Planetary lines we shouldn’t cross

Posted on October 25, 2023 by John Gibbons

I filed this piece with Village magazine in October, charting the growing number of critical planetary boundaries that have now been breached, and why this matters.

ON ANCIENT mariners’ maps, areas of uncharted waters were often marked with illustrations of dragons and other mythological creatures to signal to the unwary that dangers lay ahead.

The modern equivalent of ‘Here be dragons’ is a project which began in the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009, with the aim of graphically mapping the nine key “planetary boundaries” beyond which the dragons of ecological disaster lay in wait.

There have been two major updates on the original 2009 report, the latest of which was published this summer. The multidisciplinary team that carried out the research underpinning the report looked at climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, changes in the use of land and fresh water and the presence of the elements nitrogen and phosphorus.

Nothing was viewed in isolation; in dynamic Earth systems, every element interacts in complex and sometimes unexpected ways with every other element. “It’s pretty alarming: We are living on a planet unlike anything any humans have seen before”, according to Jonathan Foley, director of Project Drawdown, who was involved in the original research.

Briefly, this year’s update established that six of these critical boundaries for the maintenance of a stable climate system and overall integrity of the biosphere have now been breached, with two others approaching the red zone.

Only one of the nine boundaries is currently considered to be in stable and satisfactory condition, and ironically, this is global ozone. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, damage to the stratospheric ozone layer was first of all established theoretically, then by observations, leading to a huge public reaction and strong and concerted intergovernmental action.

This was spearheaded by the US, culminating in the signing of the Montreal Protocol in 1987 and the rapid phasing out of CFCs, the seemingly inert man-made chemicals that were wreaking havoc in the upper atmosphere.

Make no mistake, we had a narrow escape. Had that action not been taken then, much of the southern hemisphere in particular would by now be bathed in deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation.

Among the most severely critical boundary breaches now occurring are as a result of the overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus, primarily as fertilizers. These chemicals are devastating many of the world’s waterways, leading to algal blooms and oxygen-free dead zones.

In Ireland, the toxic effects of nutrient overload into our waterways are becoming ever more apparent. Lough Neagh, the vast lake in Northern Ireland, is severely damaged as a result mainly of runoff from agriculture, as well as raw sewage and other contaminants.

Similar blooms are being reported across Irish lakes and estuaries, a situation that has notably worsened since the abolition of dairy quotas in 2015 and the subsequent rush to intensify industrial-scale dairying operations, using our political leverage at EU level to allow thousands of Irish farmers a derogation to exceed the EU’s scientifically established maximum safe limits for nitrates.

The overloading of the global atmosphere with powerful heat-trapping gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, means we have fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere of an entire planet, and this is playing out, as predicted, in ever more extreme weather events, from droughts, heatwaves and flooding events to more powerful storm systems.

The ferocious summer of 2023, which has seen devastating impacts across much of the northern hemisphere, is a harbinger of a far more dangerous future, with rising sea levels, coastal inundation and killer heatwaves and flooding disasters that force the permanent abandonment of entire regions.

While life is about to become much more precarious and difficult for many millions of people, human impacts have already laid waste to much of the natural world, pushing tens of thousands of species into extinction and drastically reducing both the numbers and range of millions more.

This is the planetary boundary known as ‘biosphere integrity’ and the world’s genetic diversity has been severely depleted as a result of human actions. The current extinction rate is thousands of times higher than the natural or background extinction rate. A key driver of extinction has been the destruction of ecosystems and their sequestration for agriculture, fishing, mining, fossil fuel extraction and commercial forestry.

Another boundary that has been smashed is termed novel entities. This innocuous phrase describes the witches brew of tens of thousands of toxic artificial chemicals, from plastics and pesticides to PFAs, the so-called forever chemicals that have been casually unleashed into the biosphere.

Even in the relatively well regulated European Union, around 80% of man-made chemicals are brought into use with little or no testing or true understanding of their long-term impacts.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, breaching one critical planetary boundary is unfortunate; to breach six is beginning to look like carelessness.

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When it gets too hot, things die

Posted on October 18, 2023 by John Gibbons

Heat is a silent, stealthy killer. As climate change accelerates, the regions in the world becoming too hot for human habitation or even survival are set to expand rapidly. US journalist Jeff Goodell has been on the climate beat for decades and I filed this review of his book for the Business Post in October.

THE HARSHEST truth about life on a rapidly heating planet is this: “as temperatures rise, a lot of living things will die, and that may include people you know and love”. This is how environmental journalist Jeff Goodell sets out his stall.

Heat is a stealthy but relentless killer. As temperatures rise, “the sun feels like the barrel of a gun pointed at you. Plants look like they’re crying. Birds vanish from the sky, the air smells burned.”

Extreme heat, Goodell writes, is an entirely human artifact, “a legacy of human civilisation as real as the Great Wall of China” in publishing, timing is everything. His book, ‘The heat will kill you first’ has been propelled to the top of the US bestseller list as its release coincided with scorching temperatures worldwide. 2023 is on target to be the hottest year ever recorded globally.

There is a paradox at the heart of our relationship with heat. For those of us living in cooler climes like Ireland, the arrival of a heatwave is treated like an unofficial national holiday. News media persist in illustrating stories about dangerous heatwaves with images of people sunning themselves on the beach.

“The way we communicate about extreme heat is often distorted by nostalgia for a climate that no longer exists, Goodell’s eminently readable book argues. “Part of this distortion has to do with the simple fact that people love warm weather”.

For the last several thousand years, Earth has enjoyed a remarkably stable climate, which scientists describe as “Goldilocks” conditions “not too hot, not too cold”. This era is now at an abrupt end.

The benign conditions that allowed agriculture to flourish are also disappearing. As global temperatures rise, yields of food staples such as wheat and rice decline. Livestock are vulnerable too. In the summer of 2022, thousands of cattle in feed lots in Kansas died as a result of extreme heat.

The spectre of hunger is returning. In 2019, around 145 million people worldwide faced acute food insecurity. By last year, that number had almost trebled, to 345 million.

In the US, some 30 million acres of land is given over to growing crops to fuel cars and trucks, while globally, aquifers are being pumped dry, often to grow water-intensive crops such as alfalfa to feed to cattle.

Until relatively recently, it was considered impossible to establish whether any specific extreme weather event could be definitively linked to climate change. That is no longer the case. The new science of extreme event attribution allows almost real-time assessments to be made.

“Extreme event attribution is the first science ever developed with the court in mind”, according to climatologist, Dr Friederike Otto, a pioneer in this field. Asked if she thought companies like ExxonMobil could ever be held liable in a court for deaths in an extreme heat wave, Otto replied: “Not only can I imagine it, I believe it will happen sooner than you think”.

Higher global temperatures are a boon for many species humans regard as dangerous pests, such as mosquitoes, and with them, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue are sweeping northwards.

Pine beetles are thriving in warming climates. For them, “the heat was like guzzling Red Bull. Their metabolism revved up and they moved like a marauding army through thousand-acre stands of Jeffrey pines”.

For Goodell, who has spent decades covering the environmental beat and is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, global warming “is the great story of our time, one that I feel privileged to tell. Yes, it gets dark sometimes, but it is also endlessly inspiring”.

Goodell’s taut, accessible journalistic style infuses the narrative with urgency, sweeping the reader from crisis to crisis while also relating the human stories of the marginalised, such as migrants and farm labourers, who are bearing the brunt of the suffering as the mercury ratchets up relentlessly.

Various adaptations are being explored in a bid to cope with rising temperatures, from air conditioning to moving food production under glass, but Goodell cautions that unless we drastically cut the fossil fuel emissions driving this crisis, all will ultimately be in vain.

“In the end, there’s no getting around the laws of physics and biology. When it gets too hot, things die. That’s just how it works”.

The Heat Will Kill You First
By Jeff Goodell
Little, Brown, $29

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Green shoots of climate progress appear

Posted on October 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

Budget 2024 was announced in mid-October and was, by any stretch, a very good day for the Greens in government. Despite being the perennial butt of political and media jokes, they have by and large kept their heads down and beavered away quietly on delivering an ambitious change agenda. I filed this comment piece for the Irish Examiner.

THE TRUE significance of Budget 2024 from an environmental point of view may be best understood by looking at our recent past. Over the last two decades, Ireland’s collective response to the emerging climate and biodiversity crises has been, at best, piecemeal and at worst, recklessly negligent.

This can be most clearly illustrated by considering the fate of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the agency charged with managing all the State’s extensive natural amenities, as well as policing crimes against wildlife. In 2008, its budget was 46.6 million, but the Fine Gael-led coalition gutted the organisation as part of its post-crash austerity programme, with funding falling by 70% to just 14 million by 2011.

While the NPWS was by no means the only State agency to see its funding slashed, the severity of the cuts were indicative of an indifference bordering on hostility to nature protection that seemed to have been the zeitgeist of the time.

This was best captured by then agriculture minister, Simon Coveney’s declaration in April 2015 that aggressive expansion plans for the Irish dairy sector should not be constrained by petty concerns over emissions or pollution. “Nobody in the Irish administration ever suggested that agriculture was going to reduce emissions long term”, as Coveney’s remarkably candid assessment at the time.

Elections matter. The arrival of a cohort of 12 Green Party TDs into government in 2020 was on the back of the huge climate marches of the previous year and indicated that public anxiety about environmental issues had nudged from the fringes and was moving slowly towards the heart of political decision-making.

The centrepiece of Budget 2024 from an ecological standpoint is undoubtedly the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund, which is due to reach 14 billion by 2030, rising in annual increments of 2 billion, using a portion of our windfall in corporate taxes.

Within this fund, according to finance minister, Michael McGrath, there is a climate and nature component worth over 3 billion, which will be available for projects between 2026-2030. The funds will be invested and managed by the National Treasury Management Agency and subject to State audit.

By any standards, this is a massive win for the Greens, who had watched much of the progressive environmental agenda developed during their first stint in government from 2007 to 2011 being quickly eviscerated. Recession-proofing this fund and placing it beyond the whims of the next minister or administration is seen as a way of firewalling major climate investment projects well into the next decade.

“This could be the turning point we’ve waited for”, commented ecologist Pádraic Fogarty. “This is serious money, over the longer term, to deliver real changes, for farmers and for communities”.

In introducing the government’s climate measures, it was heartening to see Minister McGrath frame them in their wider context. “In recent weeks and months, we have again seen the devastating impact of climate change on communities across the globe. Extreme heatwaves, droughts and wildfires have swept many parts of the world, and 2023 is now virtually certain to be the warmest year since records began in the mid-1800s”.

It is doubtful that many of the TDs who gathered to listen to the budget speech can have remembered heading into the Dáil in their shirt sleeves in mid-October as temperatures remained eerily high in recent days, well above 20ºC in a month where the average high temperature is just 13ºC. However pleasant, an October heatwave in Ireland is as ominous as it is unexpected.

Despite what the naysayers would have us believe, the green transition is in fact gathering pace in Ireland. Last month, fully electric cars were the single biggest seller in Ireland, with over 26% of sales, outselling either diesel or petrol models for the first time. This trend is only going in one direction, and the budget extended VRT relief on EVs up to the value of €50,000 until the end of 2025.

A few years ago, the idea of solar panels being commonplace on Irish homes would have sounded fanciful. However, a combination of high electricity prices and the recent removal of VAT on solar panels has seen their uptake more than double in 2023.

The budget also doubled to €400 the amount of tax-free income a homeowner can earn by selling surplus electricity back to the grid, as well as sensibly removing VAT on solar panels for schools. Apart from producing free electricity, school solar installations could present a valuable practical learning opportunity for children on the clean energy transition.

The government’s budget for energy transformation, including retrofitting, is now approaching half a billion euros, including €380 million for residential and community schemes operated by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI).

This cost is fully funded by carbon tax revenues. Like them or not, carbon taxes really do work. By gradually raising the price on highly polluting products and using the revenues to make cleaner, greener alternatives affordable, they ease the pain of the energy transition while sending a clear longer term signal to the market that clean energy is the only game in town.

Environment and climate minister, Eamon Ryan describes Ireland’s home retrofitting plan as “one of the most ambitious in Europe” with around 40,000 home energy upgrades due to be completed this year. Assuming the momentum is maintained and even modestly increased, this could see half a million Irish homes receive a significant energy upgrade in the next 10 years or so.

Ireland’s big opportunity over the next decade is in rapidly scaling up our renewable energy production, including onshore and offshore wind as well as solar power.

Fossil fuel interests are fighting an intense rear-guard action to try to scupper this transition. They are dangling such nebulous prospects as ‘clean gas’ and HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) as alternatives to oil and gas.

In reality, these create more problems than solutions, and are little more than a distraction from the serious business of electrifying transport, home heating and much of our industrial sectors.

While it tends to grab fewer headlines, the scale of changes being rolled out mean that key bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the SEAI, NWPS and the Department of Environment and Climate need not just funding but also the skilled staff to ensure that political plans get implemented.

And, after years of chronic underfunding and political neglect, nature and heritage protection has come roaring back. Junior minister Malcolm Noonan secured €166 million for built and natural heritage, which included a €67.5 million budget for the NWPS, up 28% on last year, and more than quadrupled since the dark days of a decade ago.

For a country that trades internationally on its ‘green’ reputation, the political hostility to nature and biodiversity protection and willingness to coddle vested interests has long been a source of national shame. We can and must do better, much better.

Long after Budget 2024 is a footnote in the history books, it’s likely that the visionary and potentially game-changing Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund will be what it’s best remembered for.

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The hazards of homicidal pragmatism

Posted on October 7, 2023 by John Gibbons

Whatever you may think of the Catholic Church (I’m certainly not a fan), it’s hard to dispute the fact that the current pope is unlike any of his predecessors. As I explained in the Irish Examiner in October, he has once again emerged as a genuine global leader on demanding action on the climate emergency, and, this time out, has even socked it to climate deniers, so what’s not to like?

IN HIS YOUTH, Pope Francis was an accomplished amateur boxer. And, with a master’s degree in chemistry, the science-literate pontiff has brains as well as brawn.

The first-ever pope from the global south, Francis also brings the perspective of the colonised and the dispossessed to the job, something that had been notably missing from the corridors of power.

Eight years ago, he published a 200-page encyclical, titled Laudato Si. It was a hard-hitting appeal for urgent action to address the global climate and biodiversity crisis, to arrest what he called the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem”.

He also roundly rejected bare-knuckle capitalism and trickle-down economics as a “failed theory”. His ecological plea came wrapped in a warning: “Destroy creation and creation will destroy us”.

While it can be difficult to gauge the precise effect of such an intervention, it was timed to influence the COP15 climate conference in Paris.

Whether or not it was a coincidence, the Paris Agreement in late 2015 was the biggest breakthrough in climate diplomacy in the last two decades.

Now, Francis is back in the ring. His new encyclical, titled Laudate Deum (Praise God) pulls no punches in setting out the scale of the existential crisis we now face, while ripping into those who have stymied decisive action on the climate emergency, putting humanity in grave danger in the process.

“The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point” he stated, deploying a clarity of language rare among world leaders, but striking a similarly strident tone as that being adopted by UN secretary-general, António Guterres.

The timing of his latest intervention is an unapologetic attempt to influence the COP28 climate negotiations being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a petro-state.

“Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident”.

He singled out the corrosive role of climate denial: “In recent years, some have chosen to deride these facts. They bring up allegedly solid scientific data, like the fact that the planet has always had, and will have, periods of cooling and warming” to misrepresent the science.

“In order to ridicule those who speak of global warming, it is pointed out that intermittent periods of extreme cold regularly occur”, Francis noted.

The 86-year-old pontiff’s grasp of scientific nuance and understanding of detail around the climate emergency would put many a newspaper editor, political correspondent or senior broadcaster to shame.

Striking to the nub of the issue, he stated: “Regrettably, the climate crisis is not exactly a matter that interests the great economic powers, whose concern is with the greatest profit possible at minimal cost and in the shortest amount of time”.

The pope’s timing is serendipitous. The release of his encyclical coincided with news that September 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest September ever recorded, a record it now shares with June, July, and August of this year.

Worse, the sudden spike in September temperatures, rising an unprecedented 0.5C over the previous record, has stunned even climate scientists.

University of Reading climatologist, Ed Hawkins summed up the general reaction among experts as follows: “Surprising. Astounding. Staggering. Unnerving. Bewildering. Flabbergasting. Disquieting. Gobsmacking. Shocking. Mind boggling”.

We appear to be perilously close to a drastic shift in the Earth’s climate system or, as the pope put it, there is “the real possibility that we are approaching a critical point”, adding that while we are now unable to halt the “enormous damage we have caused, we barely have time to prevent even more tragic damage”.

While addressing climate and biodiversity issues is often framed in technocratic terms, in reality it is in essence a moral question.

Humans have unleashed god-like power with which to lay waste to much of the natural world, but the carnage is often hidden.

“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion”, Francis says.

Without a revolution in thought that re-frames humanity as a part of nature and operating within its boundaries, there is little hope of avoiding an epic global tragedy. The current dependence on techno-fixes is, he added, “a form of homicidal pragmatism”.

He noted that those who speak up for nature are derided by the powerful and “subject to ridicule by economic interests”, but they are nonetheless on the right side of history. He faces “dismissive and scarcely reasonable opinions, even within the Catholic Church”.

This is certainly borne out in Ireland, where some of the most strident attacks on environmental defenders and climate activists comes from commentators and politicians who make great play of their Catholic faith, while feeling free to discard the Pope’s teachings when it conflicts with their own ideology.

The ecological crisis is an existential emergency, challenging everything it means to be human, and profoundly questioning our place in the world.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, if any, what Francis has to say has never felt more urgent.

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What happens when the law no longer protects us?

Posted on September 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

Imagine you could somehow project yourself 10 or 20 years into the future, and were looking back at the world in the 2020s, in full knowledge of the slow-motion catastrophe that was unfolding. What would you have done differently? I suspect most of us probably would have major regrets, but this knowledge doesn’t make putting your neck on the line today any easier, as I wrote in the Irish Examiner in September.

IF YOU KNEW for certain that something unimaginably terrible was going to happen, yet the only possible way it could be prevented is by breaking the law, would you do it?

And, if by taking this action, you were likely to face public vilification, prosecution, and possible imprisonment, would you still do it? This is the dilemma facing many people in today’s environmental and climate movement.

As British climate activist and broadcaster Chris Packham put it last week: “We are sleepwalking to an apocalypse”. Just hours before his documentary, titled Is it Time to Break the Law? was aired on Channel 4, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak did a pre-election U-turn by abandoning a series of key environmental pledges.

It was perhaps the perfect curtain-raiser to the programme, helping to dispel any lingering notion that today’s political classes have the slightest interest in taking the kinds of courageous (and unpopular) decisions necessary to avert disaster.

We are, Packham noted wryly, “starting here from a point that if we don’t do something, we are doomed”. While groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil have engaged in a series of mildly disruptive actions, none have come even close to crossing the line into violence.

Most of the great social and political struggles, from the suffragette movement to abolishing slavery and the 20th-century civil rights, anti-colonial, and anti-Apartheid movements, have all entailed violent direct action.

British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested seven times, enduring beatings and solitary confinement. As she said during her trial in October 1908: “We are here not because we are law-breakers. We are here in our efforts to become law-makers”.

Other suffragettes also engaged in arson and vandalism, with Emily Davison killed after throwing herself under the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Who now still argues that these extreme actions, in the face of intractable discrimination, were not justified?

Today, climate activists are “depicted as dangerous radicals, yet the truly dangerous radicals are the countries and firms continuing to burn fossil fuels”, in the words of UN secretary general António Guterres.

There have been multiple reports of climate protesters engaged in peaceful actions, such as sit-ins on roads, being assaulted by members of the public, as well as being arrested and imprisoned.

The UK government’s new Public Order Bill, not dissimilar to repressive legislation in Russia, has effectively criminalised peaceful protests as innocuous as holding up a poster.

Other groups in society, from farmers to trade unionists, occasionally engage in disruptive street protests, but it is almost unheard of for them to be physically assaulted in the process.

Anger against climate protesters in the UK “has been fuelled by right-wing media”, Packham observed. “The public has been conditioned to hate them”.

Media coverage frequently employs loaded language like ‘zealots’ and ‘fanatics’  to stoke public antipathy against peaceful protestors who are acting not for their own gain but to draw attention to a dire ecological emergency that is becoming more apparent with every passing month.

For those involved in climate activism, these are dark, dark days. “I’ve been part of a generation of conservationists who’ve completely failed to protect the thing they’re meant to love”, Packham said.

Having been involved for years in peaceful campaigning, signing petitions, and going on marches, he is left with the stark reality that “none of it has worked; perhaps I have to take another route. Is it time for me to break the law?”

Packham’s experience mirrors my own, and doubtless, that of many other campaigners. We are losing badly, and every day of inaction takes us a day closer to irreversible climate breakdown and an unspeakable global tragedy.

We all do whatever we can. As a journalist, I have written hundreds of articles explaining the crisis and pleading for urgent action, attended numerous meetings and protests, and taken part in countless talks and interviews.

Yet, like Packham, I remain haunted by the sense that our best efforts are hopelessly inadequate.

Other than a couple of youthful indiscretions, I have remained on the right side of the law, and am grateful to live in a democratic country with a police force and judiciary that is broadly trusted. My climate activism likewise has been within the law, yet it is manifestly failing to make a difference.

In an era of climate breakdown, with our planetary life support systems unravelling before our eyes, the only truly radical action is to do nothing and meekly accept our fate.

“I’ve reached a point where I consider [breaking the law] the ethically responsible thing to do,” Packham concluded. Or, as civil rights activist Martin Luther King memorably put it: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”.

If the law seems more concerned with shielding polluters and coddling lobbyists, then yes, maybe we have to fight back. Frankly, what other choices do we now have?

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Is insurance the first climate domino to fall?

Posted on September 14, 2023 by John Gibbons

While most economists and much of the financial system is still living in la la land when it comes to failing to account for the climate emergency, one sector where the impacts are already piling up is the global insurance industry. It in turn underpins national and transnational commerce as well as being a vital component of the housing sector. No insurance, no mortgage, as I explored in the Irish Examiner in September.

FOR MOST OF us, most of the time, insurance is just another bill that drops on the mat once or twice a year for our home or car. And while sometimes it might be tempting not to bother renewing, the nagging possibility, however slight, of being financially wiped out by a catastrophe, such as a house fire or major flood damage, means we keep on paying those annoying annual premia.

Typically, it is assumed that in any given year, a small number of claims will be made per 1,000 vehicles or homes covered. The pooled income then allows a few big payouts to be made. What happens, however, if a city is hit by a storm or extreme flooding event that destroys thousands of cars and houses?

The home insurance market in particular is beginning to rapidly unravel in parts of the world as extreme weather events ratchet up. In the first eight months of 2023 in the US, there have been 23 ‘natural disasters’ where damage has exceeded $1bn, making it already the worst year on record, with almost four months remaining.

“Climate change is the number one long-term risk out there“, according to Jerome Haegeli, chief economist with re-insurance giant, Swiss Re.

Calculating insurable risk depends on complex mathematical modelling, but for all their sophistication, almost all models have a fundamental flaw in that they base current and future risk on what has happened in the past.

Accelerating climate change means the risks are increasing, in scale, frequency and in unpredictability. Last May, State Farm Insurance, the largest insurer in California halted all its new home policies in the state due to what it described as “growing catastrophic exposure” wildfire risk in particular.

In the last six years, California alone has experienced more than $30bn in insurable losses as a direct result of wildfires fuelled by rising temperatures. In March, Eric Andersen, president of Aon PLC stated that climate change has created “a crisis of confidence around the ability to predict loss”.

Ominously, Anderson added that “just as the US economy was over-exposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is over-exposed to climate risk”. Hurricanes, wildfires and flooding disasters have pushed insurers into crisis and bankruptcy in several US states, with homeowners struggling to get cover at almost any price.

The situation in Europe is also growing critical. According to the European Commission, losses directly attributable to climate change cost EU states some €145bn over the last decade, with Ireland ranking the third-highest country in per-capita climate related losses. These losses are expected to rise exponentially in the years and decades ahead, with dire implications for the insurance industry.

In parts of Cork, including Glanmire, there are already households that are unable to get insurance dating back to a major flood in the area over a decade ago. The inability to get insurance means people cannot get mortgages, with obvious knock-on effects into the wider economy.

Climate risk

In August 2022, Ireland’s Central Bank launched a consultation on climate change risk for the insurance sector, upgrading climate from “emerging risk” to “key risk”, and advised all insurers to closely monitor their exposure to climate risks.

“The stakes are high, not just for the future viability of the insurance sector, but for society as a whole”, according to Central Bank governor, Gabriel Makhlouf. A survey it conducted in 2021 found that only one in five insurers fully integrate climate risk into their risk management frameworks, with less than half the firms surveyed having conducted stress testing around climate risks.

This laid-back attitude to emerging climate risk is by no means confined to Ireland. Research published earlier this year revealed shocking levels of ignorance and complacency across the financial sector.

The study, involving the University of Exeter and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that many leading financial institutions simply didn’t understand the models being used to project the economic cost of climate change.

Models developed by economists that fundamentally misunderstand climate risks, including tipping points and compound events, are being used by financial institutions to estimate their own exposure to climate risks, and these are in many cases profoundly inaccurate.

‘Hothouse world’

For instance, a number of major financial institutions in the UK bizarrely reported that they would be unaffected or even do better in “hothouse world” climate scenarios that will lay waste to civilisation.

The most egregious example of this occurred in 2018, when famed economist, William Nordhaus in his address on receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics stated that an average 4C global temperature rise would represent the “optimal” balance between costs of climate change versus climate action.

As climate science has long confirmed, a 4C world would in reality be a hellish dystopia of famines, desertification, forced migration, political and economic chaos, ecological collapse and global immiseration. Indeed, at just 1.2C, the world is already experiencing ever-worsening and increasingly dangerous extreme weather events, as the ferocious summer of 2023 has so forcefully underlined.

The notion that the world’s food production system alone could withstand 4C global temperature rise is considered wildly unrealistic by scientists, yet many economists and the financial institutions they influence often appear to exist in a parallel reality where the physical limits of Earth systems do not apply.

As a case in point, an assessment of likely impacts on global GDP in a “hothouse” world of +3C carried out by a group comprising 114 central banks and financial overseers somehow managed to entirely omit “impacts related to extreme weather, sea-level rise or wider societal impacts from migration or conflict”.

If at this point it seems fanciful that some of the world’s highest-paid and ostensibly smartest people could really have gotten something this big so completely wrong, cast your mind back to the financial collapse of 2008, where greed, self-delusion and magical thinking on the part of major banks and investment companies came within a hair’s-breadth of triggering a total collapse of the global economy.

If they were this unable to grasp financial risk back in the early 2000s, is it really so difficult to imagine that the same people and institutions are any less blinkered today on climate risks?

On a positive note, many major insurers are now refusing to provide cover to new oil and gas exploration, having finally twigged that the fossil fuel industry is destroying the stable climate system that the insurance industry’s business model depends on.

While the only effective long-term defence against climate change is to drastically cut carbon pollution, in the interim, we also have to spend heavily to strengthen our infrastructure against threats such as rising sea levels.

To get a sense of just how unprepared the Irish public is for what lies ahead, Dublin City Council spent half a million euros in 2018 to lower a newly constructed sea wall as it slightly obstructed the sea views of motorists.

This change was demanded by local residents, even though these same residents may well face having their homes inundated as sea-level rise continues. The penny may not yet have dropped for many, but that too will change as the climate crisis comes crashing against our shores.

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Dispatches from a young eco-activist

Posted on August 20, 2023 by John Gibbons

I filed this review of ‘It’s Not Just You’, by Tori Tsui for the Business Post in August. While it makes a few interesting points, overall it fails to escape the dense tangle of eco-jargon and will be a struggle for all but the most committed to complete. You can, on the other hand, get a flavour of what it’s about by reading on…

THERE WAS a time when the young were largely free to get on with the job of growing up, while older, more experienced adults managed the serious business of looking after the future.

Lately, this natural order has been upended, with some youthful activists now finding themselves thrust into the unforgiving glare of the global media spotlight as the climate emergency deepens.

Most famous of all is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist who burst on to the world stage as a shy yet fiercely determined 16-year-old speaking truth in the plainest possible terms to the world’s political and business elite on whose watch climate change has deteriorated from being a managerial challenge into a dire existential crisis.

Thunberg is, however, one among many tens of thousands of young climate activists who have thrown themselves into the fight, often at huge personal cost. “I felt like I forfeited my youth, play and innocence to become an adult, to become a professional so that my voice is heard”, in the words of youth activist, Katie Hodgetts.

“I felt like the reward of stepping up to be a custodian for the planet and for people was poor mental health and burnout”, she told Tori Tsui, for her new book, It’s Not Just You. Tsui, a Hong Kong-born activist, has conducted extensive interviews with young climate activists and her book chronicles the heavy price being paid by these youthful campaigners, many of whom now also face criminalisation simply for trying to raise public awareness about the climate emergency.

Tsui explores a near epidemic of eco-anxiety sweeping through younger people. She defines it not as a pathology but rather as “a rational response to irrational circumstances”.

Many of these young activists face a dual burden. They are grappling with their own fears about a climate-ravaged future, as vividly illustrated throughout the chaotic summer of 2023, as relentless waves of record-smashing extreme weather events racked much of the northern hemisphere. In addition, many are buckling under the burden of being expected to somehow be the climate ‘saviours’.

“A lot of young people have so much pressure on their shoulders”, activist Dominique Palmer says. “People say: ‘You give us hope, you will change the world, you are more progressive and radical. If you won’t do it, who else will?'”

This intense pressure of expectation leaves Palmer feeling “burnt out and traumatised” and resentful of the idea that a handful of exhausted volunteer campaigners are “the answer to all of the world’s problems”.

While the concept of climate anxiety is relatively new, in the Global South, which has been at the sharp end of worsening climate impacts for which it is not culpable for decades, this has long been a worry, not about the future, but rather the bitter everyday reality.

“My ethnic group is being displaced across West and Central Africa due to climate change and conflict, but ‘climate anxiety’ is something only reserved for the rich and white”, observed Abdourahamane Ly, an activist from Guinea.

“My people are dying in the [English] Channel and stopped from entering fortress Europe while famines are sweeping the continent, but the focus is always on the feelings of those least affected”.

A high-profile campaigner, Tsui details the heavy toll climate anxiety has taken on her own mental health, with the Covid pandemic adding to the collective distress. “It’s a weird existence going from being an eco-conscious climate nomad who sailed the high seas to a traumatised, jobless twentysomething confined to a dingy shoebox of a flat” by the pandemic.

Tsui delves deeply into the links between mental health and issues including climate justice. “The climate crisis is making us unwell, and attempting to address it is my form of therapy, even if one suffers in the process”, she observes.

Tsui’s book suffers from a surfeit of jargon, with terms like “unpacking” and “intersectionality” used to excess. At times the author seems unclear if she is writing for an academic or general audience. As a result, some entire early chapters feel like they have been culled from a Master’s thesis.

It’s Not Just You will appeal to committed young climate activists, especially eco-feminists but it will struggle to win over a wider public audience beyond the eco-converted.

It’s Not Just You, by Tori Tsui, Simon & Schuster UK, €18.20

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Your time is precious: spend it wisely

Posted on August 17, 2023 by John Gibbons

While the big ticket changes to move the dial on the climate crisis are generally beyond the reach of most people, that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. How we choose to spend our time, including our choices around who we do and don’t work for, carry real weight too, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in August.

GIVEN THAT apathy, cynicism, and outright denial still dominate how our political system, corporations and much of our media are reacting to the unfolding climate emergency, it is easy for us as individuals to feel as helpless as the situation feels hopeless.

Giving up is, however, not an option, so at least for now, it’s up to us: you and me. The most valuable commodity we possess is our time; how we choose to spend it is a decision we must each make for ourselves, but more and more people are coming to realise that, in a world on fire, it makes little sense to simply carry on with our lives and careers as if nothing has changed.

The global oil and gas industry is already feeling the pinch; the number of US business school graduates opting for careers in this dirtiest and most destructive of industries has slumped by over 40% in the last decade or so.

“Good people don’t want to work for a bad company”, according to Kerryman Bernard Looney, then chief executive of energy giant, BP. His total pay in 2022 was around $12 million, amid spiralling energy bills, great hardship for consumers, and a profit bonanza for the oil majors.

Meanwhile, BP scrapped its stated target of cutting emissions by 40% by 2030. “At the end of the day, we’re responding to what society wants”, was how Looney explained this u-turn. Society also wants a stable, liveable climate and secure global food system, though.

Most people want their values and actions to be broadly in alignment. With more and more now waking up to the twin crises of biodiversity collapse and climate breakdown, maybe now is the time to consider whether your current job or career can make a positive contribution to help build a safer, cleaner future for everyone.

As UN secretary general António Guterres told a group of new college graduates last year: “You hold the cards. Don’t work for the climate wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future”.

For those with technical, managerial, or engineering skills, the renewable energy sector in Ireland is growing rapidly. Onshore wind, domestic and industrial solar power, and the upcoming boom in offshore wind will see the creation of thousands of new positions for a wide range of skills in an industry in which you can be doing good as you do well.

As Ireland rapidly transitions towards the electrification of home heating, transport, and energy, there will be winners and losers. Traditional car mechanics, for example, will need to re-train as the uptake of electric vehicles will render their existing skills redundant.

On the other hand, many of those trained to work in offshore oil and gas exploration are finding their skills in demand to help create and maintain new offshore wind farms.

Threat to health

The World Health Organisation has identified climate change as the greatest threat to human health this century. The most obvious risks arise from extreme weather events, but deteriorating air quality plus the spread of infectious diseases, food insecurity, and reduced access to clean water are all on the increase.

Groups such as Irish Doctors for the Environment are helping spread awareness about the dire health risks posed by climate breakdown, including threats to mental health.

The 300,000 people working in healthcare in Ireland are trusted voices who can help raise awareness among colleagues and patients about the climate emergency. This could include discussing the health and climate benefits of largely plant-based diets.

Those of us in media and communications have the privilege of having access to an audience. This should include the responsibility to include relevant ecological framing in how stories are presented. A new runway, for example, isn’t just a ‘business’ or  ‘travel’ story. There are also climate costs and implications to be considered.

Media also need to be ever vigilant about the growing tide of corporate greenwash being produced to bamboozle the public. If you have legal training, environmental law is a fast-growing discipline where you can put your skills to good use in fighting such deceptive practices.

If you’re one of the almost 70,000 teachers in Ireland, why not make regular space in the classroom to discuss the environment? Many schools have access to a garden space or polytunnel. Primary school children will love to get their hands dirty while learning about nature and food.

As recently as a generation ago, many homes had a “kitchen garden” where much of the fruit and vegetables for the family were grown. These disappeared with the advent of cheap, mostly imported, produce. However, food is never truly cheap, and knowing how to grow and preserve it is a vital skill that has been largely lost.

If you are a farmer, do consider horticulture, ideally organic. This is, by some distance, the most efficient way of producing food for human consumption, even using limited space. Moving production under glass helps to buffer your crops against damaging weather extremes. People need to eat every day. Soon enough, you will struggle to keep up with demand for your produce.

Even if you just have access to a garden or neighbourhood allotment, now is the time to pull on your gloves and get growing. Visit the Grow It Yourself website (giy.ie) to help set you on the right path. In previous times of emergency, communities dug ‘victory gardens’ to secure local food production and avoid hunger. The trick to being prepared is to start now.

The climate emergency will, in time, see the end of cheap food and may even lead to supermarket shelves emptying. Ireland imports nearly all of its fruit and veg, including from areas that are fast becoming too hot to produce food. It takes time to learn the basic skills we are all going to need as things become ever tougher, so the sooner we start, the better.

DIY courses

This is also a great time to sign up for a DIY course. A basic understanding of carpentry and electrics could one day prove invaluable. Solar panels could help offset future disruption to imported energy sources. Our grandparents’ generation got by on very little, wasted nothing, and were skilled at making and mending. We need to rediscover their thrifty ways as the era of global hyperabundance is now effectively over.

If you can possibly afford it, insulate your home and add solar panels and, ideally, a heat pump too. These will be an invaluable buffer against possible future disruption to imported energy sources.

‘Meitheal’ is an old Irish term describing how neighbours would come together to help in the saving of crops or in other shared tasks. In the turbulent times ahead, we will likely need to once again look to our extended families and local community for support, security and solidarity.

True wealth in the future will be measured in ‘social capital’ rather than money. Invest wisely.

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Lifting the omerta on speaking plainly

Posted on August 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

Let’s be honest for a moment. We have collectively pussy-footed around the climate and biodiversity emergency for years, decades in fact. Despite the scientific evidence piling ever higher week by week, it has long been taken as read that stating this bluntly would be either alarmist or would simply cause the public to tune out or even give up altogether. I’ve never been convinced by this line of reasoning, and explored it in some depth in a piece for the Irish Times’ climate and science page in August.

IF THE POWER of positive thinking could be parlayed into action, it’s likely the global climate emergency would have been dealt with a long time ago. Instead, after years, even decades of upbeat pronouncements from can-do politicians and business leaders, the situation has never been more ominous.

The drastic escalation of the climate emergency this year has been signalled with record-shattering temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere, including simultaneous heatwaves on three continents. July 2023 has been confirmed as the hottest month on Earth on the instrumental record, and likely the hottest in at least 120,000 years based on palaeoclimatological evidence.

So extreme have conditions been this summer that UN secretary general, António Guterres declared: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” This is in stark contrast in both language and tone to previous can-do pronouncements from politicians and public officials. The omerta on speaking bluntly about the climate emergency may have been finally lifted.

The early optimism on the ability and willingness of the global community to come together and act in line with the science has now largely evaporated. During three decades of intergovernmental climate action more heat-trapping greenhouse gases have been ejected into the global atmosphere than in all of human history pre-flight.

Despite this manifest failure the dominant messaging within mainstream climate communications has been to keep it positive. This was brought home forcefully some years back during a talk to a group of environmental activists. While outlining the stark reality of rising emissions and policy failure I was interrupted from the floor by a seasoned campaigner saying they were “sick of hearing all this negative stuff”.

The understandable desire to shut down ecological bad news involves focusing on the wafer-thin silver lining while ignoring the giant black clouds. This is as pervasive as it is common, even in environmental circles.

The tendency to look on the bright side appears to be hard-wired into our species, and in the context of the climate emergency the argument now most frequently deployed is that optimism is necessary in order to stave off fatalism and doomism, the growing sense among many that it is already too late to avert a global catastrophe.

This was tested in a study in the journal Climatic Change in July titled Fanning the Flames or Burning Out, which set out to test the various hypotheses on how people react to threatening or frightening climate messaging.

The fact that the tone and frequency of media messaging on a given topic can impact people’s beliefs and emotions and even behaviour is not in doubt. The researchers set about testing this in relation to climate messaging.

They reported that in the short term exposure to gloomy media coverage led to increased fear and a reduced feeling of hope among participants. However, a more surprising effect was then detected when a second, longer term study was carried out. Here the results were reversed.

“People’s efficacy beliefs increased over time”, according to lead author, Christofer Skura of Penn State University. “The more exposure people had to these threatening news stories each day they were increasingly likely to think they could make a difference in addressing climate change”.

What is critical here is what the researchers call the “agenda-setting effect”. When people only see climate coverage sporadically in the media they assume it’s a fringe issue. “What may be more important for motivating them to take action is that they see coverage of it on a daily basis” said study co-author Jessica Myrick.

Dublin-based psychologist Dr Eoin Galavan is vice-chair of the Psychological Society of Ireland’s group on the climate and environmental emergency. He rejects what he calls the binary notion that either pessimism or optimism are necessarily the correct responses. “What I think is needed is a balance between our capacity to bravely, creatively and constructively meet challenges around the climate crisis and the recognition of the peril that we are in and the damage we’ve already done”.

The research on the role played by fear and anxiety in how humans respond to the emerging climate threat is, he suggests, mixed. “There’s enough research to suggest that it’s important that the peril that we’re facing, which can evoke fear and anxiety, is a significant ingredient in climate messaging”, Without the public being aware of the true nature and scale of the risks, he believes we will not be successful in getting people to engage in pro-environmental behavioural change.

What has yet to happen to effect dramatic change on both an individual and societal level is that we shift into what’s called “emergency mode”. When someone says their house is on fire, “we don’t get worried about whether they are being optimistic or pessimistic, we ring the fire brigade, we move into action” he adds.

Dr Galavan cites the recent Covid pandemic as a case study in what happens when there is such an overwhelming focus on a clear and present danger that all the usual political and social considerations, including the concerns of vested interests, are put to one side and the focus is on tackling the emergency, at almost any cost. “I don’t remember people saying should we be optimistic or pessimistic about how we talk about Covid; we just said it’s dangerous, it’s going to kill us, so here’s what we have to do to protect ourselves”, Dr Galavan added.

A 2020 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication found that while excessive pessimism in climate messaging could lead to people becoming paralysed with anxiety, an unduly optimistic spin tended to lead to complacency.

Participants exposed to more negative scenarios reported higher levels of emotional arousal, which in turn led to heightened risk perception. Interestingly, in people self-identifying as conservative, emotional arousal as a result of pessimistic messaging had the biggest impact in terms of changing their views around climate change.

Those reporting greater emotional arousal also felt more inclined to believe they could make a positive impact on tacking the climate emergency. While it has many downsides, fear is a potent emotion when constructively harnessed.

The idea that optimism can induce complacency was also examined in a 2017 study exploring ‘belief in a favourable future’. Behavioural scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy school reported that “ironically, our findings indicate that this belief in a favourable future may diminish the likelihood that people will take action to ensure it becomes a reality”.

Decades of self-help mantras and upbeat business slogans have trumpeted the idea that we can, though the power of positive thinking, shape our lives and perhaps even bend reality to our will. Pessimism has been seen as negative and unhelpful yet it can be also extremely valuable.

People known as defensive pessimists worry deeply about stressful events such as exams or job interviews, but they tend to do better as a result, as they work harder, prepare better as they overestimate their likelihood of failure.

Professional pessimism, after all, saves lives. It leads engineers and scientists to check and recheck their calculations, or pilots to conduct more rigorous pre-flight checks. To borrow an old phrase: if you can keep your head about the climate emergency when the scientists around you are losing theirs perhaps you just haven’t been paying attention?

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The climate future? It’s already here

Posted on August 6, 2023 by John Gibbons

While this article was published in the Business Post in early August, it was already patently clear that 2023 was going to be the hottest year in recorded history, and so it has transpired. I set out the risks as plainly as I could, framed around a warning from 15 years ago by one of the most brilliant scientists of the last century as to exactly what lay ahead.

IT WAS ONLY A matter of time before a year like 2023 came along. I just never imagined it would be so soon.

Despite tracking the unfolding climate emergency closely for many years, I still clung to the notion that we would be into the 2030s before the signs of widespread climate breakdown became impossible to ignore. I was wrong, dead wrong. The future we have long feared is here, now.

In 2008, the brilliant scientist and inventor James Lovelock shocked an interviewer with this parting advice on the climate crisis: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan”.

That was 15 years ago, and that quote has played on my mind ever since. Apart from inventing the instrument that detected ozone depletion and so helped avert an earlier global calamity, Lovelock famously developed the Gaia hypothesis.

This is the concept that all elements on Earth are part of a complex self-regulating super-organism that holds in equilibrium the subtle mix of conditions conducive to supporting life. Climate science has since largely validated this once-exotic hypothesis.

Lovelock was more cynical than your average scientist. He was convinced that the ultimate obstacle to our survival is intractable human stupidity. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead’, but they don’t want to change anything”.

Sound familiar?

Lovelock’s grim projections for the 2020s are now playing out in real time. Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, it is truly remarkable how few people have any idea just how dangerous the situation now facing humanity truly is.

Another visionary, Professor James Hansen, a former director of Nasa and the scientist who alerted the US Congress to the growing dangers of global warming in 1988, warned in recent days that the world is now shifting into a superheated climatic state unlike anything in at least a million years.

We are, Hansen added, “damned fools” for ignoring decades of repeated warnings that this crisis, left unchecked, would destroy human civilisation and much of the natural world.

Research published last month indicates that the vast ocean current known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) could collapse as soon as 2025, but most likely by mid-century, with catastrophic consequences for billions of people worldwide. Such a shutdown would likely drastically alter the climate of Ireland, reducing average temperatures by several degrees and wiping out our agricultural systems.

“We have to stop making excuses and do whatever is necessary, no matter how difficult, to preserve the climate system we all depend on”, leading oceanographer Professor Stefan Rahmstorf told me in Dublin in April. Once the Amoc shuts down, then, in human timescales, it’s gone forever, he warned.

Meanwhile, deep in the southern hemisphere’s winter, an entire continent is beginning to awaken from aeons of frozen slumber. Antarctic sea ice has fallen to an all-time low, and it now covers an area 2.5 million square kilometres below average.

Scientists describe this drastic ice loss as at least a “five-sigma” event, meaning that under normal conditions, you would expect a winter ice melt event of this magnitude only once every 7.5 million years. “To say this is unprecedented isn’t strong enough”, said the oceanographer Edward Doddridge. “It’s gobsmacking”.

And then there are the heat waves. The hottest day on Earth for probably 125,000 years occurred at the beginning of July. Both June and July 2023 are now confirmed to be the hottest months ever recorded. Heat waves are rapidly increasing, both in frequency and ferocity. The northern hemisphere has been battered by contiguous extreme heat waves covering much of North America, Europe and large areas of Asia.

Neither have the oceans been spared. A marine heatwave is currently affecting an area of the North Atlantic Ocean covering around 40 million square kilometres, an area four times larger than Europe.

Seven Hiroshimas

The world’s oceans are accumulating the equivalent of the energy of seven Hiroshima bombs per second. That’s around 220 million Hiroshimas in excess energy each year. This is the fuel for future weather extremes unlike anything endured by modern humans.

Apart from the obvious misery and danger to humans and other animals, droughts, heat waves and floods are also fast degrading global food systems. What few seem to grasp is that all this dangerous disruption is a result of a global average temperature increase of barely 1.2°C.

Once we breach the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds, planetary tipping points from Amoc collapse to the disintegration of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice packs, to the disappearance of Arctic sea ice cover in summer begin to kick in. Any one of these events will potentially redraw the map of the world. And as one planetary domino falls, it pulls other seemingly stable systems down with it.

These are what scientists call non-linear events. In other words, things get much worse far more quickly than societies can possibly adapt to. Our tragic failure to act commits us to a near future of mass migration, famine, economic collapse, violence and political and social breakdown.

We still have choices, though years of delay mean all the easy options are long gone. We now have to choose between wrenching austerity in order to drastically cut emissions, or carrying on regardless and letting the sixth mass extinction run its course.

For once, let’s be brutally honest: we’ve already chosen, haven’t we?

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Ramping up the war on science for private gain

Posted on August 1, 2023 by John Gibbons

The Irish agri lobby’s ongoing war on reality went up a couple of gears during the summer, when it turned its political guns on the Environmental Protection Agency for having the temerity to gather and assess water quality data and then report its findings to the European Commission. A series of politicians gleefully jumped on the science-bashing bandwagon in the hope, presumably, of currying electoral favour in rural Ireland, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in August.

IN A DEMOCRACY, we are all entitled to our opinions, but we are absolutely not entitled to make up our own facts.

We have to be able to agree on objective reality, including trust in science, as it forms the solid foundation on which policies can be developed and debated. When this basic trust is undermined, the results are invariably bad, as has been witnessed in recent years in the US in particular.

Ireland had largely escaped the worst of this ‘counter-factual’ debating up to now, but there are indications that the virus has jumped the Atlantic and is now infecting our own institutions. This to me was chillingly illustrated when watching a recent Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture hearing, where scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were testifying around nitrates and water quality.

The chair, dairy farmer Jackie Cahill TD made it clear that he fundamentally rejected the scientific evidence on water quality presented by the EPA. Why? The meticulously gathered and collated EPA evidence, drawn from constant sampling almost 3,000 Irish water bodies, came under sustained attack not just from Cahill, but from right across the committee.

Senator Victor Boyhan claimed the EPA report “is not scientific and its integrity is questionable”, a baseless slur on the integrity of the researchers who contributed to it. The EPA scientists were then harangued by other committee members with intensely hostile questioning. Fine Gael TD Michael Ring for instance described the EPA as “a necessary evil”.

Though at times looking shell-shocked, the EPA scientists, led by Dr Eimear Cotter, held up admirably and stuck to the facts despite the simmering enmity.

This hostile atmosphere evaporated in the afternoon session, when the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) reps were treated as honoured guests by the same committee, with their statements going largely unchallenged.

To underline the difference in how they were treated, Cahill stated: “it was clear that in spite of significant increases in dairy cow numbers since 2015, water quality has not disimproved”. He wisely waited until the EPA scientists had left the committee room before delivering that demonstrably false assessment.

The line of questioning of the EPA by most of the committee members repeatedly used the same industry talking points. A new pattern of direct attacks on science by farm groups is fast emerging. In February, an EPA Land Use Review document was described by the IFA as “fundamentally flawed” with its president, Tim Cullinan threatening an “uprising in rural Ireland”. 

Roscommon TD Michael Fitzmaurice claimed the EPA report amounted to “ethnic cleansing of the agriculture community”. The deployment of this kind of inflammatory language by the agri-sector and their political confreres is become ever more egregious. Earlier this year, Fianna Fáil TD Barry Cowen claimed EU nature restoration proposals “smack of cultural imperialism”.

Eddie Punch of the Irish Sheep and Cattle Association said he was “sick of listening to hippie dippies and tree huggers telling us we need to do more for the environment”.

Dermot Kelleher, president of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association said that “a small cabal of unrepresentative but noisy activists were salivating at the prospect of ripping out the heart of economic activity in Ireland”.

Pat McCormack, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association in June said: “Everyone can see that at this stage it’s not about the data or the science: it’s actually about the ideology and the Government’s need to keep in harness viciously anti-farming elements”.

Apart from flatly rejecting the EPA’s science around water pollution, McCormack also dismissed the role of agriculture in biodiversity loss, instead making the ludicrous assertion that motorway building and invasive minks were the real issue.

Ecologist Pádraic Fogarty, campaigns officer with the Irish Wildlife Trust (IWT) has studied and reported on the drastic declines in Irish biodiversity for many years, and has been an outspoken and articulate critic of agricultural intensification and the negative impacts it has had on our already depleted ecosystems.

Fogarty is an expert in this area. Almost two weeks ago, he posted a blog on the IWT website accusing farmer representative groups of “increasingly lurching to the far right”, comparing their obstructionism and negativity to that deployed by the DUP.

The IFA took umbrage, even though Fogarty’s language was more measured than much of the frenzied mud-slinging from the agri side, and demanded its removal. Yielding to intense pressure, the board of the IWT amended the blog, but without consulting Fogarty, who then resigned, accusing the trust of “a capitulation to the IFA”.

In 2021, Oireachtas Agriculture committee chair, Jackie Cahill accused An Taisce, Ireland’s national trust, of “a revolting act of treason” for opposing a cheese plant. Where were the calls for his resignation for peddling such an outrageous slander?

Agriculture appears to be a genuine blind spot for the Irish media. Were this level of rhetoric coming from, say the motor trade or construction industry, it would be rightly condemned and the agitators publicly denounced.

This drift in discourse has not gone unnoticed. In Dublin last year, senior EU Commission official, Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea expressed the Commission’s alarm at the “increasingly aggressive stance” being taken against environmental defenders. This was, he added, “highly unusual to witness in an advanced society like Ireland”. The reaction to his comments? Silence.

This is how societies fail. Nobody spoke up against years of vicious attacks on environmentalists, so this emboldened agri-industrial activists to ratchet up the rhetoric and now target scientists and even smear the scientific process itself. Seriously, it’s time to shout “stop”.

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Time for a Department of Food Security

Posted on July 7, 2023 by John Gibbons

Food, glorious food. It has been so abundant and relatively cheap in the developed world for so long that it has become largely invisible to us. Where it comes from, what its ecological and carbon impacts and whether we are truly food secure are, I believe, among the big questions every society needs to urgently address in the 2020s, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in July.

CIVILISATION, it has been said, is only three meals deep. The threat of hunger has long stalked humanity. In recent decades, at least in the developed world, it looked like we had finally consigned the spectre of famine to the history books.

Reality, however, has a way of laying waste to our best-laid plans. Research published this month in the scientific journal Nature Communications warns the risks to global agricultural production and food security have been seriously underestimated.

The study warns of what it calls synchronised harvest failure across major crop-producing regions during summers in the northern hemisphere as a result of the jet stream becoming increasingly unstable as global warming accelerates.

The jet stream is a vast current of fast-moving air in the upper atmosphere, and changes to its flow pattern are already having dramatic impacts. The study found strong ‘meandering’ of the jet stream is already impacting major crop-producing regions, including North America, East Asia and Eastern Europe, leading to significant harvest reductions.

The reason the jet stream is becoming more unstable is because the polar regions are warming faster than the mid-latitudes, and the decrease in temperature difference is causing the jet stream to ‘wobble’, sometimes dragging up hot air from the tropics deep into the northern hemisphere, and also occasionally plunging Arctic air down into Europe and North America.

Risks to food production from the jet stream are only part of the picture. Already, Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average, and the summer of 2022 was the hottest in over 500 years of records, with drought conditions and water shortages across much of Europe.

These were expected to be eased with the arrival of winter, but there has been little recovery in water levels, with drought conditions and loss of groundwater continuing right through spring and into this summer.

According to the European Drought Observatory, more than one third of continental Europe is now under a drought warning, with 10% of Europe already experiencing “severe drought”.

This is being felt most acutely in Spain. Even for a country well used to dealing with high temperatures, what is now happening is unprecedented.

Acute water shortages

The acute water shortage has led many Spanish farmers to abandon spring planting of cereals and oilseeds, as well as hitting vegetable and fruit production, much of which traditionally ends up on supermarket shelves in northern Europe, including Ireland.

It is astonishing that for a country with such a large agriculture sector, Ireland imports about 85% of all the fruit and vegetables we eat. Last year, we imported nearly a million tonnes of fruit and vegetables. Incredibly, this included 75,000 tonnes of potatoes.

As climate destabilisation bites, the question arises as to how food-secure Ireland, an island nation cut off by geography from our neighbours, really is? Senior politicians, including Taoiseach Leo Varadkar have claimed Ireland “feeds 50 million people”.

This statement was echoed by Professor Gerry Boyle, then director of Teagasc, the State agriculture research agency, who said Ireland “produced enough food for 35 million people”.

These statements would suggest Ireland is highly food secure, but they are flatly refuted by data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Agency (UN-FAO), which notes the value of Ireland’s food energy net imports in calories is the “equivalent of the entire calorie intake of 2.5 million people”.

We are not, in other words, currently even providing for our own domestic food needs, let alone “feeding the world”.

While Ireland exports about 90% of the beef and dairy it produces, these exports contain less food energy than our imports of cereals, sugar and vegetable oils. Ireland also imports between 3-5 million tonnes of feed for livestock, as well as about 1.5 million tonnes of chemical fertilisers a year.

Agriculture industry’s influence

It’s our worst-kept secret that farm lobbyists and agri-industrial players have undue influence on how agricultural policy in Ireland is developed. Typically, agriculture ministers and senior Department of Agriculture officials are reduced to being glorified messengers who ferry lobbyists’ demands to government while trying to placate the most vociferous pressure groups.

This iron grip also extends to Teagasc and Bord Bia, the State agriculture marketing agency. Vital parts of a balanced agriculture mix, such as organic farming and horticulture, are the poor relations to the mega-beef and dairy producers, which explains why we have among the very lowest levels of organic farming and horticulture in the entire EU27.

The capture of our State agencies responsible for food production is best understood in the disastrous 19% increase in emissions from the agriculture sector over the last decade, accompanied by sharp increases in water pollution. Teagasc promised this would not happen, but its pronouncements were driven more by wishful thinking than scientific evidence.

While this is all ostensibly Government policy, in fact the plans are effectively written by agri-industrial players, then rubber-stamped by the minister of the day. This was confirmed by former Bord Bia chief executive Tara McCarthy when she described the Government’s Food Wise 2025 programme as “industry-owned”.

Extreme weather

Ireland and the world faces into a near future of ever-worsening extreme weather, with major question marks over our ability to feed ourselves, or our livestock. Twice in the last decade, Ireland experienced weather-related fodder crises due to inadequate grass growth to feed vast herds of cattle numbering more than seven million.

Were it not for our ability to import fodder by ship, many animals would have starved to death. What if in a future emergency, the countries we might turn to for fodder are themselves in crisis and unable to supply? In this scenario, the economic and animal welfare consequences would be horrific.

I believe the time is right to create a new department of food security, which would merge and replace the Department of Agriculture and Teagasc. Its remit would be to begin urgent planning for medium- and long-term scenarios, with an immediate focus on reviving and dramatically expanding our horticulture sector, as well as supporting a rapid expansion of organic farming.

It would also oversee Coillte phasing out its industrial clear-fell timber plantations and switching to biodiversity-rich native woodlands.

The reason we are fundamentally food-insecure is that the bulk of our farmland is given over to feeding livestock. For every 100 units of food energy in feedstuff to produce beef cattle, just 1.9 units of food energy for human consumption are produced. Huge amounts of land are therefore given over to producing remarkably few edible calories.

Horticulture, on the other hand, is by far the most efficient way to produce lots of food on very little land. The Dutch, with just 40% of our farmland, produce seven times more food. The key? Advanced plant-based horticulture carried out in nearly 10,000 hectares of greenhouses that are protected from weather extremes, while using fewer fertilisers, water and pesticides.

The likelihood of such a radical transition being led by the very people who masterminded our current livestock-led model is almost zero. Radical new thinking is needed. We’re not going to solve our food security crunch with the same thinking that created it.

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If they work hard, if they behave

Posted on July 3, 2023 by John Gibbons

Here’s a piece I chipped in to Village magazine during the summer on the hopes and fears that prospective new parents must navigate when considering taking on the awesome responsibility of bringing a new life into our climate-wracked, overheating world.

IN THE 2020s, as the darkening penumbra of climate collapse draws ever closer, it takes a remarkable leap of faith to decide to bring a new life into the world. After all, a child born this year or next will still be in their 20s by 2050, and, all other things being equal, expect to be alive to see in the 22nd century.

A new study of 5,000 parents in India, Mexico, Singapore, the United States and the UK found that more than half report that concerns about climate change are affecting their decision as to whether to have more children.

The research found surprisingly high levels of concern among these parents about climate change, with 91% reporting at least some degree of concern. Unsurprisingly, the single aspect causing most alarm is rising temperatures, while water shortages, extreme weather events and sea level rise were also cited as sources of concern.

In a letter to investors in 2021, investment giant Morgan Stanley described how the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline”. People are, you might say, voting with their foetuses.

“Every child had a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their old man got”, went the lyrics to Billy Joel’s “Allentown”, a dirge to the US rust belt and the despair of the abandoned working classes.

Choosing to become a parent is an act of faith in the future, broadly underpinned by the universal myth of progress, the belief that, despite setbacks and difficulties along the way, the future remains bright, and there for our children to inherit, “if they work hard, if they behave”, as Joel wrote.

In many respects, the promise of the future has indeed delivered. Who in 1980 could ever have imagined that one day we’d all have mobile phones, let alone the internet, on-demand video or digital music libraries that put millions of songs, all on an advanced computer that fits in your pocket.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, as the author and futurologist Arthur C. Clarke memorably put it. I am just about old enough to remember the absolute magic of seeing colour television for the first time. For other generations, the arrival of radio, the phonograph, the telephone, telegraph and the automobile were all in their own way miraculous.

A century and more of breath-taking technological progress has delivered the glittering baubles of modernity, but it has turned out to be the ultimate Faustian bargain, and now the devil, in the form of incipient climate and ecological collapse, is at our doorstep to demand his pound of flesh.

It’s a little over 20 years since I first became a parent. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of the dire condition of the biosphere. It was quite possible in the Ireland of the 1990s and into the early 2000s to not encounter anything on TV or in the papers around climate change, unless you were already aware of it and actively looking out for it.

Once my first child was born, I was now in a very real sense connected to the mid-to-late 21st century, an unknown country that previously had never cost me a thought. The future had arrived, and that rudimentary awareness in turn set me on the path that has come to dominate my life in ways that the 2002 version of me would have scarcely imagined.

As I write, there is a massive sea surface temperature anomaly covering the 40 million square kilometres of the North Atlantic, with temperatures to a depth of 20 metres a mind-boggling 1.3C above the 1982-2011 mean. Off the west and north-west coast of Ireland for much of June, what has been described as one of the most severe marine heatwaves anywhere on Earth has been occurring.

NOAA’s Marine Heatwave Watch has categorized this event as a Category 4 (extreme) marine heatwave. This provides the fuel for devastating storm systems and extreme flooding events, as witnessed in parts of Ireland with torrential downpours and so-called once-in-500-year flooding events.

The amount of energy required to heat a molecule of water is 10,000 times greater than the energy required to heat the same amount of air. To put this in context, last year, the world’s oceans heated up an amount equal to the energy of five of Hiroshima-sized bombs detonating underwater every second for 24 hours a day, every day. That’s the energy equivalent of around 160 million Hiroshimas accumulating in the oceans last year. The climate bomb is primed.

The bubble of climate complacency that has existed for many in the ‘developed’ world was popped with recent confirmation from the World Meteorological Organisation that Europe is now the fastest-warming continent. Yes, that’s where we live.

The summer of 2022 was Europe’s hottest in at least 500 years, and worse, much worse is to come. This is, quite literally, one hell of a world we are leaving for our children and theirs to inherit.

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To hold on, sometimes you have to simply let go

Posted on June 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

When facing seemingly impossible odds, we are sometimes capable of rising to the challenge, no matter how unpromising the situation, as I explored in this piece in the Irish Examiner at the end of June. On the other hand, value rigidity and an unwillingness to adapt can lead us to disaster a quirk we appear to share with some of our fellow primates.

CLIMBER ARON RALSTON faced an agonising choice. The then 27-year-old was exploring a narrow canyon in a remote part of Utah in 2002 when a boulder broke loose, crushing and pinning his right arm.

Trapped, low on water, and with no mobile phone or prospect of rescue, a slow death seemed inevitable. The only hope of saving himself was to do the unthinkable: hack off his own arm with a small knife.

Ralston’s story of survival against the odds was dramatised in the 2010 film 127 Hours. Wolves, coyotes, and other animals have also been known to chew off their own legs to escape from a trap.

The urge to survive is supremely powerful and is common across the animal kingdom. This instinct does, however, have some significant glitches.

Among humans and some other primates, there is evidence of flaws in our reasoning known as value traps. Author Robert Pirsig famously explored these, using the example of the “South Indian Monkey Trap” which indigenous hunters have devised to catch the otherwise elusive forest monkeys.

The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut tied to a stake, with a narrow hole and a bait of rice or fruit inside.

“The hole is big enough so that the monkey’s hand can go in, but too small for his fist with rice in it to come out. The monkey reaches in and is suddenly trapped by nothing more than his own value rigidity”, Pirsig wrote.

Even when the hunters return to check their traps, the hapless monkey remains stationary, clinging on desperately to its ‘prize’ caught in an invisible trap of its own construction and unable to comprehend that sometimes, to avoid losing everything, you simply have to let go.

Climate crisis

Despite our superior intelligence and reasoning power, we humans are also prone to value rigidity, and there is no more egregious example of this than in our collective response to the rapidly deepening global climate and biodiversity emergency.

Yet how have we reacted to this stark reality? With angry denial and indignation, demanding instead that “someone else” take the hit, while we cling ever tighter to our prize, whether it is cheap aviation, steaks, giant SUVs, or rampant throwaway consumerism.

Yet all the while, the trap is closing ever tighter. A recent study in the journal Nature Sustainability found that widespread ecological collapse is likely to get underway much sooner than had been thought.

One in five of Earth’s critical ecosystems is now expected to collapse within a human lifetime.

The authors of the study explained how climate extremes could hit already stressed ecosystems, “which in turn transfer new or heightened stresses to some other ecosystem, and so on”. They label this likely cascading domino effect as “an ecological ‘doom-loop’ scenario, with catastrophic consequences”.

Using advanced computer modelling, the new research identifies how, once the interaction of the multiple stresses that are being simultaneously applied is calculated, the tipping points in ecosystems (the point at which they commit to failing irreversibly) occur much sooner than conventional climate models have indicated.

As an example, they cite a specific ecosystem currently predicted to collapse by the 2090s due to rising temperatures; it could in fact fail in the 2030s once other stresses such as extreme rainfall, pollution, or resource depletion are also factored in.

April and May saw the highest ocean surface temperatures for this period since records began in 1850.

The current Atlantic heatwave is “way beyond the worst-case predictions for the changing climate of the region. It’s truly frightening how fast this ocean basin is changing”, Prof Richard Unsworth of Swansea University told CNN. Nor is this an isolated incident.

Last year, the world’s oceans heated up by an amount equal to the energy of five Hiroshima-sized bombs detonating underwater every second, 24 hours a day, every day. That’s the energy equivalent of 160 million Hiroshimas accumulating in the oceans last year.

Global response

Make no mistake, the climate bomb is primed. The trap is set. The only question that remains is whether Homo sapiens, the “wise ape” is capable of living up to that description and limiting our ecological footprint and so perhaps escape our fate.

Thirty, even 20 years ago, the options for an ecological “soft landing” were still very much available, but during that period global emissions have effectively doubled.

What has to change now, so that our children and grandchildren have at least some hope for the future? In a word: everything. We now need to rapidly decarbonise every part of our societies and economies.

And yes, this means sacrifice and austerity. First and foremost, we have to break our lethal addition to fossil fuels. Conspicuous consumption, cheap aviation, and most meat need to be consigned to history.

Nature urgently needs the breathing space to allow ecosystems, on land and in the oceans, to begin to recover.

As in wartime, we must now ration carbon as a key resource, which means learning to live within harsh planetary boundaries. If all that really is asking too much, then you already know how this story ends.

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Rationing our way to a rational aviation policy

Posted on June 27, 2023 by John Gibbons

To see the enthusiasm with which politicians have been co-opted to help Dublin Airport Authority to overturn the planning permissions that govern its operation in order to facilitate ever more flying is indicative of just how much of a vote-getter cheap aviation is, and the massive headwinds anyone attempting to clip the sector’s wings is likely to face. Though it may not be popular, only sensible longer term approach involves rationing, as I argued in the Irish Examiner.

AVIATION IS ONE of the true wonders of the modern world. To be able to step on a plane in Dublin and step off in New York, Paris or Istanbul just a few hours later is an everyday miracle few of our ancestors could ever have even imagined possible.

You can, however, have too much of a good thing, and in the case of aviation, there are some serious downsides. More than most, we Irish love to fly. In 2019 for instance, there were 35 million passenger movements through Dublin Airport alone. With our population of just five million, this is an astonishingly high number.

The rise and rise of aviation, mostly for leisure, is driven by the simple fact that the sector is heavily cosseted. For example, airlines across the EU pay around €800 million a year in pollution fees. However, due to the exemption of jet kerosene from taxies and duties, it is estimated that this industry gets the equivalent of €27 billion a year in subsidies.

The reasons for this are historical, dating back to a 1944 agreement to exempt international flights from taxes. No one at that time could have possibly imagined that billions of people would be one day taking flights. Ireland alone foregoes almost €1 billion a year in VAT and fuel taxes not charged to the aviation industry or its customers.

That’s why you have the ridiculous situation that it can be cheaper to fly from Dublin to Malaga than to get the train from Dublin to Cork.

If aviation were a country, it would be in the top 10 polluters in the world, yet almost nine in 10 people globally will never set foot on an aircraft. Flying is very much a luxury enjoyed by those of us in wealthy countries, yet its impacts, in terms of climate destabilisation and weather extremes, are felt most directly by people who have never flown.

As recently as 1980, there were in total around 800 million flights taken worldwide. By 2019, that had risen almost six-fold, to 4.6 billion flights. This explosion in air travel was facilitated by the rise of the low cost airlines like Ryanair. Today, the Irish-based carrier has the dubious distinction of being officially listed in the top 10 carbon-polluting companies in the EU.

While billions of people in the developing world have no access whatever to aviation, even among those of us who do, there is huge inequity. A recent study found that just 1% of the population in wealthy countries take around 50% of all flights. This group are known as “super-emitters” given the inordinate amount of pollution they are responsible for.

However, rather than being penalised or even charged for this, frequent flyers instead are lavished with bonuses, such as free flights and upgrades by airlines.

While emissions from aviation continue to climb, the industry has turned to “silver bullet” technologies to address its emissions problem. These include so-called sustainable aviation fuels, including biofuels, as well as newer aircraft that are more fuel-efficient.

However, growing crops to feed to aircraft as biofuels is a disastrous policy as food prices rise and climate change impacts crop productivity. Modest improvements in aircraft efficiency are overwhelmed by the growing number of flights, so overall, emissions continue to spiral upwards.

A first and obvious step would be to tax aviation on the same basis as all other transport fuels, as well as applying carbon taxes to reflect the true costs of flying. This is problematic, as the public has grown accustomed to cheap flying and governments are reluctant to take politically unpopular steps.

The other issue is of equity. A blanket increase in the cost of flying would dampen overall demand, yes, but would be much less effective in deterring the wealthy, who can afford to pay more, and who are already the biggest problem due to the dozens of flights they are each already taking every year.

The solution, in my view, is to introduce a system of rationing. Each person is allocated a given distance, say 1,500 kilometres, annually, with this non-transferrable allocation tied to your PPS or passport number. This is enough to cover a typical return flight to Europe. If you don’t take any flights in a given year, your allowance can be carried forward to the next year.

Take another flight and your next 1,500 kilometres attracts a €200 climate levy. From there, the levy doubles with every additional round trip €400, €800, €1,600 and so on. Eventually, even the wealthy will start to get the message.

A system like this would of course need flexibility around, for instance, compassionate grounds in the event of a bereavement, but could still be hugely effective in eliminating many flights that happen today simply because they are so cheap.

In the 1940s, during the Emergency, everyone in Ireland had a ration card. This ensured fair and equal access to the limited resources then available, and boosted social solidarity. Today, we are in a full-blown Climate Emergency. Action is needed that is both drastic yet fair. Once again, rationing could be the key.

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