covered lake, then a picture of, as it was, say, 50 years ago, now a picture as it is now, to show people the dramatic change that’s happened over that time. And then, apparently, that registers and that gets people to realise that in fact, these changes are happening because they’re creeping up on us.
Matt Cooper: Okay, tell us about a judgement this week, in the International Court of Justice.
John Gibbons: This is probably, legally speaking, the biggest story of the year, I would say, with regard to climate change, without a doubt. So this is a ruling from the International Court of Justice. Now, the International Court of Justiceice is empowered by the United Nations, and every country on Earth who signed up to the United Nations, is supposedly bound by the International Court of Justice. Now, I appreciate that that some nations at the moment are taking a rather, shall we say, laissez faire approach to international law. But essentially, this is where we make international law. And what the court has ruled this week is that the failure of states to take strong action to protect climate systems from emissions may constitute what they describe as an internationally wrongful act. So what there’re essentially doing about is, I guess they’re putting sort of legal language and legal context on the climate emergency and saying that it’s no longer simply an individual discipline for countries to sort of do as they will on climate change. And how does this play out in practical terms? Let’s take a country like Ireland, that’s a huge per capita emitter. It is quite possible under the ICJ ruling, that another country that’s taking strong climate action could sue Ireland for saying, you guys are climate laggards and we’re going to sue you because the damage that you’re doing is affecting us. So there’s huge scope here, by the way, for countries in the global South to take legal action against countries, high polluting countries like Ireland, in the global North, for our failure, our absolute failure to act on the science.
Matt Cooper: Do you really think anything is going to happen as a result of this? I see the likes of Greenpeace are saying that this ICG advisory opinion marks a turning point for climate justice, as it is clarified once and for all the international climate obligations, the states, and most importantly, the consequences for beaches of these obligations. The message of the court is clear the production, consumption, and granting of licenses and subsidies for fossil fuels could be breaches of international law. John, nobody’s going to enforce that, are they?
John Gibbons: Well, the question is, because the ICJ is the highest court at a global level, they’re now allowing a framework to exist that they’re essentially saying that states have now got codified legal duties to protect against climate harm. I agree with you, Matt. There’s an issue with enforceability here. However, this opens the door for victims of harm to exercise a right of redress, and they’ve given them the framework or what they describe as the legal momentum. So it’s now considered to be legally possible, actionable, and ultimately enforcible. This, of course, will play out through the courts. Now, it won’t play out in the courts in the US any time, since they’re no longer functioning in the normal sense of the word. But the reality is, Matt, the world is a lot bigger than the US and normal law and the enforcement of law is continuing in many other parts of the world, specifically here in the EU. So we can expect this is a foundational ruling that sets down the international and the intergovernmental obligations on climate change. In a sense, if you think of the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel and climate change, that’s the scientific advisory. This now is the legal system coming along and saying: we’ve looked at the scientific advice, and we’re now saying this has profound legal implications for states, but also not just for states, maybe for sectors, maybe for companies, maybe high pollution companies like RyanAir, like CRH, who could be taken to task and legally challenged for their pollution, or maybe an organisation like Dublin Airport Authority, driving higher and higher emissions.
Matt Cooper: Okay, well, the United States is a member of the International Court of Justice, but it has withdrawn from its compulsory jurisdiction, and it often just ignores what the ICGACI says. So I think you can take it that in Trump’s America, it ain’t going to be taking any notice of this.
John Gibbons: I completely agree, but I do think it’s incredibly important, however depressing everything that comes out of America is, to understand that the rest of the world, by and large, is still operates in a lawful way and isn’t governed by felons. So we have to assume that the rule of law will continue to apply there. So I’m not inclined to shrug this off and and think that it’s just going to go away, in the same way that I’m not inclined to shrug off the fact that there’s tens of billions of EU fines coming in the direction of Ireland for our non-compliance with climate targets.
Matt Cooper: We’ve got to leave it there. John Gibbons, thank you.
Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 17th is below. Topics include district heating, ‘last chance tourism and reaction to sentencing of two men in England for cutting down an iconic sycamore tree.
I haven’t written for the Business Post in a couple of years, so returned in late June with the below piece, which they headlined: ‘We must stop celebrating climate destroyers as captains of industry’. Among the topics covered was Trump’s deranged all-out assault on science, not just climate science, but the actual life-and-death science of weather forecasting. Sure enough, deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service came home to bite in the early hours of July 4th, as catastrophic flooding in Texas led to over 100 deaths (some 27 positions in the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio are currently listed as vacant). Expect to see more and more instances of ordinary people being abandoned to their fate as climate-fuelled weather disasters intensify worldwide.
IF YOU’VE BEEN finding the daily news bulletins difficult to face lately, you’re by no means alone. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the world is rapidly descending in a new dark age of Idiocracy – one dominated by deranged politicians, predatory corporations and billionaire narcissists who have largely disengaged from objective reality.
In the process, the rich fruits of a century and more of scientific progress and human development have been flung into the furnace of history.
One week from now, the US government’s most important climate resource will be shut down. The website, Climate.gov, has been operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to convey crucial scientific and weather information to the public. (Clicking the above link now takes you to the Noaa ‘climate’ section instead, which includes a notice explaining how the site, under an Executive Order, has been taken down. In the ‘News’ section on this site, the latest post is dated June 12, suggesting the site is effectively being abandoned).
Noaa has played a vital role in tracking storms and helping communities to brace for impacts of hurricanes in particular. As its remit also includes climate research and modelling, it has now fallen under Donald Trump’s anti-climate fatwa, which has slashed billions of dollars from critical climate and weather research programmes.
Fossil fuel firms spent well over €400 million in the last US election cycle to lobby Trump and to buy off politicians in the US Congress. It has turned out to be a shrewd investment. During 2024, banks pledged a record level of investment in oil, gas and coal projects, at over €800 billion, up a quarter on the previous year. The same bankers have since quietly walked away from their highly publicised ‘climate pledges’ made in recent years.
In the decade since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change set urgent global limits on fossil fuel exploration and consumption, around €7.5 trillion has been poured by banks worldwide into fossil fuel infrastructure and investment.
The world’s largest corporations have directly caused a staggering €25 trillion in climate damages in recent decades, with half that total attributable to just 10 fossil fuel corporations, according to a study released in April. While the vast profits these companies make ends up enriching shareholders and executives, the crippling costs are offloaded onto the general public in the form of pollution and climate-fuelled extreme weather events.
This is just for starters. Research published in 2023 found that global heating of 2.7ºC would expose around two billion people to annual mean temperatures above 29ºC. For context, this is the equivalent to the hottest parts of the Sahara Desert today. As a result of these deadly temperatures, between one and two billion people would be forced to migrate to cooler regions to survive, and food production in these areas would likely collapse.
Further evidence of the threat posed to global food production came in research published in the top journal Nature this week. It warned that some of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions will suffer major declines in output as temperatures continue to climb and extreme weather events intensify. Global wheat and maize production may fall by around 40%, with devastating consequence for billions of people.
The vice is already tightening. In 2023, almost half of the Earth’s land area experienced at least one month of extreme drought. This is three times the area affected by drought in the 1980s. Europe is heating up at twice the global average, according to a 2024 assessment report from the European Environment Agency. Its conclusions were stark: “If decisive action is not taken now, most climate risks identified could reach critical or catastrophic levels by the end of this century. Hundreds of thousands of people would die from heatwaves, and economic losses from coastal floods alone could exceed €1 trillion”.
The warnings of climate scientists and activists have long been ignored, but one voice that may be far more difficult to dismiss is that of the insurance and reinsurance industry. A board member of global insurance giant, Allianz SE, Günther Thallinger recently warned bluntly that the climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism.
As temperature increases approach 3ºC, the damage will be so severe that the global insurance industry will be overwhelmed. This is already happening, Thallinger noted, as “entire regions are becoming uninsurable”. Even governments will be unable to cover the losses, as entire asset classes are wiped out, triggering a global economic collapse. “The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable”.
Violent weather inflicted over $2 trillion in damages in the past decade, with $450 billion occurring in just the last two years. The only possible solution, Thallinger added, is to eliminate all fossil fuel burning as quickly as possible and deploy renewable energy as an urgent global priority.
In a rational world, these dire warnings would be routinely front page news, with business leaders, media and politicians working together to address this existential crisis. We do not live in a rational world. Rather than hitting the brakes, we are actually accelerating towards oblivion.
For instance, the global aviation industry’s growth plans will see its emissions double by mid-century. In Ireland, the state-owned DAA has been lobbying to increase passenger numbers through Dublin Airport by a quarter, to 40 million a year, a move that would see emissions grow by a ruinous 22%.
Rather than being publicly vilified as reckless and selfish, the people fuelling this tragedy are instead feted as captains of industry and job creators whom we should applaud and admire. As one climate scientist observed sombrely: “we live in an age of fools”.
Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday June 26th is below. Topics include the EPA report on widespread illegal bog mining in Ireland; health and environmental impacts of noise pollution, plus, as France moves to ban cigarette smoking in many outdoor locations from July 1st, we discuss the hugely negative impact of the estimated 4.5 trillion discarded cigarette butts annually.
What better time to write about the wonders of solar energy than during the ultra-sunny month of May 2025? Some 6.5% of total electricity production in Ireland that month was from solar, amounting to 173,000 MWh. This a new record, and more than double the level achieved in May 2024. Clean, quiet, unobtrusive, easy to deploy, hugely popular and an excellent source of 100% domestically produced renewable energy, what’s not to like about solar? Well, as I explored in the below piece for the Irish Examiner, this game-changing new technology has incurred the wrath of certain vested interests, with politicians who really should know better jumping on the anti-solar bandwagon.
ONE OF THE best news stories for Ireland this decade has been the outstanding success of our fledgling solar industry.
Five years ago, it was virtually non-existent, yet today, over 140,000 households are selling electricity back to the grid, with this number increasing at the rate of 750 a week. Ireland is on track to have a whopping 8 GW of solar deployed nationally by 2030, mostly supplied by commercial solar farms.
Last summer, peak solar power on the Irish grid was the equivalent of the output of three gas-fired power stations. To hit our 2030 targets and help wean Ireland off its chronic dependence on imported climate-destroying fossil fuels, we are going to need to step up our ambition, and that requires getting our politicians four-square behind this great national bid for energy security.
In the Dáil in March, Taoiseach Micheál Martin was adamant that what he called the “game changer” for Ireland would be “our success and the pace at which we can deliver offshore renewables and solar power”.
However, just a few months earlier, then Tánaiste Martin was highly critical of the impact of large solar farms, warning last October against “40 shades of green being replaced with 40 shades of grey” as he claimed our countryside risks being festooned with solar panels.
Small wonder that the public and indeed the energy industry are confused as to whether or not Irish politicians actually support clean energy.
How accurate was Martin’s portrayal of our green fields being blighted by solar panels? According to the government’s own estimates, to fully meet our 2030 solar targets would require around 12,000 hectares of land.
If that sounds like a lot, it is in fact just 0.25% of Ireland’s total farmland, or not much more than is used for golf courses. Put it another way, 99.75% of Ireland’s green fields will be just as green in 2030.
A flashpoint of controversy has arisen in East Cork with the recent announcement that the Greenhills farm has entered a long-term solar lease. It had until recently been milking over 1,000 dairy cows.
Its conversion to solar will see this one farm produce enough electricity to power over 50,000 homes annually, while also avoiding thousands of tonnes of damaging carbon emissions.
The farm family will have a secure long-term income and the land will be ‘rested’ under the solar panels, which only occupy around a fifth of the total area of the farm, and sheep grazing could, if they wished, take place under the panels. The effects locally will be dramatic: removing 1,000 dairy cows means a sharp drop in the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, as well as toxic nitrous oxide and ammonia. It will also ease pressure on the local watercourses from the thousands of tonnes of slurry this herd would have spread across the landscape, plus the imported chemical nitrogen used to boost grass growth.
What’s more, international studies have found solar farms to support far more biodiversity than the surrounding farmland. Local Fianna Fáil TD – and dairy farmer – James O’Connor denounced the move as leading to “devastating consequences for the dairy industry”, claiming that solar farms offer “appalling” returns to the local community. He believes this shift in land use could “undermine” the dairy industry.
Quite how the loss of one third of 1% of farmland could trigger such catastrophic consequences is a mystery. In the Dáil, O’Connor denounced the “rampant growth” in solar farms. However, the actual rampant growth in rural Ireland in the last decade has been the untrammelled increase in the dairy herd, bringing a host of harmful consequences that are real, not imaginary.
Micheál Martin also alluded to the need to balance solar power with food security, yet 90% of our dairy production is for export markets, thus contributing very little to national food security.
Ireland, on the other hand, is a net importer of over €1 million of fossil fuels every hour, or nearly €10 billion a year. Surely cutting this massive import bill by developing clean, secure and locally produced energy is at least as much a national priority as providing bulk powdered milk to Chinese mums?
We also import four fifths of all the food we eat, as well as millions of tonnes of animal feed annually, so if we are truly worried about addressing food and energy security on this island, we have to take a long, hard look at our grossly oversized livestock sector.
We need far more diversification, not less, whether it is into solar farming, horticulture, tillage, agroforestry or organic systems generally. In a surprise intervention, Climate minister, Darragh O’Brien asked those objecting to the East Cork solar farm to “reflect on what they are doing…people need to see the bigger picture and think bigger”. He’s not wrong.
John Gibbons is an environmental writer and commentator
Regular visitors to ThinkOrSwim may have been wondering in recent months if I’ve finally gotten sense and packed it in, some 17 years and many hundreds of posts later, as the blog ground to a near halt throughout 2024. For those hoping that might have been the case: sorry to disappoint. I’ve spent much of last year on a large project, one that is still ongoing and that is unlikely to see the light of day any time soon.
To make space for the work involved in this undertaking, I cut back commissioned articles to the bare minimum in recent months, while continuing my weekly radio column on Matt Cooper’s Today FM show as well as other occasional radio and TV slots. Once my end of this project is (hopefully) fully put to bed in the next 2-3 months, I expect to be able to return to something along the lines of normal service, including making sure to keep the blog updated. Needless to say, once it’s in the public domain, I’ll be more than happy to discuss what I’ve been up to at length, but for now, the less said, perhaps the better.
With the kind of crazy stuff we’ve been writing/warning about here for many years now starting to really kick off in earnest, there’s no shortage of topics for ThinkOrSwim to get stuck into. One big piece of that has been the Musk-ification of Twitter, the once indispensable social media site that is now a cess pit of far right trolling and climate denial. I’ve been there since 2010, and over the years had built up a decent following and found it a brilliant public forum for the exchange of ideas and to make contacts around the world in the climate space. Alas, the billionaire toddler has burned it down. I will be deactivating my account later this month, but have since relocated to BlueSky, and find it to be refreshingly reminiscent of the early days of Twitter. If you’re not already there, do give it a try. You’ll find me @thinkorswim.bsky.social. Hope to see you there.
Meanwhile, all the best for whatever 2025 throws our way.
The Greens went into a three-way coalition as the junior partner in 2020 and have, by any reasonable measure, overperformed in terms of bending the national political agenda towards meaningful climate action. Of course, mistakes were made and opportunities missed along the way, but to focus on these would, in my view, be to miss the point entirely. The decade from 2011-2020 saw the Greens eliminated entirely from the Dáil, and it’s no coincidence that this was a Lost Decade on climate. We’ll miss them now they’re gone; so too I suspect will many rural TDs, for whom the Greens doubled up as handy bogeymen and whipping boys. Either way, with FF and FG cosying up to the rural independents and already licking their collective lips at going on a spree of road-building, we won’t have to wait too long to find out the difference the Greens did in fact make in the last government. I filed the below piece for the Irish Examiner in early December, as the likely shape of the next Dáil was still unclear.
THE GREENS are dead. Long live the Greens. There’s a saying in Irish politics that no good deed goes unpunished. The Green Party’s reward for a broadly successful and highly influential four-and-a-half years in government has been electoral evisceration.
After a surprisingly harmonious three-way working relationship, it became clear in the run-up to this election that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were prepared to ruthlessly abandon their erstwhile junior partner while using them as a lightning rod to deflect public anger away from themselves.
One of many hints in this direction was the presence of Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary at the launch of a Fine Gael candidate’s campaign, where the audience lapped up his call to “weed out the Greens”. O’Leary had spent years denigrating transport minister, Eamon Ryan, so his presence at a party event signalled it was officially open season on the Greens.
Paradoxically, around one in three Irish people claim to be “alarmed” about climate change, according to research produced by the EPA, yet in the lead-in to the election, fewer than 4% indicated this would be a critical issue in terms of voting.
All politics is, after all, local. It’s quite the statistic to consider that, in the midst of a rapidly deteriorating global climate crisis, only one in 25 people in Ireland are prepared to even consider casting a vote for the only party for whom climate is their core focus.
Former Fine Gael deputy leader Simon Coveney, who masterminded the environmentally ruinous industrial expansion of the dairy sector, noted that historians would praise the Greens for pushing climate change onto the mainstream political agenda. This is undoubtedly true, but will be cold comfort to those TDs who have just been ousted.
Having previously recovered, Lazarus-style, from electoral obliteration, the smart play in 2020 for the 12 Green TDs would have been to sit on the Opposition benches and make political capital by ridiculing the government on its dire environmental performance.
Instead, as its leader and sole surviving TD, Roderic O’Gorman noted: “You get political capital and you spend it.”
While this may seem hard for some in media and politics to countenance, the Greens are far more focused on protecting the environment than preserving their seats. In signing up for coalition government four years ago, most of its TDs knew they would in all probability be signing their own political death warrants, but they went ahead anyway.
From my reading of the manifestos of the three largest political parties, the bad news is that, eco rhetoric notwithstanding, none of them have even begun to grasp the nettle of progressive, let alone radical, climate action. On the campaign trail, Taoiseach Simon Harris repeated the phrase “the planet is on fire”, to the point where he completely drained it of all meaning.
The good news is that both the Social Democrats and Labour have placed environmental protection and climate action at the centre of their political agendas. SocDem leader Holly Cairns is also a farmer, but one prepared to stand up to the industrial livestock lobby. Her party backs phasing out the nitrates derogation, as well as reviving horticulture, expanding organics, incentivising herd reduction and supporting farmers in less polluting and more sustainable forms of agriculture.
Party colleague Jennifer Whitmore confirmed on Sunday that climate was a “red line issue” for the party.
Few doubt that Labour, under Ivana Bacik, is serious about the climate emergency, and keen to put the forgettable performance of Alan Kelly as environment minister in the mid-2010s behind them. Bacik was also generous in lauding what she called the tenacity of the Greens in the outgoing government, adding that Labour is “passionate” about climate action.
With FF/FG likely to have more than 85 seats in the next Dáil, they are clearly within touching distance of power but will need to partner with either one or both of the smaller left-leaning parties or else look to like-minded independents, some of whom have built their careers on doggedly opposing environmental action.
Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been happy to take the credit for climate action in recent years, and equally keen to let the Greens take the blame for the painful measures. It would be a profound betrayal on the part of both Simon Harris and Micheál Martin were they not to build a coalition featuring parties committed to progressive environmental agendas.
The new Dáil will be much the poorer for not featuring Eamon Ryan, arguably the most influential politician of the last decade, as well as Malcolm Noonan who excelled in nature protection. Some say the Greens weren’t radical enough, yet Neasa Hourican of the party’s radical left fared no better than the centrists.
As Senator Róisín Garvey reminded us over the weekend: “As Kermit the Frog used to say, it’s hard being Green”.
The horrifying floods that killed over 200 people in the Valencia region of Spain dominated the headlines in October 2024, but as I explained in a piece at the time for TheJournal.ie, these were far from isolated incidents. They are clearly linked to an ever intensifying pattern of extreme weather events as our global climate system reacts ever more violently to being overloaded with greenhouse gases. Remember, while 2024 may have been the hottest year ever recorded globally, it is likely to be one of the coolest years of the rest of the tumultuous 21st century.
WASHED AWAY AMID the chaos and the carnage in the Spanish city of Valencia as a year’s rainfall crashed down in barely four hours was the conceit that humanity is somehow in control of nature. This was always a dangerous falsehood, but now it is being painfully exposed as extreme weather disasters hit ever harder.
The death toll at the time of writing has passed 150 for this single incident. As recently as July 2021, horrific flash floods killed more than 180 people in Germany and Austria and caused damage costing billions of euros. Flooding this month in Nigeria killed at least 300 and impacted a further 1.2 million people.
Just the last two weeks have seen extreme flooding in southern France, the Liguria, Savona and Bologna regions in Italy, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Mexico, Taiwan, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Andalucía in Spain, Marrakech in Morocco, Oman and Malaysia.
Breaking the wrong records
Meanwhile, October 2024 has seen temperature records smashed around the world. By 15 October, Phoenix, Arizona had endured the longest heatwave in US history, with 21 consecutive hottest-ever days, breaking the previous record set during the disastrous Dust Bowl era in 1936.
Closer to home, English farmers have just endured the second worst food harvest on record, as persistent heavy rains turned entire regions into morasses. If by now you are beginning to sense that there’s a clear pattern emerging, you are absolutely correct.
Commenting on the flooding disaster in Valencia, Dr Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) expert group stated: “No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change; with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall.”
In the first week of October, the 2024 State of the Climate report was published by a panel of top specialists. Its conclusions were stark: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled”, they wrote.
This report, endorsed by more than 15,000 practising climate scientists, added that we are witnessing “the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”
Nothing in 100 centuries of human civilisation can compare with today’s global climate crisis. “We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo”, the scientists warned.
All this chaos and devastation, bear in mind, is being wrought as a result of a rise in global average surface temperatures of around 1.3ºC. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is the largest shift in planetary climatic conditions since the end of the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. On our current pathway, worse, infinitely worse, is in store.
A new review of the 10 worst extreme weather events of the last 20 years by WWA researchers concluded that every event had been made more intense as a result of human-caused climate change. “If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue”, the report noted.
Political will
This is not inevitable. The technologies exist to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel usage. Renewable energy is now in almost all cases cheaper than fossil fuels, yet governments continue to subsidise oil, coal and gas burning. In Ireland alone, €2.9 billion was spent in subsidising fossil fuels in 2021 alone, much of this to enable cheap aviation via tax-free jet kerosene.
Ireland’s per capita carbon emissions are among the very highest in the EU, largely thanks to our highly polluting livestock herd, which is a major contributor to global warming due to its release of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. While politicians like Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin talk the talk on climate, with statements like “the planet is on fire”, they also stand squarely behind the major polluters, be they the aviation industry, data centres or the industrial livestock sector.
Nor are they alone. There is little indication that any of our main political parties, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Sinn Féin have any real appetite to challenge our heavily polluting business-as-usual model predicated on relentless economic growth. The system that is churning out more and more flying, more SUVs, more throwaway consumerism and ever more meat-rich diets is the very system that is accelerating humanity and much of the natural world towards the climate abyss.
Despite this, most Irish politicians, policymakers and the great majority of our media are either oblivious or completely indifferent to this epic unfolding tragedy. You may by now think I’m overstating the risks and running well ahead of the science. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The recently published UN Emissions Gap report found that current policies put in place by governments around the world take us to a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1ºC this century. A major scientific study on the ‘future of the human climate niche’ found that over the next 50 years around one-fifth of the land surface of the Earth will become too hot for human habitation. This will likely force between one and three billion people to migrate as crops fail, animals die and their homelands have to be abandoned. But migrate to where?
Time to look up
Put simply, this is an impending tragedy quite unlike anything in human history, a disaster against which even the world wars of the 20th century pale into near-insignificance.
Still unconvinced? Did you know that, globally, 2023 was not just the hottest year on the instrumental record, but almost certainly the hottest year on Earth for the last 125,000 years? Well, summer 2024 has topped even that, and this year as a whole is now on track to overtake 2023 as the hottest year on record.
We now know where all this is headed. The only question remaining is whether we are prepared to change course. Some brave individuals and groups, including Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil have been trying to raise the alarm, using disruptive but non-violent tactics. They have been met with police violence, media ridicule and long prison sentences.
The reality remains the same: either we rapidly bring the era of fossil fuels to an end, or climate collapse will assuredly bring human civilisation to a fiery end. The choice, for now, is ours.
By any standards, 2024 was a grim year for armed conflict worldwide. At the time I filed this piece in the Irish Times in February of that year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was bogged down in a bloody stalemate, while the Israeli rampage of slaughter in Gaza was already well underway. Things, of course, can always get worse, as we are about to find out with the installation of the second Trump regime in Washington and the likely accelerated unravelling of our globalised world into heavily armed camps in the months and years ahead. This is playing out against the backdrop of a destabilising climate system, with acute and growing pressures on food production, access to clean water and a scramble for diminishing resources. The spectre of forced climate mass migration also looms, with its potential to ignite a veritable geo-political powder keg.
AS THE world heats up, so too do the risks of armed conflict. In 2022, a total of 56 countries worldwide experienced violent conflict, while the number of resultant fatalities that year was the highest in more than four decades.
In all probability, 2023 was even worse, given the bloody conflict that has erupted in Gaza since last October, one that threatens to escalate into a regional conflagration. As tensions escalate, so also has military spending. This has risen continuously since the late 1990s, hitting an astonishing $2.24 trillion (€2.07 trillion) worldwide in 2022.
Researchers now estimate that some 5.5 per cent of total carbon emissions are directly attributable to the world’s militaries. This is greater, for instance, than all global aviation. In fact, were the military a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest single emitter.
Its environmental impacts go far beyond simply tallying emissions. “Militarism is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavour”, according to sociologist Prof Kenneth Gould.
Exact details are, however, difficult to obtain, as much military activity is shrouded in secrecy. At the insistence of the United States, the carbon impacts of the world’s militaries were specifically excluded from the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015 only requires “voluntary” reporting of military-related emissions, and there was no tally of such emissions in the recent Cop28 conference in Dubai.
While in the past, conflicts arose from a wide range of causes, today these risks have been amplified by global environmental destabilisation. “I see climate change as the overarching existential threat, one that dwarfs so many other issues,” says Mark Mellett, vice-admiral and former chief of staff of the Defence Forces.
As climate change intensifies, “we are going to see extraordinary penalties in terms of resources, in terms of people being dislocated. One degree of temperature rise will impact billions, not millions, yet we’re on track for that, with current projections of probably 2.7 degrees”, Mellett says. “This is an extraordinary future.”
Mellett, who has a PhD in environmental governance, believes the most critical climate impact coming down the tracks is forced migration which will, he believes, “challenge the cohesion of the institutions of the European Union; the only way it can be addressed is through mitigation”. Forced migration, he stresses, is “only a symptom of a much more serious problem that needs to be dealt with at source”.
The relationship between climate change and conflict is complex and non-linear. The US military, by far the world’s largest, classifies climate as a “threat multiplier”. The increasing frequency and intensity of weather disasters is putting a strain on military resources, as they are typically among the first responders in disaster zones. In addition, sea-level rise, hurricane damage and extreme flooding events have cost the US military billions of dollars in recent years in direct damage to bases and equipment.
An international study of the 25 countries worldwide reckoned to be most vulnerable to climate impacts found 14 involved in conflict. Many of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the world that has been already severely impacted by climate change.
The irony for countries such as Yemen, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel region is that they have contributed only a negligible amount of the carbon emissions that are now devastating their regions, notes Dr Rory Finegan, assistant professor of military history and strategic studies at Maynooth University.
It is the high-emitting countries and regions, including Europe and the US, that bear the brunt of responsibility for climate damages. This was, for the first time, addressed at Cop28 with the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund to help compensate countries for climate impacts not of their making.
However, the total so far committed to this fund is about €700 million, a veritable drop in the bucket measured against climate impacts already running into hundreds of billions of euro annually.
A major study published in 2020 in the journal Nature Sustainability found what its authors described as the human climate niche is surprisingly narrow. As global temperatures continue to climb, the study projected that between one and two billion people will be facing “unlivable” temperatures later this century, leading to forced migrations on a scale never before experienced by humans.
The social, political, economic and security implications of such a large movement of people across national borders are almost unimaginably severe. While climate and ecological destabilisation are clearly major risk factors increasing the risk of armed conflict, the environmental impacts of conflict are equally acute.
“Down through the millennia, a scorched earth policy was often among the military tactics being used,” adds Finegan, who served in the Defence Forces for 36 years before moving into academia. “You are now seeing this being used in a lot of the African conflicts, including in Chad and the DRC, where crops are being deliberately destroyed and wells being poisoned; this all just feeds into the cycle of misery.”
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in the past decade, the number of people forcibly displaced has doubled to almost 80 million worldwide, comprising 35 million refugees and 45 million internally displaced. This data predates both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, so it is likely an underestimate.
While forced migration as a consequence of climate change represents a vast threat to global security in the medium term, equally pressing and related issues include acute water shortages as well as reductions in global food production as a result of ever more destructive extreme weather events.
Another study in Nature Sustainability last year found conflicts involving water have risen sharply since 2000. In the decade to 2010, there were rarely more than 25 incidents a year globally. By 2018, this had increased five-fold, to more than 125 – while in 2022, it doubled again, to just more than 250.
The devastating civil war that has raged in Syria since 2011 was triggered at least in part by acute water shortages that followed the most severe regional drought in some 800 years. A World Weather Attribution study found that this drought was made 25 times more likely as a result of climate change.
The double irony of climate and conflict is the feedback loop that connects them. Armed conflict destroys infrastructure and can lead to widespread contamination of farmland and waterways. Conflict often forces farmers to abandon their fields and livestock, which in turn exacerbates the very conditions, such as hunger and water shortages, that stoke a vicious cycle of further conflict.
Some of this conflict arises between pastoralists and settled farmers, as they are pushed into competition for land and access to water as a result either of climate change or forced displacement arising from warfare.
A further element increasing pressure, Mellett says, is “the large rise in population that is happening in theatres like Africa”. The continent’s population has grown more than five-fold since 1960 and, barring disasters, Africa’s population is expected to double by 2050.
Since the end of the second World War, Europe in particular has enjoyed decades of peace and security. “That’s all in the crosshairs now, as we move forward with these new temperature profiles, because significant parts of the world will become uninhabitable”. In international law, there is no clear recognition of what constitutes a climate refugee, he underlines.
We are, Mellett adds, “a generation that will be accused of intergenerational sabotage in years to come, because we have consumed so far beyond what is sustainable – it’s greedy, frankly. If we don’t live sustainably, we are accepting that we simply don’t care about future generations.”
The ecological scars of warfare can last for decades. Iraq is still dealing with the fallout from the widespread use of depleted uranium by US troops in the 1990 Gulf War. Finegan says the “deliberate use of chemical warfare by the US in Vietnam, where large tracts of the jungle were defoliated with Agent Orange, still has very tragic residual effects on the Vietnamese population”.
While long-range forecasting is fraught with uncertainty, it seems inevitable the 21st century will be defined by growing political tension and conflict as billions of people struggle for scarce resources and for survival on a rapidly heating, ecologically depleted planet.
In a rush of optimism, I had gone for a bigger venue – the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin’s Dawson Street – which realistically needed upwards 75 attendees to look reasonably busy. As the date approached, my anxiety intensified as I scrambled to complete a series of last minute tasks related to the launch.
