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The perils of light pollution

Posted on August 3, 2025 by John Gibbons

Pod of the latest Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 31st is below. We discussed the workings and finances of the hugely popular deposit return scheme for cans and plastic bottles, plus the impact of light pollution on the natural world, and what steps can be taken to reduce the harms. Finally, we discussed the continued boom in air travel, with record numbers of people heading through Irish airports over the Bank Holiday weekend. Climate crisis, what crisis?

Transcript below:

Matt Cooper: John Gibbons, I know you’re fan of the deposit return scheme to get people’s plastic bottles and cans and things back for recycling. ?But what’s this about 67 million euro or so of the money that people paid when they bought their cans or bottles not being reclaimed?

John Gibbons: Good evening, Matt. Let’s take it from the top. ?This scheme has been a huge success. Since its launch, we’ve got about 1.6 billion bottles and cans returned. They reckon that’s about three quarters of all the bottles and cans that are put out there are being returned. ?Now, some people just simply shove them into the machines. They get their voucher and they don’t cash it in, or they’re just using it as a way of getting rid of them, which is fine. That’s their entitlement. ?Some of these machines are also connected to charities, Matt, so that it’s a good way of making a small donation to a charity. But what we’re seeing is that the company that operates this return, they have €103.2 million in unredeemed deposits on hand by the end of 2024, which is enormous. Now, I was doing some back back of the envelope calculations here. ?And my estimate, when you consider that the return rate is between 15 and 25 cents, depending on the size of the container, I give it a median of about 20 cents. That means for every billion bottles and cans returned, that’s about €200 million in levees? So what we’re seeing here is that the company, which is a not-for-profit organisation operating with the approval of the Irish government, essentially it’s piling up cash because a lot of these cans are coming back and people are not making the claims. ?And of course, what’s important to emphasise here is that if you buy a can or a bottle from a supermarket, you will pay your levy. Now, if you throw that in the regular bin and it’s never returned, that 25 cent levy goes to Re-Turn anyway. And to my mind, it’s a slightly perverse incentive, and I’ll tell you why I say that. you know, in a way way, Re-Turn are getting paid for you not returning, which is a strange one. ?So, if the return rate, for example, falls, in a way, it doesn’t really matter to them. Because they’re collecting the money anyway. So I’m not sure whether this was necessarily fully thought through. ?Maybe somebody can correct me on this, but I would prefer to see a return scheme where they had a strong incentive for success, but whereas in this, the money pours in whether or not the returns are coming in. So that’s something to consider.

Matt Cooper: But I presume this company doesn’t get to hang on to the money. ?You must return it to the state for environmental use.

John Gibbons: Well, this, I guess, whether the funds are ring-fenced for that, that’s another day’s story. I think what’s important, probably to stress here, Matt, that this is a good news story. ?I don’t want to nitpick it unduly, and I certainly don’t want to put people off using it because I use it, many other people use it. It’s a great idea. ?You see the machines everywhere, this is the way to go. And probably like with all of these things, you have a certain amount of, shall we say, administrative hiccups to be gotten through. But the key thing here, this is getting bottles and cans that would otherwise be waste back into circulation.

Matt Cooper: ?Another listener says, I’m saving all my return receipts from my Christmas shop.

John Gibbons: There you go. That’s, you know, that could accumulate quite a lot over the char hours of the year, okay?

Matt Cooper: ?Another person says, I wonder how many people just continue to throw them into the green or black bin?

John Gibbons: If they do, Matt, they’re throwing the money away. So if you want to do that, nobody can stop you, but you’re throwing your own money away.

Matt Cooper: Okay. My biggest shock says listen, I wasn’t in the volume of plastic bottles were in return to the amount of money not collected, but the sheer volume of plastic bottles, we bring return and that we use.

John Gibbons: That’s right. ?If you think about it, we’re a tiny country, five million people, and here we are dumping a billion bottles and cans. And remember, all of these are essentially designed to be single use. Now, we’re trying to extract multiple use out of them. ?For example, aluminium can be recycled indefinitely. But these plastic, so called PET plastic, the maximum number of times you can recycle this plastic is about five to seven times. After that, it has to be landfilled or incinerated. ?So what we need to be doing here is reducing the amount of this stuff in circulation. Now, it is better not to be throwing it out, yes, but I think your listener as has hit on something there. The big underlying issue here is we’re absolutely overusing these resources.

Matt Cooper: Robert says, the only people who recycle it are the people who recycled anyway, the amount of people I see throwing away the so-all returnables didn’t ever and never will recycle. Tell us about this new study into night-time light pollution.

John Gibbons: That’s right, Matt. First of all, what do we mean by light pollution, I think a lot of listeners would be surprised even to hear the term light pollution, like what’s wrong with a bit of light. I suppose the key thing to understand is that for aeons of evolution, nature operated through daytime and nighttime. So, for example, we have many nocturnal creatures, insects, birds, etc., who they only come out at night. ?And they depend on the signals, for example, moonlight. And you have birds, migrating birds, for example, that hunt and navigate by starlight. Now, all of that is fine, except when the current atmosphere or environment, especially around urban areas, is so heavily polluted with light pollution, that these animals are losing their signals, their abilities to detect, for example, the difference between night and day. ?Why this matters matter is that their signals, for example, on reproduction, on breeding, on nesting, on even their timing of hunting and so on. Those signals are essentially messed up when you flood the night time with light. The hunters are unable to hunt and the prey are unable to conceal themselves. ?So what we’re doing, I suppose, essentially, is we’re sort of turning night into today with the extensive use of lighting. This study comes out of University College, Galway. And one of the interesting things about to emerge from it is that they found that probably contrary to people’s expectation, that street lighting wasn’t actually the main source of light pollution. ?It was, in fact, the light coming out of our own windows, which is kind of surprising, you know, and the suggestion, I guess, is that we should, first of all, at night, if you have curtains, pulled them.

Matt Cooper: So you say, if you have curtains, everyone used to have curtains; they’re not as common as they used to be.

John Gibbons: That’s right. ?And there’s another kind of a little paradox built in here as well. And that is the fact that in the last decade, we’ve had the welcome introduction of LED lighting, which, of course, has been a huge boon from the point of view of carbon emissions and so on. But the flip side of LED lighting is that it’s so cheap that it’s everywhere. ?People are flooding their gardens, they’re stringing them around their trees. Across the road from me, somebody has got four of their bushes and trees permanently illuminated at night. This this is right now. Not just Christmas. This is in July, Matt. ?And you see this. Also, you have people who fill their gardens with these little solar panel night lights that are everywhere. And these might look cute and dainty, but they’re disrupting animals going about their business. ?So it’s one of these things, again, where it’s only when we stop and really have a think about the impacts that we’re having in the natural world. And again, once people are aware of it, generally speaking, most of us want to do the right thing. And I think the key thing here is to try to reduce the spill of light pollution. ?Give you a small example. If you have one of those floodlights in your back garden or your yard, turn it off, or put it on a not too sensitive motion detector. Do not have that blasting away all night. ?It’s not good for your neighbours and it’s not good for nature. The other thing, Matt, about this as well, of course, we we’re part of nature. So the human endocrine system is also disrupted by light at night. ?So you find, for example, our Circadian rhythms, our ability to go into deep sleep; light is another form of pollution, and we need to rest deeply at night, and light pollution can interfere with that, just as effectively as noise.

Matt Cooper: Okay, I noticed today on LinkedIn Kenny Jacobs, the head of the Dublin Airport Authority, put up a post saying that it would be the busiest week ever for Dublin Airport, with over half a million passengers this bank holiday weekend. He said, we’re making some progress through our planning applications this week. ?We applied to extend the end of Pier 100, mostly for Ryanair. He also said that Cork airport welcomes over 90,000 passengers this weekend. He said his own family would be four of them. ?He described as Ireland’s fastest growing airport. So basically, our airports are getting busier and busier and busier and the reason there is because more and more people are flying.

John Gibbons: Yeah, he’s entirely correct. ?And we were talking about Re-Turn earlier as a state or quasi-state agency. DAA is certainly a semi-state agency. And the last time I checked, it is national policy, it is the state’s policy to reduce carbon emissions from all sectors. So here we have the chief executive of DAA bragging about reversing that and increasing carbon emissions.

Matt Cooper: No, no, in fairness now, he made no mention of increasing carbon emissions. ?He’s arguing he’s providing facilities for people to travel because they want to travel. And he’d also say that an enormous amount ofwork has been done at the airports to make them more carbon friendly. carbon emissions friendly.

John Gibbons: Yeah, they were actually pulled up by the advertising regulator over this recently, Matt, as you know, where they put out an ad. ?I think Marty Whelan was voicing this particular ad talking about all the amazing carbon reductions they were doing at Dublin Airport but the little bit they omitted to mention is they were only talking about emissions from the airport itself, which apparently would constitute a fraction of 1% of the emissions associated with the aircraft that fly in and out of Dublin airport. So we get a huge amount of sophistry here. I know this is another favourite subject of ours. ?Dublin Airport is pushing for about a 20% increase in the number of flights or passenger movements through the airport, and they themselves, in their own planning application, say that that will increase emissions by 22% Matt. So Kenny Jacobs knows exactly what he’s doing.

Matt Cooper: But isn’t the point, John, is despite all the conversations we have and despite the contribution of aviation to carbon emissions, more and more people want to fly.

John Gibbons: I completely understand that. And I don’t blame people, by the way, for wanting to fly, because flying is one of those areas of life that we have absolutely failed to regulate. We’ve taken an incredibly valuable resource and we’ve cheapened it. ?And what we do is, with cheap aviation, we outsourced the real costs of that, the climate damage, the ecological wreckage. That’s outsourced to other people in other parts of the world. But of course, as we know, it isn’t long before that climate bill comes home to roost here in Ireland.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability, TodayFM | Tagged aviation, light pollution, Matt Cooper, recycling, Today FM | Leave a comment

ICJ ruling draws a line in the sand on climate action

Posted on July 26, 2025 by John Gibbons

Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 24th is below. We discussed the landmark International Court of Justice ruling on climate, plus a new study on the ‘boiling frog syndrome’, which may explain why public reaction to ever worsening extreme weather events remains so muted. We also looked at sharp rises in global food prices driven by climate-fuelled weather disruption.

Transcript is below:

Matt Cooper: John Gibbons is with us for a weekly last word in the environment. And for all the people who give out about you every week, you know, saying the impact of climate change is nothing like you say. I wonder how they feel about the realisation that it’s making their food more expensive.

John Gibbons: Yeah, I think food prices are something that everybody can agree on. They’re going up.. We’re seeing it dramatically here in Ireland. But a new study has tracked this trend globally. And what we’re finding, it’s not exactly a shocking conclusion, but this has really been laid down in clear measurements, is the direct correlation between the sharp rise in extreme weather events in recent years and food prices, because I guess food production, as anybody involved in agriculture knows, happens within very, very tight margins. The difference between a fertile field and a drought ridden field, or indeed a waterlogged field – these are fine margins. We’ve seen that, for example, recently in England. They had, I think, the wettest autumn in probably 50 to 100 years, with the result, of course, that the harvests are depressed the following year and so on and so forth. But to give you a few examples. This study tracked how the price of vegetables rose in California and Arizona, in the US in 2022 by 80% as a result of extreme heat and water shortages. They tracked similarly olive oil prices in Europe in 2024 rose by 50%, following a prolonged drought in Italy and Spain in 2023. Rice prices soared by almost 50% in Japan during 2024, again, as a result of a heat wave. Moved down to Africa, we saw Ghana and the Ivory Coast. These are big global producers of cocoa, and we saw prices, cocoa bean prices rise by 280% in 2024.

Matt Cooper: So fluctuation. So it’s the supply issue. The reason the price goes up is if the supply is damaged in interruption to the production of the crops, then the lower supply means higher prices.

John Gibbons: That’s one part of it for sure. So extreme weather hits yields, no question about it. The second thing, of course, is that supply chains are also vulnerable to climate impact. So the supply chains that get food in good condition from the field to the fork, the ability to store food, the ability to transport it, and then to move it in good condition, maybe halfway around the world. With extreme weather, what we’re getting is more spoiling of food, more food being lost and discarded along the way. So it’s a dual pressure, but the single greatest pressure, undoubtedly, is extreme weather conditions, be they drought, be the heat waves. And for example, it’s very difficult to farm in the traditional way if your field is under a foot of water. This is basic stuff and we’re seeing it, again, torrential downpours that are making farming incredibly difficult. We’ve seen it here in Ireland in very recent times. The inability, for example, of farmers to get crops out of the fields when they’re waterlogged. This summer, on the other hand, as somebody who grew up in a farm, I don’t think I’ve ever seen wheat fields, mature, ready to cut wheat fields, probably in late June in Ireland and into early July, at least a month ahead. So again, that gives you a sort of a bounce that obviously meant a very good season for cereals in Ireland, but it’s the luck of the draw, it’s the spin of the bottle and the roll of the dice as to whether you get that positive effect. But what we’re seeing is that for every positive effect, we’re seeing 10 or 20 negative effects. So the net effect is declining food, food production, declining reliability of food production. And, of course, that knocks over into rapidly rising food prices, commodity prices.

Matt Cooper: Okay, tell me about what’s causing the boiling frog effect.

John Gibbons: I suppose, people will be familiar with the analogy of the frog sitting in the pan, and it gradually warms and the frog adjusts to the warmth and eventually the frog boils. Now, I’m happy to report, by the way, that this is indeed a myth. Frogs, if you put them, and I’m sorry, somebody’s actually tested this out. If you put a frog in a pan and you slowly warm it up, it’ll jump out before it boils. So it’s a bit of a bit of a myth. However, the analogy applies far better to humans than to frogs. We’re very susceptible to what’s called the shifting baseline syndrome. And what that means is we tend, it’s maybe one of our most successful characteristics as a species, is our incredible adaptability. Humans adapt to the circumstances around them. So what this study looked at is that there’s useful adaptability and there’s not so useful adaptability. And what they’re finding is that humans are adapting to extreme weather conditions by normalising it and by believing that it’s always been like that. And what’s really incredible, and this came out of this study is how quickly people normalize the weather. For example, even in the length of time this slot has been on the air, which is less than five years, global climate and weather systems have changed in that time. Yet, for all the time, Matt, that we’ve been talking about that, we’ve been talking about extreme weather pretty much on a weekly basis. That would lead your listeners to believe that extreme weather is a normal fact of life, that you get these droughts, you get these heat waves, because we’re getting them year after year after year. And what the study found is that in periods as short as two to eight years, even two years is enough for people to reframe their idea of normal. And if I can give an example of this one that I came across in a book by a historian of science called Jared Diamond. He had lived, he grew up in the American Midwest and he moved away from the Midwest for about 30 years. And then he came back, all those decades later. And the first thing he noticed was that he lived on the foothills of the Rockies and he was saying to people in his local town, what happened to the snowcaps? And they said, what snowcaps? And he said, but, you know, when I was a kid, the Rockies were snow covered and now it’s just the tips. And they said, no, no, that changes every year. So he went back and did the analysis. And sure enough, in certain years, they went up, in certain years, they went down. But over the 30 years, the snow cover steadily disappeared. But the locals didn’t notice because they were the frogs in the pan. They failed to notice the change because they were seeing it every year. And of course, within the climate and weather systems, as we know, we get a lot of variability from season to season and from year to year. And that variability makes it very hard, unless you’re looking at this through a scientific lens, it’s incredibly easy to be misled about the underlying pattern. So I guess that’s what science does. It looks at the underlying patterns to try and distinguish them against the noise of sort of short term variability. And the key finding, I suppose, that this study, in terms of applying it in a practical way, they’re saying that science communication that shows people charts that are slowly rising, is having no effect at all. So their advice to climate communicors is to show it in much more binary terms. In other words, show first, for example, an ice covered lake, then a picture of, as it was, say, 50 years ago, now a picture as it is now, to show people the dramatic change that’s happened over that time. And then, apparently, that registers and that gets people to realise that in fact, these changes are happening because they’re creeping up on us.

Matt Cooper: Okay, tell us about a judgement this week, in the International Court of Justice.

John Gibbons: This is probably, legally speaking, the biggest story of the year, I would say, with regard to climate change, without a doubt. So this is a ruling from the International Court of Justice. Now, the International Court of Justiceice is empowered by the United Nations, and every country on Earth who signed up to the United Nations, is supposedly bound by the International Court of Justice. Now, I appreciate that that some nations at the moment are taking a rather, shall we say, laissez faire approach to international law. But essentially, this is where we make international law. And what the court has ruled this week is that the failure of states to take strong action to protect climate systems from emissions may constitute what they describe as an internationally wrongful act. So what there’re essentially doing about is, I guess they’re putting sort of legal language and legal context on the climate emergency and saying that it’s no longer simply an individual discipline for countries to sort of do as they will on climate change. And how does this play out in practical terms? Let’s take a country like Ireland, that’s a huge per capita emitter. It is quite possible under the ICJ ruling, that another country that’s taking strong climate action could sue Ireland for saying, you guys are climate laggards and we’re going to sue you because the damage that you’re doing is affecting us. So there’s huge scope here, by the way, for countries in the global South to take legal action against countries, high polluting countries like Ireland, in the global North, for our failure, our absolute failure to act on the science.

Matt Cooper: Do you really think anything is going to happen as a result of this? I see the likes of Greenpeace are saying that this ICG advisory opinion marks a turning point for climate justice, as it is clarified once and for all the international climate obligations, the states, and most importantly, the consequences for beaches of these obligations. The message of the court is clear the production, consumption, and granting of licenses and subsidies for fossil fuels could be breaches of international law. John, nobody’s going to enforce that, are they?

John Gibbons: Well, the question is, because the ICJ is the highest court at a global level, they’re now allowing a framework to exist that they’re essentially saying that states have now got codified legal duties to protect against climate harm. I agree with you, Matt. There’s an issue with enforceability here. However, this opens the door for victims of harm to exercise a right of redress, and they’ve given them the framework or what they describe as the legal momentum. So it’s now considered to be legally possible, actionable, and ultimately enforcible. This, of course, will play out through the courts. Now, it won’t play out in the courts in the US any time, since they’re no longer functioning in the normal sense of the word. But the reality is, Matt, the world is a lot bigger than the US and normal law and the enforcement of law is continuing in many other parts of the world, specifically here in the EU. So we can expect this is a foundational ruling that sets down the international and the intergovernmental obligations on climate change. In a sense, if you think of the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel and climate change, that’s the scientific advisory. This now is the legal system coming along and saying: we’ve looked at the scientific advice, and we’re now saying this has profound legal implications for states, but also not just for states, maybe for sectors, maybe for companies, maybe high pollution companies like RyanAir, like CRH, who could be taken to task and legally challenged for their pollution, or maybe an organisation like Dublin Airport Authority, driving higher and higher emissions.

Matt Cooper: Okay, well, the United States is a member of the International Court of Justice, but it has withdrawn from its compulsory jurisdiction, and it often just ignores what the ICGACI says. So I think you can take it that in Trump’s America, it ain’t going to be taking any notice of this.

John Gibbons: I completely agree, but I do think it’s incredibly important, however depressing everything that comes out of America is, to understand that the rest of the world, by and large, is still operates in a lawful way and isn’t governed by felons. So we have to assume that the rule of law will continue to apply there. So I’m not inclined to shrug this off and and think that it’s just going to go away, in the same way that I’m not inclined to shrug off the fact that there’s tens of billions of EU fines coming in the direction of Ireland for our non-compliance with climate targets.

Matt Cooper: We’ve got to leave it there. John Gibbons, thank you.

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Media, TodayFM | Tagged food security, ICJ, IPCC, Today FM | Leave a comment

Untapped potential of district heating

Posted on July 17, 2025 by John Gibbons

Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday July 17th is below. Topics include district heating, ‘last chance tourism and reaction to sentencing of two men in England for cutting down an iconic sycamore tree.

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Media, TodayFM | Tagged District heating, Matt Cooper, Today FM, tourism | Leave a comment

Worst possible time to be led by the worst possible people

Posted on June 27, 2025 by John Gibbons

I haven’t written for the Business Post in a couple of years, so returned in late June with the below piece, which they headlined: ‘We must stop celebrating climate destroyers as captains of industry’. Among the topics covered was Trump’s deranged all-out assault on science, not just climate science, but the actual life-and-death science of weather forecasting. Sure enough, deep staffing cuts to the National Weather Service came home to bite in the early hours of July 4th, as catastrophic flooding in Texas led to over 100 deaths (some 27 positions in the NWS office in Austin/San Antonio are currently listed as vacant). Expect to see more and more instances of ordinary people being abandoned to their fate as climate-fuelled weather disasters intensify worldwide.

IF YOU’VE BEEN finding the daily news bulletins difficult to face lately, you’re by no means alone. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the world is rapidly descending in a new dark age of Idiocracy – one dominated by deranged politicians, predatory corporations and billionaire narcissists who have largely disengaged from objective reality.

In the process, the rich fruits of a century and more of scientific progress and human development have been flung into the furnace of history.

One week from now, the US government’s most important climate resource will be shut down. The website, Climate.gov, has been operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) to convey crucial scientific and weather information to the public. (Clicking the above link now takes you to the Noaa ‘climate’ section instead, which includes a notice explaining how the site, under an Executive Order, has been taken down. In the ‘News’ section on this site, the latest post is dated June 12, suggesting the site is effectively being abandoned).

Noaa has played a vital role in tracking storms and helping communities to brace for impacts of hurricanes in particular. As its remit also includes climate research and modelling, it has now fallen under Donald Trump’s anti-climate fatwa, which has slashed billions of dollars from critical climate and weather research programmes.

Fossil fuel firms spent well over €400 million in the last US election cycle to lobby Trump and to buy off politicians in the US Congress. It has turned out to be a shrewd investment. During 2024, banks pledged a record level of investment in oil, gas and coal projects, at over €800 billion, up a quarter on the previous year. The same bankers have since quietly walked away from their highly publicised ‘climate pledges’ made in recent years.

In the decade since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change set urgent global limits on fossil fuel exploration and consumption, around €7.5 trillion has been poured by banks worldwide into fossil fuel infrastructure and investment.

The world’s largest corporations have directly caused a staggering €25 trillion in climate damages in recent decades, with half that total attributable to just 10 fossil fuel corporations, according to a study released in April. While the vast profits these companies make ends up enriching shareholders and executives, the crippling costs are offloaded onto the general public in the form of pollution and climate-fuelled extreme weather events.

This is just for starters. Research published in 2023 found that global heating of 2.7ºC would expose around two billion people to annual mean temperatures above 29ºC. For context, this is the equivalent to the hottest parts of the Sahara Desert today. As a result of these deadly temperatures, between one and two billion people would be forced to migrate to cooler regions to survive, and food production in these areas would likely collapse.

Further evidence of the threat posed to global food production came in research published in the top journal Nature this week. It warned that some of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions will suffer major declines in output as temperatures continue to climb and extreme weather events intensify. Global wheat and maize production may fall by around 40%, with devastating consequence for billions of people.

The vice is already tightening. In 2023, almost half of the Earth’s land area experienced at least one month of extreme drought. This is three times the area affected by drought in the 1980s. Europe is heating up at twice the global average, according to a 2024 assessment report from the European Environment Agency. Its conclusions were stark: “If decisive action is not taken now, most climate risks identified could reach critical or catastrophic levels by the end of this century. Hundreds of thousands of people would die from heatwaves, and economic losses from coastal floods alone could exceed €1 trillion”.

The warnings of climate scientists and activists have long been ignored, but one voice that may be far more difficult to dismiss is that of the insurance and reinsurance industry. A board member of global insurance giant, Allianz SE, Günther Thallinger recently warned bluntly that the climate crisis is on track to destroy capitalism.

As temperature increases approach 3ºC, the damage will be so severe that the global insurance industry will be overwhelmed. This is already happening, Thallinger noted, as “entire regions are becoming uninsurable”. Even governments will be unable to cover the losses, as entire asset classes are wiped out, triggering a global economic collapse. “The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable”.

Violent weather inflicted over $2 trillion in damages in the past decade, with $450 billion occurring in just the last two years. The only possible solution, Thallinger added, is to eliminate all fossil fuel burning as quickly as possible and deploy renewable energy as an urgent global priority.

In a rational world, these dire warnings would be routinely front page news, with business leaders, media and politicians working together to address this existential crisis. We do not live in a rational world. Rather than hitting the brakes, we are actually accelerating towards oblivion.

For instance, the global aviation industry’s growth plans will see its emissions double by mid-century. In Ireland, the state-owned DAA has been lobbying to increase passenger numbers through Dublin Airport by a quarter, to 40 million a year, a move that would see emissions grow by a ruinous 22%.

Rather than being publicly vilified as reckless and selfish, the people fuelling this tragedy are instead feted as captains of industry and job creators whom we should applaud and admire. As one climate scientist observed sombrely: “we live in an age of fools”.

Posted in Agriculture, Extreme weather, Global Warming, Politics | Tagged Allianz, aviation, Donald Trump, heatwave, insurance, NOAA, Texas | Leave a comment

Official Ireland turns a blind eye to widespread illegal peat mining

Posted on June 26, 2025 by John Gibbons

Pod of The Last Word on the Environment, with Matt Cooper on Today FM, as broadcast on Thursday June 26th is below. Topics include the EPA report on widespread illegal bog mining in Ireland; health and environmental impacts of noise pollution, plus, as France moves to ban cigarette smoking in many outdoor locations from July 1st, we discuss the hugely negative impact of the estimated 4.5 trillion discarded cigarette butts annually.

Posted in Biodiversity, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, TodayFM | Leave a comment

Forty shades of misinformation around solar energy

Posted on May 21, 2025 by John Gibbons

What better time to write about the wonders of solar energy than during the ultra-sunny month of May 2025? Some 6.5% of total electricity production in Ireland that month was from solar, amounting to 173,000 MWh. This a new record, and more than double the level achieved in May 2024. Clean, quiet, unobtrusive, easy to deploy, hugely popular and an excellent source of 100% domestically produced renewable energy, what’s not to like about solar? Well, as I explored in the below piece for the Irish Examiner, this game-changing new technology has incurred the wrath of certain vested interests, with politicians who really should know better jumping on the anti-solar bandwagon.

ONE OF THE best news stories for Ireland this decade has been the outstanding success of our fledgling solar industry.

Five years ago, it was virtually non-existent, yet today, over 140,000 households are selling electricity back to the grid, with this number increasing at the rate of 750 a week. Ireland is on track to have a whopping 8 GW of solar deployed nationally by 2030, mostly supplied by commercial solar farms.

Last summer, peak solar power on the Irish grid was the equivalent of the output of three gas-fired power stations. To hit our 2030 targets and help wean Ireland off its chronic dependence on imported climate-destroying fossil fuels, we are going to need to step up our ambition, and that requires getting our politicians four-square behind this great national bid for energy security.

In the Dáil in March, Taoiseach Micheál Martin was adamant that what he called the “game changer” for Ireland would be “our success and the pace at which we can deliver offshore renewables and solar power”.

However, just a few months earlier, then Tánaiste Martin was highly critical of the impact of large solar farms, warning last October against “40 shades of green being replaced with 40 shades of grey” as he claimed our countryside risks being festooned with solar panels.

Small wonder that the public and indeed the energy industry are confused as to whether or not Irish politicians actually support clean energy.

How accurate was Martin’s portrayal of our green fields being blighted by solar panels? According to the government’s own estimates, to fully meet our 2030 solar targets would require around 12,000 hectares of land.

If that sounds like a lot, it is in fact just 0.25% of Ireland’s total farmland, or not much more than is used for golf courses. Put it another way, 99.75% of Ireland’s green fields will be just as green in 2030.

A flashpoint of controversy has arisen in East Cork with the recent announcement that the Greenhills farm has entered a long-term solar lease. It had until recently been milking over 1,000 dairy cows.

Its conversion to solar will see this one farm produce enough electricity to power over 50,000 homes annually, while also avoiding thousands of tonnes of damaging carbon emissions.

The farm family will have a secure long-term income and the land will be ‘rested’ under the solar panels, which only occupy around a fifth of the total area of the farm, and sheep grazing could, if they wished, take place under the panels. The effects locally will be dramatic: removing 1,000 dairy cows means a sharp drop in the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, as well as toxic nitrous oxide and ammonia. It will also ease pressure on the local watercourses from the thousands of tonnes of slurry this herd would have spread across the landscape, plus the imported chemical nitrogen used to boost grass growth.

What’s more, international studies have found solar farms to support far more biodiversity than the surrounding farmland. Local Fianna Fáil TD – and dairy farmer – James O’Connor denounced the move as leading to “devastating consequences for the dairy industry”, claiming that solar farms offer “appalling” returns to the local community. He believes this shift in land use could “undermine” the dairy industry.

Quite how the loss of one third of 1% of farmland could trigger such catastrophic consequences is a mystery. In the Dáil, O’Connor denounced the “rampant growth” in solar farms. However, the actual rampant growth in rural Ireland in the last decade has been the untrammelled increase in the dairy herd, bringing a host of harmful consequences that are real, not imaginary.

Micheál Martin also alluded to the need to balance solar power with food security, yet 90% of our dairy production is for export markets, thus contributing very little to national food security.

Ireland, on the other hand, is a net importer of over €1 million of fossil fuels every hour, or nearly €10 billion a year. Surely cutting this massive import bill by developing clean, secure and locally produced energy is at least as much a national priority as providing bulk powdered milk to Chinese mums?

We also import four fifths of all the food we eat, as well as millions of tonnes of animal feed annually, so if we are truly worried about addressing food and energy security on this island, we have to take a long, hard look at our grossly oversized livestock sector.

We need far more diversification, not less, whether it is into solar farming, horticulture, tillage, agroforestry or organic systems generally. In a surprise intervention, Climate minister, Darragh O’Brien asked those objecting to the East Cork solar farm to “reflect on what they are doing…people need to see the bigger picture and think bigger”. He’s not wrong.

John Gibbons is an environmental writer and commentator

Posted in Agriculture, Energy, Global Warming, Renewables | Tagged Darragh O’Brien, James O'Connor, Micheal Martin, Solar energy | Leave a comment

He hasn’t gone away, you know

Posted on January 7, 2025 by John Gibbons

Regular visitors to ThinkOrSwim may have been wondering in recent months if I’ve finally gotten sense and packed it in, some 17 years and many hundreds of posts later, as the blog ground to a near halt throughout 2024. For those hoping that might have been the case: sorry to disappoint. I’ve spent much of last year on a large project, one that is still ongoing and that is unlikely to see the light of day any time soon.

To make space for the work involved in this undertaking, I cut back commissioned articles to the bare minimum in recent months, while continuing my weekly radio column on Matt Cooper’s Today FM show as well as other occasional radio and TV slots. Once my end of this project is (hopefully) fully put to bed in the next 2-3 months, I expect to be able to return to something along the lines of normal service, including making sure to keep the blog updated. Needless to say, once it’s in the public domain, I’ll be more than happy to discuss what I’ve been up to at length, but for now, the less said, perhaps the better.

With the kind of crazy stuff we’ve been writing/warning about here for many years now starting to really kick off in earnest, there’s no shortage of topics for ThinkOrSwim to get stuck into. One big piece of that has been the Musk-ification of Twitter, the once indispensable social media site that is now a cess pit of far right trolling and climate denial. I’ve been there since 2010, and over the years had built up a decent following and found it a brilliant public forum for the exchange of ideas and to make contacts around the world in the climate space. Alas, the billionaire toddler has burned it down. I will be deactivating my account later this month, but have since relocated to BlueSky, and find it to be refreshingly reminiscent of the early days of Twitter. If you’re not already there, do give it a try. You’ll find me @thinkorswim.bsky.social. Hope to see you there.

Meanwhile, all the best for whatever 2025 throws our way.

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media | Tagged BlueSky, Twitter | Leave a comment

No good deed goes unpunished as Greens eviscerated

Posted on December 7, 2024 by John Gibbons

The Greens went into a three-way coalition as the junior partner in 2020 and have, by any reasonable measure, overperformed in terms of bending the national political agenda towards meaningful climate action. Of course, mistakes were made and opportunities missed along the way, but to focus on these would, in my view, be to miss the point entirely. The decade from 2011-2020 saw the Greens eliminated entirely from the Dáil, and it’s no coincidence that this was a Lost Decade on climate. We’ll miss them now they’re gone; so too I suspect will many rural TDs, for whom the Greens doubled up as handy bogeymen and whipping boys. Either way, with FF and FG cosying up to the rural independents and already licking their collective lips at going on a spree of road-building, we won’t have to wait too long to find out the difference the Greens did in fact make in the last government. I filed the below piece for the Irish Examiner in early December, as the likely shape of the next Dáil was still unclear.

THE GREENS are dead. Long live the Greens. There’s a saying in Irish politics that no good deed goes unpunished. The Green Party’s reward for a broadly successful and highly influential four-and-a-half years in government has been electoral evisceration.

After a surprisingly harmonious three-way working relationship, it became clear in the run-up to this election that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were prepared to ruthlessly abandon their erstwhile junior partner while using them as a lightning rod to deflect public anger away from themselves.

One of many hints in this direction was the presence of Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary at the launch of a Fine Gael candidate’s campaign, where the audience lapped up his call to “weed out the Greens”. O’Leary had spent years denigrating transport minister, Eamon Ryan, so his presence at a party event signalled it was officially open season on the Greens.

Paradoxically, around one in three Irish people claim to be “alarmed” about climate change, according to research produced by the EPA, yet in the lead-in to the election, fewer than 4% indicated this would be a critical issue in terms of voting.

All politics is, after all, local. It’s quite the statistic to consider that, in the midst of a rapidly deteriorating global climate crisis, only one in 25 people in Ireland are prepared to even consider casting a vote for the only party for whom climate is their core focus.

Former Fine Gael deputy leader Simon Coveney, who masterminded the environmentally ruinous industrial expansion of the dairy sector, noted that historians would praise the Greens for pushing climate change onto the mainstream political agenda. This is undoubtedly true, but will be cold comfort to those TDs who have just been ousted.

Having previously recovered, Lazarus-style, from electoral obliteration, the smart play in 2020 for the 12 Green TDs would have been to sit on the Opposition benches and make political capital by ridiculing the government on its dire environmental performance.

Instead, as its leader and sole surviving TD, Roderic O’Gorman noted: “You get political capital and you spend it.”

While this may seem hard for some in media and politics to countenance, the Greens are far more focused on protecting the environment than preserving their seats. In signing up for coalition government four years ago, most of its TDs knew they would in all probability be signing their own political death warrants, but they went ahead anyway.

From my reading of the manifestos of the three largest political parties, the bad news is that, eco rhetoric notwithstanding, none of them have even begun to grasp the nettle of progressive, let alone radical, climate action. On the campaign trail, Taoiseach Simon Harris repeated the phrase “the planet is on fire”, to the point where he completely drained it of all meaning.

The good news is that both the Social Democrats and Labour have placed environmental protection and climate action at the centre of their political agendas. SocDem leader Holly Cairns is also a farmer, but one prepared to stand up to the industrial livestock lobby. Her party backs phasing out the nitrates derogation, as well as reviving horticulture, expanding organics, incentivising herd reduction and supporting farmers in less polluting and more sustainable forms of agriculture.

Party colleague Jennifer Whitmore confirmed on Sunday that climate was a “red line issue” for the party.

Few doubt that Labour, under Ivana Bacik, is serious about the climate emergency, and keen to put the forgettable performance of Alan Kelly as environment minister in the mid-2010s behind them. Bacik was also generous in lauding what she called the tenacity of the Greens in the outgoing government, adding that Labour is “passionate” about climate action.

With FF/FG likely to have more than 85 seats in the next Dáil, they are clearly within touching distance of power but will need to partner with either one or both of the smaller left-leaning parties or else look to like-minded independents, some of whom have built their careers on doggedly opposing environmental action.

Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been happy to take the credit for climate action in recent years, and equally keen to let the Greens take the blame for the painful measures. It would be a profound betrayal on the part of both Simon Harris and Micheál Martin were they not to build a coalition featuring parties committed to progressive environmental agendas.

The new Dáil will be much the poorer for not featuring Eamon Ryan, arguably the most influential politician of the last decade, as well as Malcolm Noonan who excelled in nature protection. Some say the Greens weren’t radical enough, yet Neasa Hourican of the party’s radical left fared no better than the centrists.

As Senator Róisín Garvey reminded us over the weekend: “As Kermit the Frog used to say, it’s hard being Green”.

Posted in Irish Focus, Media, Politics | Tagged Election 2024, Green Party, Holly Cairns, Roderic O’Gorman | Leave a comment

Rain in Spain a harbinger of ever more climate pain

Posted on October 7, 2024 by John Gibbons

The horrifying floods that killed over 200 people in the Valencia region of Spain dominated the headlines in October 2024, but as I explained in a piece at the time for TheJournal.ie, these were far from isolated incidents. They are clearly linked to an ever intensifying pattern of extreme weather events as our global climate system reacts ever more violently to being overloaded with greenhouse gases. Remember, while 2024 may have been the hottest year ever recorded globally, it is likely to be one of the coolest years of the rest of the tumultuous 21st century.

WASHED AWAY AMID the chaos and the carnage in the Spanish city of Valencia as a year’s rainfall crashed down in barely four hours was the conceit that humanity is somehow in control of nature. This was always a dangerous falsehood, but now it is being painfully exposed as extreme weather disasters hit ever harder.

The death toll at the time of writing has passed 150 for this single incident. As recently as July 2021, horrific flash floods killed more than 180 people in Germany and Austria and caused damage costing billions of euros. Flooding this month in Nigeria killed at least 300 and impacted a further 1.2 million people.

Just the last two weeks have seen extreme flooding in southern France, the Liguria, Savona and Bologna regions in Italy, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Mexico, Taiwan, Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Andalucía in Spain, Marrakech in Morocco, Oman and Malaysia.

Breaking the wrong records

Meanwhile, October 2024 has seen temperature records smashed around the world. By 15 October, Phoenix, Arizona had endured the longest heatwave in US history, with 21 consecutive hottest-ever days, breaking the previous record set during the disastrous Dust Bowl era in 1936.

Closer to home, English farmers have just endured the second worst food harvest on record, as persistent heavy rains turned entire regions into morasses. If by now you are beginning to sense that there’s a clear pattern emerging, you are absolutely correct.

Commenting on the flooding disaster in Valencia, Dr Friederike Otto of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) expert group stated: “No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change; with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall.”

In the first week of October, the 2024 State of the Climate report was published by a panel of top specialists. Its conclusions were stark: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled”, they wrote.

This report, endorsed by more than 15,000 practising climate scientists, added that we are witnessing “the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence.”

Nothing in 100 centuries of human civilisation can compare with today’s global climate crisis. “We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo”, the scientists warned.

All this chaos and devastation, bear in mind, is being wrought as a result of a rise in global average surface temperatures of around 1.3ºC. This doesn’t sound like much, but it is the largest shift in planetary climatic conditions since the end of the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. On our current pathway, worse, infinitely worse, is in store.

A new review of the 10 worst extreme weather events of the last 20 years by WWA researchers concluded that every event had been made more intense as a result of human-caused climate change. “If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue”, the report noted.

Political will

This is not inevitable. The technologies exist to rapidly transition away from fossil fuel usage. Renewable energy is now in almost all cases cheaper than fossil fuels, yet governments continue to subsidise oil, coal and gas burning. In Ireland alone, €2.9 billion was spent in subsidising fossil fuels in 2021 alone, much of this to enable cheap aviation via tax-free jet kerosene.

Ireland’s per capita carbon emissions are among the very highest in the EU, largely thanks to our highly polluting livestock herd, which is a major contributor to global warming due to its release of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. While politicians like Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin talk the talk on climate, with statements like “the planet is on fire”, they also stand squarely behind the major polluters, be they the aviation industry, data centres or the industrial livestock sector.

Nor are they alone. There is little indication that any of our main political parties, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or Sinn Féin have any real appetite to challenge our heavily polluting business-as-usual model predicated on relentless economic growth. The system that is churning out more and more flying, more SUVs, more throwaway consumerism and ever more meat-rich diets is the very system that is accelerating humanity and much of the natural world towards the climate abyss.

Despite this, most Irish politicians, policymakers and the great majority of our media are either oblivious or completely indifferent to this epic unfolding tragedy. You may by now think I’m overstating the risks and running well ahead of the science. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The recently published UN Emissions Gap report found that current policies put in place by governments around the world take us to a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1ºC this century. A major scientific study on the ‘future of the human climate niche’ found that over the next 50 years around one-fifth of the land surface of the Earth will become too hot for human habitation. This will likely force between one and three billion people to migrate as crops fail, animals die and their homelands have to be abandoned. But migrate to where?

Time to look up

Put simply, this is an impending tragedy quite unlike anything in human history, a disaster against which even the world wars of the 20th century pale into near-insignificance.

Still unconvinced? Did you know that, globally, 2023 was not just the hottest year on the instrumental record, but almost certainly the hottest year on Earth for the last 125,000 years? Well, summer 2024 has topped even that, and this year as a whole is now on track to overtake 2023 as the hottest year on record.

We now know where all this is headed. The only question remaining is whether we are prepared to change course. Some brave individuals and groups, including Greta Thunberg and Just Stop Oil have been trying to raise the alarm, using disruptive but non-violent tactics. They have been met with police violence, media ridicule and long prison sentences.

The reality remains the same: either we rapidly bring the era of fossil fuels to an end, or climate collapse will assuredly bring human civilisation to a fiery end. The choice, for now, is ours.

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Just Stop Oil | Tagged flooding, Friederike Otto, Spain, TheJournal.ie, Valencia, World Weather Attribution | Leave a comment

Armed conflict also means going to war on nature

Posted on February 15, 2024 by John Gibbons

By any standards, 2024 was a grim year for armed conflict worldwide. At the time I filed this piece in the Irish Times in February of that year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was bogged down in a bloody stalemate, while the Israeli rampage of slaughter in Gaza was already well underway. Things, of course, can always get worse, as we are about to find out with the installation of the second Trump regime in Washington and the likely accelerated unravelling of our globalised world into heavily armed camps in the months and years ahead. This is playing out against the backdrop of a destabilising climate system, with acute and growing pressures on food production, access to clean water and a scramble for diminishing resources. The spectre of forced climate mass migration also looms, with its potential to ignite a veritable geo-political powder keg.

AS THE world heats up, so too do the risks of armed conflict. In 2022, a total of 56 countries worldwide experienced violent conflict, while the number of resultant fatalities that year was the highest in more than four decades.

In all probability, 2023 was even worse, given the bloody conflict that has erupted in Gaza since last October, one that threatens to escalate into a regional conflagration. As tensions escalate, so also has military spending. This has risen continuously since the late 1990s, hitting an astonishing $2.24 trillion (€2.07 trillion) worldwide in 2022.

Researchers now estimate that some 5.5 per cent of total carbon emissions are directly attributable to the world’s militaries. This is greater, for instance, than all global aviation. In fact, were the military a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest single emitter.

Its environmental impacts go far beyond simply tallying emissions. “Militarism is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavour”, according to sociologist Prof Kenneth Gould.

Exact details are, however, difficult to obtain, as much military activity is shrouded in secrecy. At the insistence of the United States, the carbon impacts of the world’s militaries were specifically excluded from the 1997 Kyoto protocol. The Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015 only requires “voluntary” reporting of military-related emissions, and there was no tally of such emissions in the recent Cop28 conference in Dubai.

While in the past, conflicts arose from a wide range of causes, today these risks have been amplified by global environmental destabilisation. “I see climate change as the overarching existential threat, one that dwarfs so many other issues,” says Mark Mellett, vice-admiral and former chief of staff of the Defence Forces.

As climate change intensifies, “we are going to see extraordinary penalties in terms of resources, in terms of people being dislocated. One degree of temperature rise will impact billions, not millions, yet we’re on track for that, with current projections of probably 2.7 degrees”, Mellett says. “This is an extraordinary future.”

Mellett, who has a PhD in environmental governance, believes the most critical climate impact coming down the tracks is forced migration which will, he believes, “challenge the cohesion of the institutions of the European Union; the only way it can be addressed is through mitigation”. Forced migration, he stresses, is “only a symptom of a much more serious problem that needs to be dealt with at source”.

The relationship between climate change and conflict is complex and non-linear. The US military, by far the world’s largest, classifies climate as a “threat multiplier”. The increasing frequency and intensity of weather disasters is putting a strain on military resources, as they are typically among the first responders in disaster zones. In addition, sea-level rise, hurricane damage and extreme flooding events have cost the US military billions of dollars in recent years in direct damage to bases and equipment.

An international study of the 25 countries worldwide reckoned to be most vulnerable to climate impacts found 14 involved in conflict. Many of these are in sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the world that has been already severely impacted by climate change.

The irony for countries such as Yemen, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel region is that they have contributed only a negligible amount of the carbon emissions that are now devastating their regions, notes Dr Rory Finegan, assistant professor of military history and strategic studies at Maynooth University.

It is the high-emitting countries and regions, including Europe and the US, that bear the brunt of responsibility for climate damages. This was, for the first time, addressed at Cop28 with the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund to help compensate countries for climate impacts not of their making.

However, the total so far committed to this fund is about €700 million, a veritable drop in the bucket measured against climate impacts already running into hundreds of billions of euro annually.

A major study published in 2020 in the journal Nature Sustainability found what its authors described as the human climate niche is surprisingly narrow. As global temperatures continue to climb, the study projected that between one and two billion people will be facing “unlivable” temperatures later this century, leading to forced migrations on a scale never before experienced by humans.

The social, political, economic and security implications of such a large movement of people across national borders are almost unimaginably severe. While climate and ecological destabilisation are clearly major risk factors increasing the risk of armed conflict, the environmental impacts of conflict are equally acute.

“Down through the millennia, a scorched earth policy was often among the military tactics being used,” adds Finegan, who served in the Defence Forces for 36 years before moving into academia. “You are now seeing this being used in a lot of the African conflicts, including in Chad and the DRC, where crops are being deliberately destroyed and wells being poisoned; this all just feeds into the cycle of misery.”

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in the past decade, the number of people forcibly displaced has doubled to almost 80 million worldwide, comprising 35 million refugees and 45 million internally displaced. This data predates both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, so it is likely an underestimate.

While forced migration as a consequence of climate change represents a vast threat to global security in the medium term, equally pressing and related issues include acute water shortages as well as reductions in global food production as a result of ever more destructive extreme weather events.

Another study in Nature Sustainability last year found conflicts involving water have risen sharply since 2000. In the decade to 2010, there were rarely more than 25 incidents a year globally. By 2018, this had increased five-fold, to more than 125 – while in 2022, it doubled again, to just more than 250.

The devastating civil war that has raged in Syria since 2011 was triggered at least in part by acute water shortages that followed the most severe regional drought in some 800 years. A World Weather Attribution study found that this drought was made 25 times more likely as a result of climate change.

The double irony of climate and conflict is the feedback loop that connects them. Armed conflict destroys infrastructure and can lead to widespread contamination of farmland and waterways. Conflict often forces farmers to abandon their fields and livestock, which in turn exacerbates the very conditions, such as hunger and water shortages, that stoke a vicious cycle of further conflict.

Some of this conflict arises between pastoralists and settled farmers, as they are pushed into competition for land and access to water as a result either of climate change or forced displacement arising from warfare.

A further element increasing pressure, Mellett says, is “the large rise in population that is happening in theatres like Africa”. The continent’s population has grown more than five-fold since 1960 and, barring disasters, Africa’s population is expected to double by 2050.

Since the end of the second World War, Europe in particular has enjoyed decades of peace and security. “That’s all in the crosshairs now, as we move forward with these new temperature profiles, because significant parts of the world will become uninhabitable”. In international law, there is no clear recognition of what constitutes a climate refugee, he underlines.

We are, Mellett adds, “a generation that will be accused of intergenerational sabotage in years to come, because we have consumed so far beyond what is sustainable – it’s greedy, frankly. If we don’t live sustainably, we are accepting that we simply don’t care about future generations.”

The ecological scars of warfare can last for decades. Iraq is still dealing with the fallout from the widespread use of depleted uranium by US troops in the 1990 Gulf War. Finegan says the “deliberate use of chemical warfare by the US in Vietnam, where large tracts of the jungle were defoliated with Agent Orange, still has very tragic residual effects on the Vietnamese population”.

While long-range forecasting is fraught with uncertainty, it seems inevitable the 21st century will be defined by growing political tension and conflict as billions of people struggle for scarce resources and for survival on a rapidly heating, ecologically depleted planet.

Posted in Politics, Sustainability | Tagged Gaza, Mark Mellett, Rory Finegan, UNHCR | Leave a comment

Another year for the record books?

Posted on January 4, 2024 by John Gibbons

I filed this piece, a combined review of 2023 and preview of 2024 on the climate and wider environmental front for the Irish Examiner just before the holidays and it ran in early January. And if I sound like a broken record, it’s just that records keep getting broken, and 2024 looks like yet another year of living dangerously.

THEY SAY THAT every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored. While it was supposed to be virtually impossible, there is now a better than evens chance that global temperatures this year will “for the first time in millennia” rise by 1.5C over the pre-industrial average.

Already, 2023 is understood to have been the hottest year on Earth in the last 125,000 years with temperatures averaging around 1.4C above pre-industrial.

To try to grasp the magnitude of this heating, scientists calculated that in July 2023 “the hottest month in Earth history” the planet absorbed the equivalent energy from human actions as released by 800,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every single day.

This colossal additional energy has provided fuel for epic weather disasters on all continents.

Record-smashing extreme heatwaves were recorded repeatedly across Europe, North America and much of Asia, and as the southern hemisphere swung into spring and summer later in the year, temperatures above 35C were recorded in South America in its midwinter.

To understand just how extraordinary these heatwaves are, the temperatures being experienced from northern Argentina to Chile were 22-25C above normal for the time of year. In parts of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, temperatures breached 40C in the depths of winter.

A study by the scientific group World Weather Attribution found that these freakishly hot conditions, that led to multiple deaths, were made 100 times more likely as a result of human-induced climate change.

While the developing El Niño played a minor role in spiking 2023 temperatures, its impact is expected to be much more pronounced in 2024. El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern of sea surface warming, originating in the Pacific Ocean.

Typically “in an El Niño year” global temperatures increase slightly, as more heat energy from the oceans enters the atmosphere. The strengthening El Niño effect into 2024 has the power to turbocharge the global atmosphere, which is already heating quickly as a result of the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from human activity.

At the Cop21 conference in Paris in 2015, nations of the world agreed to limit the rise in global temperatures to “well below 2C” aiming to hold the line at 1.5C. In the years since then, scientific evidence has underlined the extreme sensitivity of Earth systems to increased levels of GHGs.

At that time, it was still being projected that the world would not experience its first 1.5C year until into the 2030s. This has turned out to be entirely optimistic. While temperatures race forward, the political response to the crisis still moves at a glacial pace.

The recently-concluded Cop28 conference in Dubai managed to mention the phrase “fossil fuels” for the first time in its history. Beyond that, little concrete progress was made. Emissions reductions remain largely voluntary and left up to individual states to implement or ignore.

While most politicians headed home from the conference largely satisfied with the non-binding nature of the process, how many of them will have read the State of the Cryosphere 2023 report?

This was produced recently by 60 top experts in the field and began with the stark statement: “We cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice”. We are, the study warned, on the cusp of catastrophic sea level rises.

The cryosphere refers to the world’s frozen landscapes “from the poles to Greenland” and massive glaciers such as in the Himalayas, as well as permafrost. “From the cryosphere point of view, 1.5C is not simply preferable to 2C or higher, it is the only option”, the report noted.

Failure to drastically cut global carbon emissions locks in humanity to centuries of catastrophic sea level rise, of a scale and at a rate that will be impossible for societies to adapt to.

The central conclusion of the cryosphere report is that if temperatures are allowed to reach 2C, it will trigger an irreversible collapse of the world’s major ice shelves leading to the inundation and loss of much of the world’s coastal settlements and infrastructure.

For Ireland, this would mean the gradual abandonment of much of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Wexford and Galway. Put simply, this cannot be allowed to happen.

Yet politicians, lobbyists, and corporations are carrying on with the delusional conceit that we can cobble together some kind of last-minute compromise with the laws of physics.

After the blistering European summer heatwaves of 2022, deadly heat returned to the continent in 2023 with the mercury hitting 45C in areas of Spain and across the Mediterranean in mid-July last. Many Irish tourists found themselves in “unbearable” temperatures in traditional European holiday spots.

The flip side of high temperatures are extreme flooding events. The most severe of these occurred when Storm Daniel ripped into Libya in September 2023, killing an estimated 20,000 people with many deaths attributed to the collapse of a poorly maintained dam.

Analysis by World Weather Attribution found that the devastation in Libya was made far more likely and worse by climate change. Reconstruction costs are expected to run into billions of dollars.

There was much fanfare at Cop28 at agreement having been reached on a Loss and Damage Fund to help compensate countries being impacted by climate change, yet the total (voluntary) commitments to this fund run to around $700m.

As Libya illustrates, this is a drop in the bucket for a single country let alone as a global fund. Ireland received a taste of extreme weather when Midleton, Co Cork, was hit by a severe flooding event in October.

Storm Babet dumped over a month’s rainfall on the area in a 24-hour period, leading to millions in damage. For every 1C rise in global temperatures, the atmosphere can hold an additional 7% of water vapour, and Ireland’s rainfall has increased by this amount in just the last 30 years in line with rising temperatures.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that, while engineering solutions can work in limited instances, the only longer-term way to safely manage increased precipitation in Ireland is to employ nature-based solutions such as restoring uplands and paying farmers to allow their fields in floodplains to flood, as nature intended.

In some cases “however” it will be simply impossible to defend properties and infrastructure, and a planned retreat from high-risk areas is inevitable. We may have already breached tipping points

It is astonishing to consider that all 10 of the hottest years ever recorded on the instrumental record, stretching back to the late 1800s, have all occurred since 2012. The chance of this sequence being a coincidence is less than one in a billion.

The problem with tipping points is that, because of system inertia, you can have breached one or more without the true impacts being immediately apparent. All we know for sure is that we are already in a parlous situation.

And 2024 promises to be yet another year of living dangerously. While we should be tip-toeing carefully along, humanity continues instead to blunder forward more quickly than ever wandering deeper and deeper into a veritable minefield of climate impacts.

Will our luck finally run out in 2024 or, like in the movies, will we engineer an unlikely last-minute escape? Time will tell.

Posted in Energy, Extreme weather, Global Warming, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged COP28, flooding, Libya, Midleton, Storm Babet, World Weather Attribution | 1 Comment

Winning slowly still means we’re losing

Posted on December 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

I filed my final Irish Examiner report on the Cop28 conference as it came to an end in Dubai. Next stop: Cop28 in Azerbaijan in November 2024 another petro-state, and yes, this event will also be presided over by a senior oil company executive. It is sorely tempting to just denounce the entire Cop process as a rolling farce, yet in the final analysis, it’s all we’ve got.

SEEING THE outcome of the Cop28 conference in Dubai unfold is reminiscent of watching a dog riding a bicycle. It may not be elegant, it may not be making much progress, but the real wonder is that it is happening at all.

Considering how difficult it can be to achieve political consensus even within a single country, it is bordering on miraculous that a global mechanism exists where around 200 sovereign states sit down together every year to try to thrash out an agreement on the climate crisis.

This strength is also the key weakness of the process. The Cop conferences require unanimity, and this allows vested interests to hobble proceedings and force them to move at the speed of the most reluctant participants.

It is mind-boggling to consider that it has taken almost 30 years for fossil fuels, the principal cause of global warming, to even be formally mentioned by name.

That this has at last happened in Dubai is significant, but can hardly be considered a seismic event. When it comes to climate change, winning slowly is ultimately the same as losing.

Tipping points in the climate system, from ice shelf collapse to permafrost thaw, AMOC shutdown (collapse of the Gulf Stream), or die-back of the Amazon rainforest respond not to politics, but to physics.

We either stay within critical planetary limits or we face near-term catastrophe, and there is simply no way of negotiating or wishing away these limits.

While an aspiration to “transition away” from fossil fuel usage makes its long-overdue first appearance in a Cop decision text this year, even that lukewarm phrase is further diluted by stating that this transition is to happen “in energy systems” only.

In practice, this completely ignores transport, which accounts for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Critically, there are no mechanisms in place globally to in any way limit countries or corporations from continuing to explore for or burn fossil fuels.

In fact, the International Monetary Fund estimates that in 2022, fossil fuels received $7trn in subsidies, or $13m every minute, despite earlier calls to begin to phase these out.

Even within the EU, last year, fossil fuel subsidies doubled to around €300bn, as governments kept energy prices artificially low.

For hosts, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), presenting some kind of win was crucial as a face-saving exercise, having been humiliated by the revelation that it was using the Cop conference to conduct oil deals.

Their discomfort was increased by leaked comments from conference president Sultan Al Jaber which were dismissive of the need to ever limit fossil fuel emissions and disrespectful towards the Chair of the Elders, Mary Robinson.

When Al Jaber claimed “we have helped restore faith and trust in multilateralism, and we have shown that humanity can come together”, he may have been stretching the meaning of language to breaking point.

And lest we forget, Adnoc, the UAE state oil company that Al Jaber heads, is planning to massively increase oil production.

The oil-producing bloc, Opec, led by Saudi Arabia, accounts for over three-quarters of the world’s known oil reserves. It had fiercely resisted any meaningful or binding steps to put limits on fossil fuels.

The Saudi delegation expressed approval for the final Cop28 document, which includes a Swiss cheese of loopholes and opt-outs, secure in the knowledge that it means business as usual for its energy sector.

While Climate Minister Eamon Ryan fought the good fight to salvage a better deal as the EU’s climate finance negotiator, his description of the outcome in Dubai as “historic” but “not perfect” oddly summed up the conference’s many contradictions quite well.

Failure to reach any form of agreement would have been a body blow to the whole intergovernmental climate process, which is based on incremental baby steps nudging towards consensus.

For me, the most puzzling Irish contribution to Cop28 came from Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) chairwoman Marie Donnelly, where she claimed that Ireland is not a climate laggard and is “keeping pace with other countries”.

A Central Bank report last month showed that Ireland’s per capita emissions are now a whopping 23% higher than the EU average, because of our high emissions agriculture sector, adding that “by global standards, Ireland is an emission-intensive economy”.

It is more than a little surprising that the chair of the CCAC, the very agency charged with leading Ireland on a low-emissions pathway, does not appear to even accept that we have a problem to begin with.

Globally, what ultimately matters is whether tangible progress has been made at Cop28 on the pathway towards keeping global average temperatures increases to below 1.5C and well below 2C.

The short answer is “no”, but in a world riven by conflict and divided by the rise of populism and authoritarianism, it remains more vital than ever that we persist with the only mechanism in existence that allows humanity to take a truly global approach to address our ultimate global challenge.

Posted in Energy, Global Warming | Tagged AMOC, CCAC, COP28, Eamon Ryan, Marie Donnelly, Sultan Al Jaber, Tipping points | Leave a comment

Seriously, why not just use a rake?

Posted on December 13, 2023 by John Gibbons

Have to admit that this one has long been a personal bugbear: the petrol leaf-blower. These are the proverbial solution to which there is no known problem, yet they are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable. I filed this piece for the ‘Outdoors’ page of the Irish Examiner in December.

IF YOU HAD TO come up with an invention that is as pointless as it is harmful, you would be hard-pressed to do better than the petrol-powered leaf blower. First of all, there’s the racket. Producing around 100 decibels of noise, a leaf blower is similar to the level of sound produced by a jet aircraft taking off.

Even at a distance of 250 metres, people are exposed to noise levels well above the World Health Organisation’s maximum safe level of 55 decibels. A single leaf blower can disturb an entire neighbourhood, and there are thousands in use across Ireland, by contractors, local authorities and individuals, with little or no oversight on their harmful impacts.

Next year sees the state of California institute a complete ban on petrol leaf blowers; this follows a similar move by Washington DC early last year. Bans are also being considered in cities and municipalities across Europe.

Apart from noise, what makes leaf blowers especially dangerous is that they are powered by small two-stroke engines, that burn a combination of petrol and oil, and in the process produce prodigious levels of air pollution. A study in California found that these two-stroke engines actually produce more smog-producing emissions than all 14 million cars in the state.

Thanks to strict regulations, tailpipe emissions from cars have been sharply reduced in recent decades. However, two-stroke engines are exempted from such regulation. The effects are stark.

In the US, these so-called small off-road engines (SOREs), which include leaf blowers, lawn mowers and chain saws, account for a quarter of all emissions of benzene, a carcinogen, 12% of all nitrogen oxide and 17% of volatile organic compounds.

Research conducted by the California Air Resources Board reached the astonishing finding that just one hour’s use of a petrol leaf-blower creates as much smog-forming pollution as driving a modern mid-sized car about 1,600 kilometres, the equivalent of around 15 hours continuous driving.

In 2019, the German environment ministry issued guidance on the use of leaf blowers, stating they should be only used if indispensable. Research in recent years has shown alarming drops in insect populations in Germany, and the ministry added that leaf blowers can be fatal to insects in the foliage.

Insects, along with many invertebrates and smaller creatures, use fallen leaves both as a source of shelter and nutrition to help them survive the winter. The jet of air produced by a leaf blower reaches speeds of around 300 km/hr, the equivalent of a lethal hurricane for any small creatures caught in its blast.

Another, less obvious hazard produced by these machines is the dust they stir up and release back into the air a toxic cloud of mould, pollen, animal faeces, fungal spores, heavy metals and residues from pesticides.

The people most at risk from petrol leaf blowers are the operators, especially those employed by contractors, as they are exposed to extremely high noise levels as well as toxic fumes. And while many wear ear protection, it is extremely rare to see an operator in Ireland also wearing breathing apparatus.

Ironically, the recent backlash against leaf blowers dates back to 2020 and the covid lockdown. Many people all over the world were forced to work from home, and came to deeply resent the near-constant noise intrusion of these machines in otherwise quiet neighbourhoods.

With the advent of battery-powered leaf blowers, there are now vastly quieter, cleaner alternatives available to the current two-stroke engines. Washington DC has introduced a rebate programme for small landscaping firms aiming to trade up to electric equipment, while California has set aside a $25 million fund to help contractors buy electric power tools.

While battery-powered leaf blowers greatly reduce both the noise and pollution hazards produced by their two-stroke petrol counterparts, they nonetheless remain environmentally unfriendly in operation, damaging habitats, harming wildlife and stirring up toxic dust clouds.

However they are powered, leaf blowers remain the solution to which there is no known problem. Garden rakes do just as good a job, but without the drama and damage to wildlife. Will it take a little longer to clear a lawn of leaves by rake instead of blower? Yes, but frankly, how many times a year does the average gardener need to do this?

There is of course also an excellent case for leaving leaves exactly where they fall, to slowly decompose and fertilise the soil and provide nutrients and shelter for a plethora of wild critters, just as nature intended, in fact.

The oh-so-human compulsion to tidy up and see everything in neat piles and straight lines is completely at odds with the organised chaos of the natural world. So, forget about that leaf blower…nature, as well as your neighbours, will thank you for it.

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Pollution, Sustainability | Tagged air pollution, gardening, Irish Examiner, leaf blower | Leave a comment

Do as I say, just not as I do

Posted on December 10, 2023 by John Gibbons

While it’s easy to finger-wag and point to the failures of others on achieving climate targets, how does Ireland stack up in terms of delivering on its own legally-binging commitments? In short, not very well, as I explained in this Cop28 update piece for the Irish Examiner in December.

IT IS QUITE incredible to consider that, in all 27 of the UN’s Cop climate change conferences held since 1995, never once did they conclude with a recommendation that fossil fuels be phased out, or even a proposed future timeline for this to happen.

It would be akin to hosting an annual international conference on the dangers of smoking that somehow never mentioned cigarettes or the tobacco industry, and had no plans to tax, phase out, or even mildly rein in their use.

Given that fossil fuel burning is far and away the main driver of the climate emergency, this underlines the iron grip this powerful sector has retained over politics. Former Irish president and chair of the Elders, Mary Robinson arrived in Dubai on Friday and wasted no time in demanding that Cop28adopt “clear, unambiguous language to urgently phase out all fossil fuels.

Robinson’s pre-conference spat with Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, made headlines around the world, and put the hosts, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on the back foot, having been publicly embarrassed over Al Jaber’s antediluvian comments that were dismissive both of the science of climate change and Robinson herself.

In plain terms, unless there is international agreement on an urgent roadmap to phase out the use of fossil fuels, including an immediate ban on new exploration, it will be impossible to avoid climate catastrophe.

It really is as simple as that. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of rapid destabilisation of the global climate system happening right now, political system inertia and vested interests keep us locked on a collective course for disaster.

The presence of around 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop28, quadruple the number who attended last year’s conference, underlines that the industry, with over $5 trillion (€4.6tn) in revenues last year, is gearing up to fight to the bitter end.

Last month was the hottest November ever recorded globally, one of six months this year that broke all-time records. For two days in November, global average temperatures actually breached 2C above pre-industrial, a scenario many scientists thought impossible for at least another decade.

Overall, 2023 is already confirmed to be the hottest year on the global instrumental record, and likely the hottest in millennia. The feet of the world’s climate negotiators are, in a very real sense, to the fire in Dubai. Nothing less than radical action to shift direction will suffice. As climate activist Greta Thunberg memorably put it: “We are out of excuses, and we are out of time”.

While it can seem reassuring for many Irish people to point the finger at the fossil fuel giants as the chief climate villains, the reality is that we too are international laggards. This point was driven home forcefully with the release at Cop28 on Friday of a new report which independently monitors the climate performance of around 90 countries.

Ireland’s rankings tumbled six places to 43rd in the Climate Change Performance Index. Ireland received a ‘medium’ rating for renewable energy and energy use, but was ranked ‘low’ on both climate policy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

It noted that, despite the Government introducing legally-binding carbon budgets in 2022, it lacked a long-term strategy for phasing out fossil fuel infrastructure.

The report also singled out economic growth in emissions-intensive sectors, specifically agriculture and land use as causing Ireland’s absolute GHG emissions to remain high.

Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue arrived in Dubai on Friday to take part in a series of events. According to a Government statement, Ireland is a world leader in sustainable foods systems from farm to fork and the minister is using the opportunity to showcase our story as a model for other food producing countries.

According to a 2017 study published by the European Commission, Ireland produces the largest amount of GHGs per euro of agricultural output of any country in the EU27, while a 2019 study from Wageningen University in the Netherlands found that Irish GHG emissions per kilogramme of milk are the fourth highest in the EU.

As Alan Matthews of Trinity College Dublin noted in 2019, analysis carried out by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that Irish emissions per kilogramme of protein in milk are 50% higher than the average for producers in western Europe as a whole.

Quite what lessons Ireland can share at Cop28 as a self-described “world leader in sustainable food systems remains to be seen, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is crystal clear on the future of genuinely sustainable food production.

What is needed, according to the IPCC’s 2022 report on climate mitigation, is “a transition towards more plant-based consumption and reduced consumption of animal-based foods, particularly from ruminant animals, which could reduce pressure on forests and land used for feed, and support the preservation of biodiversity and planetary health.

Major meat producers are heavily represented at Cop28, led by the Global Meat Alliance, an international group that includes an Irish representative.

Efforts are being developed to claim that livestock production can be carbon neutral if small reductions in methane, a potent greenhouse gas produced by livestock, are achieved. However, these claims have been rebutted in a recent paper in the journal, Environmental Research Letters, that shows that any claimed ‘cooling’ effect is only temporary and in no way offsets the warming impacts of livestock agriculture.

These industry claims distract us from the urgent challenge of reducing emissions of all greenhouse gases from all sectors, including agriculture, according to the paper’s authors.

Meanwhile, Tanaiste and Foreign Affairs Minister Micheal Martin announced support for climate-related projects for highly vulnerable countries. The amount Ireland is spending on climate finance has doubled since 2015 and is on target to reach €225m by 2025, according to Martin. The Tanaiste also pointed to Ireland’s domestic progress on climate, including our legally-binding 51% emissions reductions target by 2030.

However, the Environmental Protection Agency has already confirmed that this target is dead in the water, with the very best outcome for 2030 now a 29% emissions cut. Martin also stressed Ireland’s commitment to being climate-neutral by 2050. However, our failure to meet binding near-term targets puts a major question mark over the likelihood of such objectives being met.

On a positive note, few would doubt the sincerity or commitment of Climate Minister Eamon Ryan to see Ireland square up to the existential challenge of the climate emergency. And, while Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s contributions seem forced and scripted, the climate penny does seem to have dropped for Micheal Martin.

On the international climate stage, Ireland is fortunate in having the tigerish Mary Robinson as one of the leading players, while President Michael D Higgins has also been a consistent advocate for climate action.

What is less clear is who would pick up the baton for a future government at Cop29 or 30, one presumably led by Sinn Fein? So far, the party has been at best lukewarm, wary perhaps of a rural backlash, real or imaginary, against strong climate action and showing limited engagement with the science.

As we enter the final days of Cop28, the indications are that it is shaping up to be one of the more consequential in recent times, perhaps not yet on the level of Cop21 in Paris but nonetheless an important milestone on an increasingly rocky road to averting climate breakdown.

Posted in Agriculture, Global Warming, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged Charlie McConalogue, COP28, Dubai, Eamon Ryan, EPA, Global Meat Alliance, Livestock, Mary Robinson, Sinn Fein | Leave a comment

Taking the man in charge down a peg or two

Posted on December 4, 2023 by John Gibbons

The Cop28 conference got off to an eventful start in Dubai, with our own former president grabbing international headlines in her forthright exchanges with the new president of Cop, as I reported in the Irish Examiner in early December.

IT WAS ALWAYS a high risk strategy to entrust the running of the crucial intergovernmental climate negotiations to a petro-state, and then to appoint the boss of its national oil company as president of Cop28. And so it has transpired.

Former Irish president and UN climate envoy, Mary Robinson pressed Al Jaber hard on the conference call, stating: “we are in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel”.

When Al Jaber brushed off her comments as alarmist, Robinson, a lawyer by training, went in for the kill: “I read that your company is investing in a lot more fossil fuel in the future.”

The now-flailing Cop28 president retorted that her information was from “your own media, which is biased and wrong. I am telling you I am the man in charge and it is wrong. You need to listen to me, ma’am, you guys write a lie and you believe it I’m sorry, get your facts straight, ma’am”.

A flustered Al Jaber then fell back on the laziest of climate denier tropes of her “wanting to take the world back into caves”.

Al Jaber gave the distinct impression of not being remotely comfortable at being challenged, least of all by a woman. To say this was an inauspicious lead-in to the Cop28 climate negotiations would be quite the understatement.

At an unscheduled press conference, Al Jaber made a lacklustre attempt to walk back his own comments, while also stating that the phase-out of fossil fuels is inevitable, in fact it is essential. He once again inferred the real problem was how they were reported in the media.

His mood was unlikely to have been improved by the recent revelation that the United Arab Emirates was planning to use the Cop28 meeting to conduct negotiations for oil and gas. The line between tragedy and farce is being blurred on a daily basis.

The arrival of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in Dubai from the outset of the conference appeared to set the tone for Ireland’s engagement with the process at the highest level. However, Varadkar pointedly made his first engagement in Dubai a visit to a large dairy farm.

While not doing any media around the visit, a statement from the Taoiseach said the Al Ain farm is “keen to learn more from Ireland’s expertise in sustainability” This appears to be an unsubtle political signal to Ireland’s high-emissions livestock sector that they have little to fear from the Cop28 process.

While the UAE hosts were clearly discombobulated by Mary Robinson’s line of questioning, they will have been relieved to hear Leo Varadkar fudge on the need to phase out fossil fuels. At the weekend, he said: “If it’s the case that there are technologies, like carbon capture and storage (CCS) that can be developed … then that achieves the objective”.

The techno-fixes that Varadkar (and climate minister Eamon Ryan) appears to be betting on simply do not exist anywhere on Earth, and for good reason. Adding CCS to any existing fossil fuel facility, such as a power station, is hugely expensive and would make it uneconomic to operate. Oil companies know this because they have already tried.

While CCS is at least possible in theory on a power station, it’s simply impossible to capture carbon from a car’s tailpipe or a central heating system. It may have a very limited role in the future, but betting the house on it today seems reckless in the extreme.

Also over the weekend, the fossil fuel industry pledged to cut methane leaks from their pipelines. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, now responsible for around a third of all global warming. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the industry’s commitments as “clearly falling short of what is required”.

Ireland, meanwhile, is an oversized producer of methane through our expanded and intensified livestock herd, but is not expected to bring any significant proposals to the Cop conference on reducing methane emissions.

Agriculture minister Charlie McConalogue issued a statement outlining what he called the “strong progress of agriculture in meeting climate targets”, et nowhere in his statement could I find any actual data to support this claim of strong progress. Bizarrely, McConalogue refers to whole-of-economy 51% reduction in emissions by 2030 that are, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, already completely off the table.

This underlines the radical disconnect between the reality of the climate emergency and the anodyne statements by politicians protecting their patch.

What is touted as the biggest win of Cop28 to date is the agreement on a ‘loss and damage’ fund to help poorer countries cope with climate impacts. Commitments to date amount to around $400 million, including €25 million from Ireland. This is barely 0.1% of the estimated annual climate losses topping $400 billion currently hammering the global south.

Little done, lots more to do at Cop28.

Posted in Agriculture, Irish Focus | Tagged Charlie McConalogue, COP28, Dubai, Leo Varadkar, Mary Robinson, Sultan Al Jaber, UAE | Leave a comment