To cut or to cull, that is the question

Posted on June 24, 2023 by John Gibbons

It’s amazing the power of a single word or phrase. A headline writer in one of the Irish dailies deployed the word ‘cull’ to describe proposals to modestly reduce the total number of Irish cattle in line with our climate targets, and it became the phrase that rang around the world. At a stroke, it mis-framed this issue as being all about animal welfare, and defending our cattle from being ‘culled’ by greenies. As a cynical inversion of reality, it’s about as perfect an example as you could get, but as I explained in the Irish Examiner in June, this conspiratorial nonsense gained serious traction, especially when boosted by Elon Musk.

HAVE YOU HEARD the one about the poor defenceless Irish cows that callous, bloodthirsty environmentalists want to kill?

“You will not believe the insanity now happening in Ireland”, Fox News host Dagen McDowell told her US audience last week (clip below).

“Farmers there are revolting against a proposal by the Government to kill 200,000 cows, all to meet the EU’s climate goals’, this is the kind of insanity going on in the name of fighting climate change.”

She then quoted a tweet from billionaire Elon Musk, which read: “This really needs to stop. Killing some cows doesn’t matter for climate change.”

Musk’s comments were in response to a tweet from conservative author Ashley St Clair which stated: “The push to end life, of both animals and humans, in the name of ‘climate activism’ is fundamentally evil”.

This deranged narrative which, among other things, conflates abortion with “killing cows” has gained traction globally.

It has been said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has time to pull its boots on, and this is a case in point.

There is a certain Orwellian genius at pitching a sector, whose business model involves commercially exploiting livestock from the moment of birth until they are slaughtered, into the defenders of these same animals (for the record, all dairy cows also end their lives in an abattoir).

But in a post-truth world, such deception, enthusiastically abetted by right-wing media, is as unremarkable as it is rife.

Nature Restoration Law

This gusher of disinformation is all part of a concerted drive to derail the EU’s proposed Nature Restoration Law, with the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), of which Fine Gael is a member,  leading the charge.

The EPP has produced a torrent of dubious data and dodgy claims to support its efforts. Among the more egregious was that villages would have to be demolished to make way for nature restoration. When asked to name one village anywhere in Europe actually facing demolition, the EPP admitted the claim was baseless.

Despite the dishonesty, its efforts appeared to have been successful, having persuaded the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture to vote for an outright rejection of the entire nature restoration law.

However popular these attempts to sabotage nature restoration are with the agri-industrial PLCs and the farm groups who support them, the EPP’s plans may now be unravelling.

‘Core economics’

It turns out, in the words of the European Central Bank (ECB), that “humanity needs nature to survive, and so do the economy and banks’ destroy nature, and you destroy the economy”.

The ongoing war on nature being waged by unsustainable intensive farming “presents a growing financial risk that cannot be ignored”, according to Frank Elderson, vice-chairman of the ECB’s supervisory board.

These threats, Elderson expanded, are measurable. The ECB assessed that the decline of so-called ecosystem services (things provided by nature for free) threatens up to 75% of all bank loans in the Euro area, as many of the millions of companies operating in the EU area “depend on ecosystem services to continue producing their goods or providing their services”.

In short, it turns out that thrashing nature for a quick profit is not quite the bargain that many, especially in the EPP and Fine Gael, appear to think. Responding to criticism of his comments, Elderson added: “This is not some kind of flower power, tree-hugging exercise, this is core economics”.

Arguments rebuffed

Another powerful economic argument was advanced in an explanatory paper issued by the European Commission. It noted that nature restoration offers a spectacular return on investment of €8 for every €1 spent. In wetlands, the ratio is even higher.

There was more bad news in store in recent days for the agri-industrial lobby and its political supporters. Among the various arguments mounted in opposition to nature restoration have included Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s claim that this would impede renewable energy projects.

This was thoroughly debunked by the lobby group Wind Europe, which noted that biodiversity protection and the expansion of renewable energy “go hand in hand, the two are completely compatible”.

Varadkar’s claims regarding nature protection being a threat to food security have also been roundly refuted. A clear example of this is the collapse in insect populations across Europe. Some 84% of crop species cultivated in Europe depend on insect pollinators, providing “free services valued at over €150bn a year”.

It beggars belief that ecologically illiterate politicians, and indeed farm lobbies, would be vying to allow the very basis of our food systems to be destroyed, principally, it appears, at the behest of the giant agri-chemical industry, whose profits depend on the sales of millions of tonnes of the very pesticides that are devastating the insect kingdom.

Efforts at EU level on nature and climate protection usually degenerate into a David-and-Goliath tussle, as NGOs with shoestring budgets are outgunned, out-schmoozed, and outspent by industry players. This time, however, there are some genuine heavyweights in their corner.

A coalition of more than 60 corporations, including Patagonia, Unilever, Nestlé, Ikea, Decathlon, and even Coca Cola, have lobbied EU legislators, urging them to hold their nerve and implement strong nature restoration laws. Their argument can be boiled down to the simple fact that it’s hard to run a thriving business in a dying biosphere.

In a moment of unintended levity, the EPP accused the European Commission of urging firms to lobby in favour of nature restoration. As Politico reported this week, the response of César Luena, the Socialists & Democrats MEP to their complaint was to dismiss it as “only theatre”.

Luena added mockingly: “Oh poor people of the EPP, now they are afraid of the lobbies, do you believe this?”

‘Fearmongering’

Having initially opposed the nature restoration law, Sinn Féin now says it will support it, stating that it received additional assurances. Fianna Fáil remains split, with Billy Kelleher opposed.

However, his party colleague, Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue, spoke at the weekend at the “fearmongering” surrounding this issue and called on the EPP to rejoin negotiations, adding that “nature restoration is absolutely essential”.

As today’s crucial vote in the European Parliament’s environment committee takes place, ahead of a Council of Ministers meeting on June 22, the mixed messaging in Ireland will likely leave the public bewildered.

It should be a source of great concern that only 15% of Irish natural habitats are rated as being in good condition. Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency reported on the continuing decline in Irish water quality, mainly as a result of the over-use of nitrogen and phosphorus in agriculture.

Meanwhile, another State agency, Bord Bia, describes Irish dairy as “more sustainable, more natural, farmers working in harmony with nature” while simply greenwashing away the growing tide of negative consequences. This, bear in mind, is in a country with the second-lowest amount of land farmed organically in the entire EU27.

It’s hard to begin an honest conversation about striking a balance between the needs of nature and our agricultural systems when so many still remain mired in denial about even the most rudimentary facts.

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We’ll miss them when they’re gone

Posted on June 20, 2023 by John Gibbons

The insect kingdom, sometimes described as the “tiny empires that rule the world” is now facing its gravest threat in its 400 million-year reign, with human impacts taking a devastating toll, as I explored in this piece for TheJournal.ie in mid-June.

NOT SO LONG ago, a spell of glorious summer weather like this would have brought out countless millions of flying insects into the warm night skies.

If you left a window open with a light on, you’d likely return to find the room swarming with insects, while on a night-time drive you would have to use the wipers to clear off the dense ‘bug splat’ that festooned your windscreen. Not any more.

If all of the above sounds unfamiliar, even fanciful, chances are that you are under the age of 30-40 and you may be largely unaware of the truly shocking rate of change that has swept through the natural world in just the last few decades.

Disappearing

This was all brought back to me forcefully the other evening, on completing a 150km drive back to Dublin in the late evening. My route was a combination of national roads and motorway, and on parking up, I noticed that my windscreen was almost completely clear of insect splat marks.

And no, it’s not just my imagination. The term “Insectageddon” has been coined to capture the epic ongoing global collapse of insect life. A major scientific review of insect population decline studies published in 2019 found that two in five insect species worldwide are declining. According to the authors, “we are witnessing the largest extinction event on Earth since the late Permian and Cretaceous periods”.

It is estimated that the number of flying insects across Europe has declined by around 80%, triggering a collapse in the number of bird species that depend on insects.

European farmland birds are in sharp decline, with 57% disappearing largely as a result of a combination of mechanisation, pesticides and land clearance for intensive crop production. In Ireland, the situation is even more dire, with 63% of our bird species in decline and one in four seriously threatened, according to research carried out by Bird Life International.

Overall, around a quarter of the world’s insect population has disappeared since 1990. Declines in insect biomass are occurring at the rate of around 9% per decade, a situation without precedent in tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of years.

Tipping point

In his 2022 book titled “The Insect Crisis”, journalist Oliver Milman set out the grim scenario in stark terms: “our Pyrrhic victory at the very last gasp of Earth’s history means for the first time that a single species is the primary cause of an extinction episode to impact the only known life in the universe”.

Milman describes the insect kingdom as “the tiny empires that run the world”, and this is hardly an overstatement. Were insects to disappear, virtually all species of birds and amphibians would vanish in a year or less, and entire ecosystems would crumble.

The trillions of insects that occupy every ecological niche on Earth collectively outweigh all of humanity 17-fold, and are the critical components in every land-based ecosystem on the planet.

“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind”, wrote Francisco Sánchez-Bayo of the University of Sydney in a scientific review that identified intensive agriculture as the main driver of insect decline, specifically the heavy use of pesticides, while urbanisation, climate change and light pollution are also implicated.

At over 400 million years old, the insect kingdom is truly ancient, pre-dating the rise and outlasting the demise of the dinosaurs, yet the severity and global nature of the crisis it now faces is without precedent in Earth’s history.

According to entomologist Josef Settele, the current agricultural system, with its heavy dependence on pesticides, is ultimately “putting the food security of the entire human race at risk”.

Political posturing

Efforts at EU level to ease the severe pressures on the natural world resulting from intensive agriculture have met a wall of organised resistance and lobbying from multinational chemical PLCs (global agri-chemical sales amount to over €230 billion a year) who stand to lose if the EU is successful in its goal of achieving a 50% cut in pesticide usage this decade.

The success of these interest groups in influencing many farmers’ organisations, as well as politicians to support their commercial agenda, has been one of the most disheartening aspects of the recent debate around the European Commission’s modest, measured Nature Restoration Law, with Irish Fine Gael MEPs leading the charge, broadly supported by Sinn Féin and some in Fianna Fáil.

As the recent recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly on biodiversity loss have shown clearly, the Irish public strongly support robust action to protect nature and restore biodiversity, but for politicians like Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, even these modest but essential measures “go too far”.

The insect kingdom represents the critical strands that hold the web of life together. “Insects are the food that make all the birds and make all the fish”, said Dr David Wagner of the University of Connecticut. “They’re the fabric tethering together every freshwater and terrestrial ecosystem across the planet”. Three-quarters of the world’s food crops are pollinated by insects, a ‘free’ service to agriculture valued at more than $500 billion a year.

Some 80% of wild plants depend on insect pollination, so the consequences of rapid declines in insect populations cascade throughout the entire tree of life.

Intensive farming

Land use change, mostly the conversion of forests and wetlands for food production, had been the number one driver of insect decline. However, climate change is now adding to extinction pressures by disrupting habitats and drying out ecosystems.

Ironically, rising global temperatures have been a major boon to ‘pest’ species including mosquitos and pine bark beetles; the latter have wreaked havoc on temperate forests, having destroyed over a quarter of a million square kilometres of North American forests in the last two decades.

The form of agriculture least harmful to wildlife, including insects, is when organic systems are used. Across the EU, on average around 9% of land is farmed organically. This area has grown rapidly, increasing by 41% in just the last five years as awareness of the biodiversity crisis has spread.

Ireland, however, is the second worst in the EU27 for organic farming, with barely 2% of our land farmed without chemicals. This low uptake may well reflect the resistance in some quarters in Ireland to the reality of the climate and biodiversity emergency, and the influence of populist politicians who stoke urban-rural tensions for electoral advantage by using inflammatory rhetoric to ridicule even the bare-minimum actions to protect nature.

In one of the most surreal moments in Dáil Eireann in recent years, deputy Michael Collins demanded an apology from junior minister, Pippa Hackett for describing him as an “organic farmer”, even though Collins had previously described himself as “proud to be organic”

It is strange to consider that, in some quarters, “nature” is almost a dirty word, yet without healthy, functioning ecosystems, there is no future for farming or, come to think of it, for any of us.

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Good ancestors demand a Ministry for The Future

Posted on June 10, 2023 by John Gibbons

While the title for this piece was borrowed from the Kim Stanley Robinson cli-fi classic novel, I wanted to explore our paradoxical relationship with the future and how we struggle to engage in intergenerational stewardship to take into account the needs of our successors when decisions that are being made today that have long term implications, as I discussed in the Business Post in June.

OF COURSE, WE all claim to care about the future. After all, that’s where our children and theirs will have to live. Yet whose job exactly is it to really think about posterity? Or, as Groucho Marx quipped: “What have future generations ever done for us?”

Corporations operate in quarterly timeframes. Politics, too, is bedevilled by short-termism, dominated by the horse race of three- to five-year electoral cycles. Amid the constant clamour of competing demands, the quiet voice of the future is barely heard and easy to ignore.

Meanwhile, the digital age has plunged society into an era of what philosopher Roman Krznaric describes as “pathological short-termism”. Never has it been more critical that we focus on the severe threats and challenges ahead, yet never have we as individuals and societies seemed more dazed, distracted and disconnected.

Nearly four decades ago, the United Nations Brundtland Commission famously defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

This 1987 definition has never been bettered, yet with every year that passes, the ecological debt we are inadvertently piling on to our children’s shoulders grows ever more crushing. This intergenerational injustice was brilliantly captured by Californian author Paul Hawken when he wrote: “We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP”.

Fifty years ago, Sweden appointed its first junior minister with specific responsibility for what it called future studies. This was followed up in 2011 by a Commission on the Future of Sweden, which was tasked with taking the long-term view, up to 2020 and then beyond to 2050.

In 2014, Sweden went a step further, setting up its so-called Ministry of the Future. In reality, this functions as a think tank within government, where interdisciplinary teams work together to future-proof decisions and policies being developed today.

For most policies, the acid test is how they will hold up over five- to 15-year timeframes, but on climate change the time horizon expands to 50 years. As a result of this approach, which aims to overcome the traditional rivalries between government departments, its head Kristian Persson was able to announce in late 2015 Sweden’s ambition to be “a fossil-free country” by 2030.

In an interview in 2016, Persson argued that “every country should have a Ministry for the Future. Politicians tend to be reacting to things that are happening, but then it’s too late. You should look ahead”.

Having ambitions on climate action are, she added, worthless unless you implement them boldly and rapidly. “I can see social catastrophes coming as a result of climate warming, and also from the increasing division and inequality in the world”, she warned.

While a number of other countries including Canada, Israel and Hungary have tried out various mechanisms to give a voice to future generations, arguably the one to make the most concrete progress is our nearest neighbour, Wales, which in 2015 passed the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act. This created the role of Future Generations Commissioner, with statutory powers.

Sophie Howe, whose term as Future Generations Commissioner ended earlier this year, explained that her job was to ensure that political decisions being taken now did not compromise the interests of citizens in the future.

As an example of this role in action, her office opposed a €1 billion relief road project being planned for around Newport, arguing that the immediate economic benefits were offset by the likely long-term damage to biodiversity in the region.

Naturally, politicians are loath to cede power, so the commissioner’s role is limited to requiring policymakers to justify their decisions, without the power to overturn them if the answers come up short.

Political dysfunction and capture by special interest groups often mean that not alone are future generations not represented, the will of people today is also routinely ignored. For me, this is best illustrated by the outstanding success of Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, an ongoing experiment in what is known as deliberative democracy.

This involves a randomly selected group of ordinary citizens engaging in an in-depth review of a given issue, guided by independent experts and without lobbyists being able to shape or distort their deliberations.

In 2016 the assembly was far ahead of the Oireachtas in accurately identifying the public’s wish to scrap the Eighth Amendment and overturn Ireland’s blanket abortion ban. In 2018 the assembly’s recommendations on climate action were light years beyond what politicians, fearful of pressure groups, were prepared to even countenance.

And earlier this year, the assembly’s recommendations on addressing biodiversity loss were far-reaching and ambitious, yet within weeks, both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin had caved in to agri-industrial lobbyists working to torpedo the EU’s proposed new Nature Restoration Law.

This clearly flouts the will of the great majority of Irish people, but the iron grip of self-interested lobbyists on politicians is not easily broken. This begs the question: if politicians can’t even work in the best interests of people alive today and with a vote, realistically what hope is there for a voice for those yet to be born?

Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly has won praise internationally for breathing life back into our democracy by allowing direct, meaningful civic engagement. I believe that to consolidate this success, our political parties should commit to establishing a Ministry for the Future based on a combination of the Swedish and Welsh models to form part of the next Coalition government.

While it may seem novel, this concept has long existed in indigenous communities. For example, the native American Iroquois and Onondaga nations invoked the concept of seven-generation stewardship. Every major decision taken by the tribe had to weigh its impact deep into the future.

The eyes of posterity are on this generation, right now, silently urging us to act strongly on the biodiversity and climate emergency, to save them from an immiserated future in a collapsed biosphere. Will we ignore their pleas, or will we instead rise to the moment of our greatest crisis and earn the right to one day be regarded as ‘good ancestors’?

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Airline industry’s sky-high emissions crash climate targets

Posted on June 1, 2023 by John Gibbons

All the clever plans the aviation industry is developing to reduce emissions have one thing in common: the one sure-fire way to truly reduce emissions, ie. by flying less, is absolutely off the table. Just like in so many other heavily polluting (and highly subsidised) sectors, the only game in town is endless growth, garnished with some ‘green’ tweaks around the edges, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner.

AS MORE AND more countries come to terms with the climate emergency, including the oversized role played by the aviation industry, a range of measures aimed at clipping the sector’s wings are now being considered.

In May, France introduced a limited ban on short-haul aviation. This is a heavily watered down version of the original French proposal, which would have essentially outlawed internal aviation across one of Europe’s largest countries.

However, intense industry lobbying has turned it into a largely symbolic measure. Despite its deficiencies, it does flag the direction of future transport policy and sends a clear signal to those considering longer term trends: in simple terms, we need to fly less, much less.

One person who clearly hasn’t got the memo is Kenny Jacobs, new chief executive of DAA, the airport management group that claims to be “delivering excellence in a sustainable future”.

It’s unclear how exactly Jacobs squares this “sustainable future” with his interview in this newspaper earlier this week in which he spoke of the possible reinstatement of the Cork-Dublin air route. This was scrapped in 2011 with the completion of the M8 motorway linking Ireland’s two major cities.

Industry spokespeople have long defended the expansion of aviation in Ireland as being inevitable given our location as an island on the edge of Europe. Even this shaky argument can hardly be deployed to defend not just maintaining but actually expanding internal air routes, where ample road and rail alternatives already exist.

In response to moves elsewhere in Europe to curtail flying, Jacobs retorted: “You cannot get a train from Cork to the south of France”. You can of course get a ferry from Cork to France, or indeed from Rosslare to northern Spain.

From a climate point of view, the difference is enormous. A typical foot passenger on a ferry accounts for around 19 grams per kilometre. If you instead fly, it varies from 156-244 grams per kilometre, or between eight to 13 times more emissions.

One of the unexpected dividends of Brexit has been a resurgence in ferry links direct from Ireland to Europe. At the moment, many of these, such as Cork to Zeebrugge in Belgium and Waterford Port to Rotterdam, are for cargo only, but as public awareness of the massive negative impacts of aviation grows, then demand for climate-friendly travel options is likely to expand in the coming years.

It’s ironic that rather than penalising our most polluting sectors, the Irish State instead lavishes them with massive subsidies. In 2020, the cost paid by motorists per tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) from petrol burning was more than €260, with road diesel costing just under €200. The equivalent levy per tonne of CO2 from jet kerosene was: zero.

Jet kerosene for commercial aviation is exempt from both excise and carbon taxes. In 2019, the State lost around €634m in revenues foregone on aviation fuel. These lavish subsidies are separate from the money the Irish State pours into supporting aviation, which included €36m in regional airport funding in Budget 2023.

A further fillip to regional airports is the availability of public service obligation (PSO) funding for certain routes. The Kerry-Dublin air route had been supported by PSO funds but when Ryanair won the route in 2021, they did so without such support. However, earlier this year Kerry Airport warned that the route might once again need taxpayers’ direct support should Ryanair pull out.

In the second quarter of last year, there were over 87,000 passengers on the Kerry-Dublin route. At least some of these routes directly compete with the vastly more sustainable options of taking the train or bus, or even driving. And Kerry airport is the third busiest destination for that most intensely polluting form of aviation, private jets.

Looking at a map of Ireland, the seaboard is dotted with airports offering international connectivity, from Cork and Kerry to Shannon, Knock and Donegal. And of course, Dublin.

In the throes of a worsening climate emergency, can we really justify the maintenance of six airports? Kerry airport is close to Shannon, while Donegal airport is barely 100km from Derry airport.

While flying is a fantastic resource, bear in mind that more than 80% of the world’s population will never set foot on an aircraft, so those of us who enjoy the privilege of flying are among the fortunate few. You can of course have too much of a good thing. Last year, there were over 28m passenger movements through Dublin airport alone, for a country with a population of 5m.

Despite industry hype about efficiency, “sustainable” fuels etc, in simple terms, if global aviation were a country, it would be in the world’s top 10 carbon polluters. On tackling climate change, sometimes, to do more actually means doing less. And this is certainly the case with aviation.

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When nature is the enemy, whose side are you really on?

Posted on May 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

The iron grip of agri PLCs and the farm lobbyists who work on their behalf on the EU’s agriculture policy was seen yet again in the outright rejection of modest proposals to give nature restoration a chance amid an ever-deepening biodiversity crisis, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in late May.

WHILE EFFORTS at EU level to push through a Nature Restoration Law are being stymied at every turn, is it instead our dysfunctional political process that’s in need of restoration?

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told the Dáil this week that aspects of the proposed law “go too far”. They say that in politics, timing is everything. Just as Varadkar mounted his stout defence of the do-nothing status quo, a study from the University of Exeter confirmed that business-as-usual would leave around 2bn people exposed to potentially deadly heat later this century and involving what scientists describe as “phenomenal” human suffering.

A separate study released this month confirmed that the global collapse in wildlife populations is more acute than previously understood, with almost half the species on Earth undergoing rapid declines.

This accelerating extinction pulse, “the most severe since the mass die-off event following an asteroid strike around 66m years ago” is ripping apart the web of life. Amphibian populations have been devastated globally, with insect, bird, and mammal populations also in sharp decline.

However, according to the Taoiseach, who heads a government whose own Climate Action Plan commits Ireland to stronger nature restoration actions than being mooted at EU level, doing our bit to arrest this devastating crisis is just too much, too soon.

After all, he explained, it doesn’t “fully recognise how we use land in Ireland in particular”. His position was echoed by the entire group of Fine Gael MEPs, all of whom on the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture voted for a flat rejection of the nature restoration law.

The only senior Fine Gael figure to show any backbone on this issue has been EU Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, who pointed out these proposals would help, not harm, farmers.

“Without the actions set out in our proposal for nature restoration and the sustainable use of pesticides, farmers’ livelihoods and, indeed, food security will be put at risk”, McGuinness said. “This is what the science is telling us”.

As a former agricultural journalist, McGuinness knows well this is not a popular position with the big-money lobbyists, but it remains the truth nonetheless.

Some Fianna Fáil MEPs have similarly rejected the proposed law, while Sinn Féin has adopted its now customary sphinx-like position, with electoral advantage rather than environmental protection in mind, and ever wary of drawing the ire of agri activists.

Predictably, the very rural TDs who claim to represent the “custodians of the landscape” are invariably the most shrill in shooting down any reforms, however modest, that might in any way discommode the agri-industrial lobby whose talking points they echo.

Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Nothing ‘natural’ or safe about gas hobs

Posted on May 20, 2023 by John Gibbons

Was there ever a cleverer sleight of hand than the labelling of the fossil fuel methane as ‘natural gas’? Oil and coal are also natural, but have you ever heard of ‘natural coal’ as a marketing slogan? Mercifully not, yet the global gas industry continues to operate with relative impunity. In the case of gas, this extends right into our homes, where many of us have hobs that burn ‘clean’ fossil gas which has been skilfully sold as harmless. This is absolutely not the case, as I explored in this piece for the Irish Examiner in May.

AS PART OF our journey to a lower-carbon household, we replaced our gas boiler with a heat pump some months ago. Along with an electric car, this means our transport and home heating, two of the major fossil fuel users, are now fully electrified.

There is, however, one remaining piece of the puzzle. Our cooker is a combination of electric oven with a gas hob, hence we have yet to fully disconnect from the gas network. So, in common with hundreds of thousands of other Irish households, we continue to cook using gas.

From a health point of view, burning an open flame indoors is always problematic, but the one that is most commonly done actually attracts the least scrutiny, and that is the gas cooker.

Though cleverly branded by the industry as ‘natural gas’, the fact remains that this is a fossil fuel that produces emissions that are damaging to the global climate. Compelling evidence is emerging that the gas cooker in your kitchen is also a potent and potentially dangerous source of indoor air pollution.

A study published last December found that one in eight cases of childhood asthma in the United Stated are linked to gas cooking. It turns out that the ‘clean’ blue flame on your cooker hob is in fact nothing of the sort.

When burned, gas emits a toxic cocktail of compounds, including nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, collectively described as NOx. Other emissions from gas cooking include low doses of carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, benzene, xylene, and toluene. These chemicals have been linked to a range of respiratory issues, as well as some cancers.

While few of us would tolerate allowing anyone smoking in our homes, the health effect of having a gas stove is calculated to be similar to breathing in secondhand smoke indoors.

Even when switched off, a typical gas cooker leaks a small amount of methane into the air. A US study published last year calculated that the amount of methane leaked from all of America’s gas cookers each year was equivalent to the carbon dioxide pollution from half a million cars.

The same study found that NOx emissions when a gas cooker is in use can exceed US federal safety standards for outdoor pollution within just a few minutes. One of the researchers, Seth Shonkoff of the University of California at Berkeley described gas cookers as “stationary air pollution machines inside people’s homes”.

Across the US, cities and states are gearing up for either partial or total bans on new gas infrastructure, with New York city drafting legislation that would prohibit gas cookers from being used in new buildings, including new family homes and commercial properties. California and Washington state have updated their building codes to similar effect.

European research published in January estimated that around 700,000 cases of childhood asthma in the last year could be attributed to homes that cook using gas. In total, around 100 million households in the EU use gas for cooking.

The organisations behind the EU research are urging the total phasing out of gas cookers in the EU.

“Gas cooking appliances need health warning labels like cigarette packets” , said Christine Egan, CEO of Clasp, an NGO lobbying for improvements to appliances and equipment to boost human health and reduce climate impacts.

If you are currently using a gas cooker, the best way of reducing the health risks is to always use your ventilated hood when cooking, and when possible, leave a window open to improve ventilation in your kitchen when preparing food.

Gas cookers are popular because they provide instant heat and are easier to control than traditional electric hobs, which can be sluggish to respond. However, induction stoves are becoming increasingly popular. These run electricity through a coil that creates a magnetic field.

One major advantage is that the surface of the stove remains cool, and induction stoves heat instantly and are extremely efficient. In tests, an induction stove was able to bring a pot of water to the boil in half the time taken by a gas flame.

Induction hobs are not cheap, costing typically 50% more than a standard electric or gas hob, and they also require special pots and pans. However, on the positive side, induction hobs use significantly less electricity, and with today’s high energy prices, this will make a useful dent in the monthly household electricity bill, so helping to offset the higher purchase price.

Despite its improved efficiency, cooking with an induction hob is still a little more expensive than with gas, but in the scheme of things, this is surely a small price to pay for a cooker that doesn’t pollute the air in your home, worsen climate change or expose you and your children to increased risk of respiratory disease.

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The Late Late no-show on climate emergency

Posted on May 10, 2023 by John Gibbons
Back in more innocent times, i.e. before the whole soap opera over how much Ryan Tubridy was getting paid, and by whom blew up into one of the biggest “stories” of the year, there was the small matter of who might succeed Tubs in the hot chair at the Late Late, a slot that only three permanent hosts have held, between them, for over 60 years. Rest assured, I found a climate angle on a show that has never failed to disappoint, and this ran in the Irish Examiner in mid-May.

WHISPER IT: there’s something missing from our national conversation. Over the 24 years since Gay Byrne stepped down from RTÉ’s flagship TV programme, The Late Late Show in 1999, climate change as a topic has, by my count, featured precisely twice.

Incredibly, in both cases, the floor was given to deniers to spread disinformation. Sadly, that is symptomatic of how the biggest unfolding story of the 21st century has been handled by our national broadcaster.

The first incident of note occurred in January 2009, when presenter Pat Kenny platformed botanist and former TV personality David Bellamy’s contrarian views on climate change. A red flag for the show should have been that Bellamy had no expertise whatever in climate science.

The real cause of whatever warming was occurring was sun spots, Bellamy stated incorrectly, adding that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be nigh-on-impossible. Even if we succeeded, “that would put the temperature up by at most two degrees centigrade”, he added. This too is manifestly false, but Bellamy’s bluster went entirely unchallenged.

Whatever about the host, it’s not as if Bellamy was unaware that he was spreading misinformation. Some years earlier, when still a working scientist, he had spoken publicly and at length on the “dramatic and devastating climate change” that would arise from CO2 emissions, adding that those trying to block action were “criminals”. That’s quite a spectacular U-turn.

Later in 2009, there was a generational shift as Ryan Tubridy took over the Late Late chair aged just 36. Hopes that this might bring a fresh perspective to climate coverage were dashed when, in January 2011, Tubridy hosted Viscount Christopher Monckton, UKIP deputy leader, and long-standing climate denier.

Monckton duly used this huge public platform to spread disinformation and long-debunked bogus science, with the host once again unable to even fact-check him. The only push-back was a solitary voice from the audience, a Green Party member trying vainly try to get a word in sideways to stem the tide.

In the 12 years and over 350 episodes since then, the global climate crisis has dramatically worsened, yet to the best of my knowledge, not once did the Late Late team consider this vast subject worth examining in depth.

It wasn’t as if nobody was asking. Numerous environmental NGOs would have approached the show over the last decade trying to interest them in covering the climate crisis. It’s not just about science. After all, it touches every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to how we travel, shop, design our cities, heat our homes, and perhaps most critically, it challenges us to reimagine the kind of world we are bequeathing to our children.

In 2015, I interviewed UK climate scientist Prof Kevin Anderson on his visit to Dublin and I also approached a senior producer on the show to ask if they might consider him as a guest.

I also sent them some video clips of Anderson in action “he’s a forceful, serious science communicator”. The reply: sorry, a bit dull, not really what we’re looking for on the show. (Here’s one from 2015, where he was interviewed by Duncan Stewart at COP15 in Paris for EcoEye, and didn’t pull his punches on the Irish media platforming of ‘skeptics’).

Fair enough, you might say, the Late Late is really about light entertainment, not current affairs. Yet oddly, anti-science cranks and contrarians, perhaps by dint of being more “colourful”, are to be welcomed on as guests. Controversy sells, as the saying goes.

Now, 61 years after the famous “To whom it concerns” catchphrase was first aired, the show is to get just its fourth permanent host. As the mass street climate protests in Dublin and across Ireland in 2019 showed so clearly, there is a new generation desperate to see real, substantive action on the climate emergency. For its part, RTÉ is equally desperate to make a connection with a younger generation that is turning its back on traditional TV.

In his heyday, Gay Byrne’s genius as a broadcaster was his uncanny knack of sensing the zeitgeist of the age and his ability to push the boundaries of the national conversation into some very uncomfortable terrain.

A new science-literate host prepared to truly connect with the legitimate existential concerns of Generation Z may yet breathe life back into the Late Late’s venerable but jaded formula.

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Beware the radical climate inactivists

Posted on April 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

It has long puzzled me that those promoting ecocidal policies that in the short term impoverish and kill millions and that in the longer term may well kill us all have somehow managed to maintain the illusion that they are ‘centrist’, ‘reasonable’ people, unlike the riff raff of climate crusties out blocking traffic and making unreasonable demands that we stop destroying the basis of life on Earth. The media has also been a great enabler of this dangerous fiction, as I explored in the Business Post in late April.

IF YOU CAN keep your head about the climate emergency when all the experts around you are losing theirs, then frankly, you really haven’t been paying attention.

Last year, thousands of long-standing temperature records fell around the world. The summer of 2022 saw China’s most intense heatwave, an event scientists described as the most extreme in recorded history, while Europe experienced its worst drought in at least 500 years.

The same pattern was repeated across the United States, and much of Africa and Asia, and these dangerous conditions have persisted right into 2023. Scorching April heatwaves in Asia have this year shattered records from Thailand to India and Japan, with multiple deaths and hospitalisations.

Spain is already in the grip of a heatwave. Exceptional drought conditions are affecting 60 per cent of the country, with severe implications for food production and exports. The Italian government has been forced to introduce a new drought decree to tackle its deepening water crisis, with little sign of recovery after the “state of calamity” declared as a result of the 2022 drought, the worst in 70 years.

Meanwhile, marine scientists are reporting a sudden spike in global sea temperatures. Off the east coast of the US, sea surface temperatures in March were 13.8C higher than average, an increase that almost beggars belief. This portends ever more ferocious weather conditions as energy builds up across the entire climate system.

There is nothing ‘natural’ about these disasters. Such rolling extreme weather events are a direct result of the uncontrolled release of billions of tonnes of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere every year. Worse, much worse, is in the pipeline.

A major scientific study published in 2020 projected that over the coming 50 years, areas of the world where between one and three billion people live today will become too hot for human habitation or agriculture, with entire ecosystems breaking down as a result of intolerable heat.

This is an existential crisis for human civilisation on a par with the very darkest moments in our history. Quite simply, we as a species have never faced a moment of such acute collective jeopardy.

Unsurprisingly, some people who have grasped the situation have begun to take to the streets to engage in direct action to draw attention to a crisis that governments, major corporations and most of the media seem determined to pretend isn’t really happening.

Every action begets a reaction. On the right, there are now concerted attempts to tar peaceful climate protesters as dangerous radicals wielding a sinister anti-democratic agenda.

In the Business Post last weekend, former politician Lucinda Creighton deployed the term “extreme/extremist” 14 times in a single article in an unsubtle attempt to portray climate protesters as irrational terrorists. The movement has, in fact, been highly disciplined in eschewing violent protest.

Creighton insinuated that climate protesters were getting special treatment before the law. The opposite is usually the case, with peaceful protest now being criminalised. For instance, a London judge last month jailed environmentalists for defying his bizarre direction that they not tell a jury that the reason they joined a roadblock was to draw attention to the climate crisis.

While caricatured on the right as anarchists and crusty anti-establishment layabouts, today’s climate protesters are as likely to be medical doctors or scientists. For instance, climatologist Dr Peter Kalmus of Nasa was arrested last year for chaining himself to the doors of a bank that lends to fossil fuel interests.

“We scientists have been trying to warn you guys for decades that we’re heading towards a fucking catastrophe, and we’ve been ignored”. Kalmus said. “We’re not joking. We’re not lying. We’re not exaggerating”.

A survey of senior climate experts found that four in five believed they would witness the “catastrophic impacts” of climate change in their own lifetimes, and two thirds of respondents report feelings of grief, anxiety and related distress. Do these really sound like radical anarchist bums to you?

As António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, observed: “Climate activists are depicted as dangerous radicals, yet the truly dangerous radicals are the countries and firms continuing to burn fossil fuels”.

These radical “inactivists” include many from the political right, whose phobia about taxes and regulations tragically blinds them to the rapidly unfolding climate emergency. It’s almost quaint to recall that not that long ago, people who identified as politically conservative used to pride themselves on being guided by science and evidence.

While environmental defenders are today far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent actions, it’s impossible to say what may happen in the future, as ecological breakdown frays the very fabric of our civilisation.

A horrifying mass fatality heatwave event in India is explored vividly in the climate-fiction novel The Ministry of the Future, set in the mid-2020s. This disaster leads to over 20 million deaths and is the trigger for wrenching changes to societies around the world.

A shadowy revenge terror group arises from the catastrophe and sabotages the globalised economic system it blames for the climate-fuelled disaster. From the ensuing chaos a leaner, greener and intensely frugal new world order arises.

Such an imagined egalitarian eco-socialist future might be the worst nightmare for the ultra-rich and their many acolytes. But for the rest of us, it’s an infinitely better prospect than crawling from the wreckage of our collapsed civilisation into a parched, dying biosphere.

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Between the AMOC and the deep blue sea

Posted on April 29, 2023 by John Gibbons

The Environmental Protection Agency hosted a public meeting as part of their ongoing series on climate change in the Round Room at Dublin’s Mansion House in late April, chaired by Ella McSweeney. I met the guest speaker, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf for an interview an hour or so before his presentation and filed the below piece for the Examiner. There are so many parts of our global climate system in dire straits, it can be hard to keep track sometimes, but there’s no doubt that should the AMOC shut down, in the words of another well known scientist, “all hell would break loose in the North Atlantic”.

WE ARE FAST approaching one or more tippings point that will drastically reshape the climate of the Northern hemisphere, but exactly where these points lies is “the billion dollar question”, according to leading oceanographer, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf.

With global warming already having pushed up the Earth’s average surface temperature by over 1.1C, Prof Rahmstorf of Potsdam University, Germany, warned that multiple climate tipping points could be crossed once temperatures have risen by 1.5-2C. This will likely lead to a ‘domino effect’ with catastrophic consequences.

The critical systems most vulnerable to collapse in the relatively near term include the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the loss of which would add three metres to global sea levels, as well as the Amazon rainforest, the world’s coral reefs, and the Greenland ice sheet.

The massive system of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC, is the reason why Ireland, Britain, and most of northwestern Europe enjoy a relatively mild climate and are ice-free all year round.

This enormous submarine system of currents up to 100 times greater than the flow of all the world’s rivers combined, transfers around one petawatt of heat energy from the tropics into the northern hemisphere. This is equivalent to the total energy produced by one million nuclear power stations.

Gulf Stream

Research studies published by Prof Rahmstorf and colleagues, including Dr Levke Caesar of Maynooth University, have established that the AMOC, sometimes referred to as the Gulf Stream, has weakened by around 15% since the 1950s and is now at its weakest in at least 1,000 years. This is already having impacts on weather systems, including fuelling an increase in European heatwaves.

“New studies on the stability of the AMOC are really quite worrying”, he added. “I’m now a lot more concerned than I was 10 or 20 years ago”, he told the Irish Examiner.

In the southern hemisphere, new research has revealed that the deep ocean current around Antarctica which is part of the same global system and which has been stable for thousands of years is now expected to collapse in the coming decades as a result of carbon emissions, with unfathomable implications for the global climate system.

While a complete shutdown of the AMOC, which is part of a global overturning system of deep ocean currents, would likely take decades to play out, its implications are profound. Ireland and our neighbours in northwestern Europe would experience a sharp drop in temperatures as well as rainfall, and an increase in powerful storms, although the temperature drop would be partly offset by the overall global warming effect.

Such rapid changes in climatic conditions have no precedent in at least 10,000 years and would be devastating for agriculture and food production

“We’ve had decades of very clear warnings from the scientific community on climate change, yet the world is really only starting to wake up to the danger now” Prof Rahmstorf added. “What’s important to bear in mind is that once it shuts down, the AMOC is, in human timescales, gone forever”.

His message to politicians and policymakers was blunt: “The key is they simply have to start putting climate at the top of their agendas; they cannot allow it to be pushed off the agenda by other short-term priorities. This is an extremely urgent situation”.

Cutting emissions

Since there is no possible way of mitigating the devastating consequences of a full-scale collapse in our weather systems, Prof Rahmstorf was adamant that the only way to avoid the worst outcomes is to take the science seriously and cut emissions from every sector in half by 2030.

“That means we really only have seven years to turn this around. We have to stop making excuses and do whatever is necessary, no matter how difficult, to preserve the climate system we all depend on”, he added. “We need really fast and decisive action”.

Apart from his extensive published research, Prof Rahmstorf is also a committed science communicator. “I have a duty, if you see a danger, you have to let people know. If a house is on fire, you have to call the fire brigade. For me, this is a moral duty. Also, my research is funded by the taxpayer; they pay my wages and they are entitled to be told of our findings”.

Prof Rahmstorf called for an all-of-society response to the unfolding climate emergency. “As a scientist, I have learned that simply informing the public of the facts is not enough to shake people out of their inertia. We need everyone on board; artists, media, communicators. This is too big a task just to be left to the climate scientists”.

At the moment, politicians are fearful of being voted out if they propose climate action that is seen as unpopular, such as banning oil or gas boilers. As the climate emergency begins to really bite, “what they should be afraid of is that they’re going to be voted out if they don’t make climate their top priority”, Prof Rahmstorf added.

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A defining moment for humanity

Posted on April 28, 2023 by John Gibbons

A number of people active in the area of climate science and activism were asked by the Irish Times in April to contribute a fairly short vignette on where we saw the current situation. My contribution, titled “Few options available to avert catastrophe” is below:

IT IS ALMOST impossible to overstate the urgency and gravity of the climate emergency. Quite simply, this is the defining moment for humanity. The choices this generation make will, one way or another, shape the kind of world our descendants inherit.

While the science of climate change has long been clear, rather than this translating into concerted action we have instead witnessed decades of dithering, denial and political buck-passing. All easy options for a ‘soft landing’ in terms of slowly cutting emissions have now been squandered.

Today, the few options still available to avert complete catastrophe are as unpalatable as they are unpopular. This was made clear with the recent publication of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report. Humanity’s pathway to keeping global temperatures below the 1.5 degree danger line has all but disappeared.

We are now facing into an era of unprecedented turmoil, as extreme weather events intensify, stressing the global food system and forcing hundreds of millions to abandon their homelands due to unbearably high temperatures and lethal droughts.

But, like with the persistent ringing of an alarm bell on a neighbour’s house, the public and much of the media seem to have become inured to the warnings and have managed to tune out the sirens and dismiss them as background noise.

It’s a scary time to be alive, yet also one of unique opportunities. No future generation is ever likely to have the chances open to us to still make a difference. Now is the time to prove ourselves to be good ancestors.

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There’s no climate show like a Joe Show

Posted on April 25, 2023 by John Gibbons

Whatever it may or may not have achieved politically, US president Joe Biden clearly hugely enjoyed his trip to Ireland in April. Though not a political groupie, I still found myself on the road to Westport to attend the last public engagement of his trip, a hugely enjoyable, even emotional occasion for some, including I suspect, Biden himself. Having overdosed, like so many others on the Hopium being peddled by the Obama presidency, the current incumbent is a lot less flash and feels like the real deal, and as I argued in an opinion piece for TheJournal.ie, is also probably the best thing to happen to global climate action this century so far, though it has to be said that’s against a pretty low bar.

POLITICIANS, IT HAS been said, campaign in poetry but govern in prose. The soaring rhetoric of the hustings rarely survives the meat grinder of deal-making and realpolitik.

When US presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period” he unconsciously echoed a similar pledge made 32 years earlier by George H. Bush, when he said: “read my lips: no new taxes”.

That pledge was to come back to haunt Bush as, sure enough, taxes went up just two years later and this is widely seen as one of the reasons he failed to get re-elected.

Whether Biden’s apparent u-turn in recently authorising an $8 billion plan, known as the ‘Willow project’ to drill for 600 million barrels of oil on pristine federal lands deep inside the Arctic Circle comes back to hurt his re-election chances at the end of next year remains to be seen, but it has caused deep dismay in progressive and environmental circles as the latest political capitulation to Big Oil.

It appears that the Biden administration took the political decision not to fight oil giant ConocoPhillips, the company promoting the Willow project as a refusal would almost certainly be overturned in the (Republican-dominated) courts and could likely cost the US government up to $5 billion in compensation claims for lost revenues.

As an attempt to salvage something from the situation, the US government has forced the Willow project to scale back from five to three drilling sites, and ConocoPhillips has agreed to give up leases it held on around 68,000 acres.

Climate tug of war

The Biden administration is also issuing new rules to block future oil and gas leases on more than half of the 23 million acres with the area in Alaska known as the National Petroleum Reserve, as well as 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean.

While this sounds encouraging, bear in mind that a future Republican administration could simply overturn these protections, as Donald Trump did to a raft of environmental and climate measures put in place by Barack Obama.

Though it’s cold comfort, Biden was clearly deeply unhappy at having to sign off on the Willow project. During his recent address to the Oireachtas, he described climate change as “the single existential threat to the world”, adding that “we don’t have a lot of time, and that’s a fact”.

Biden has seen the evidence with his own eyes. “I’ve flown over more territory in the United States since I’ve been President, in a helicopter, that has been burned to the ground equal to the entire state of Maryland”.

Our own record

Political talk is of course cheap. For instance, does anyone for a moment seriously imagine our own Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has even begun to grapple with the climate emergency as the key existential issue of his generation?

Biden, I believe, is different, and he proved it last year when he sunk huge political capital into delivering a $369 billion climate investment package, which he modestly described as “the most significant legislation in history” as part of his Inflation Reduction Act.

Expert assessments calculate this could lead to around a 40% reduction in US emissions by 2030, as it engages the levers of large-scale investment to nudge the entire economy on a lower-emissions pathway.

Yes, he lost the Willow battle, but in the overall climate war, Biden is using his decades of experience as a deal-maker and his reputation as a moderate to steer genuinely transformative change at a rate and pace than completely eluded his former boss Barack Obama.

Is it really enough, given the hellish threats posed by climate breakdown? Almost certainly not, but for progressives contemplating staying at home in the 2024 presidential election in protest at the Willow decision, they may need a reality check and to recall the ecocidal Trump regime and how it shredded decades of hard-won environmental regulations as well as attempting to sabotage global climate negotiations.

If either Trump or the equally worrying Ron DeSantis were to enter the White House in January 2025, the Willow debacle would be the very least of our worries. With potential global ecological collapse almost within touching distance, just one more term with a climate denier in charge of the world’s most powerful country should suffice to push us over the edge.

While identifying as a progressive, I’ve never considered myself a US political fan-boy. When Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to Dublin, I watched it on TV but stayed away, despite living locally. Yet last weekend I joined thousands of others on the long road to Ballina to witness Joe Biden’s final Irish address.

Why the change of heart? Partly, it was the sheer relief that Biden had “at least for now” saved US democracy from being dragged headlong into authoritarianism and fascism in 2020 by MAGA extremists. But mostly it was in recognition of the fact that Biden, Willow notwithstanding, has made real, sustained efforts to show leadership in averting climate catastrophe.

Whatever your politics, your personal or religious views or whatever issues are most precious to you, all of these will be wiped away if we fail to prevent global ecological and climate collapse. In short, if we get this wrong, nothing else will matter, ever again and the future itself will become little more than a rapidly fading memory.

I’m firmly on the side of whoever is fighting to make sure this doesn’t come to pass. Who can say if we’ll succeed? All I know for sure is we cannot afford to fail.

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Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone

Posted on April 15, 2023 by John Gibbons

They say that, given half a chance, most people would instinctively love and cherish nature. If that’s the case, then something must have gone seriously awry in Ireland in recent decades, given our collective neglect of our natural heritage, along with our bizarre tolerance towards those going out of their way to actually wreck our landscapes and torch what’s left of our biodiversity, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in April.

MANY PEOPLE were genuinely shocked this week to hear a legal team representing Ireland argue that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) does not in fact guarantee the basic human right of access to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

You might well wonder who could possibly argue against such fundamental, inalienable human rights. The answer is the Irish State, acting under advice from the Attorney General’s office, which was one of only two countries to present a verbal argument rejecting these rights.

This astonishing intervention occurred during the so-called ‘Swiss grannies’ case, where a group of women in their 70s have taken a case to the ECHR arguing that Switzerland’s failure to take adequate action on the climate emergency violates their human rights.

Just a few days earlier, Dr Aoibhinn Ní­ Shúilleabháin, chair of the Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss confirmed that the Irish State was the number one offender when it came to breaking or failing to enforce laws protecting nature in Ireland.

Consider that as recently as 2019, total funding available to the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to manage and protect Ireland’s national parks and nature reserves was less than €14m. Divided over 26 counties, this amounted to a pittance, averaging at barely €500,000 per county.

In 2008, the NPWS had a budget of nearly €50m, but under cover of austerity measures, this was cut by over two-thirds, while during the same period, funding for Bord Bia increased sharply, to assist in the marketing of Irish food overseas.

Funding for nature and wildlife protection has only recently been restored to 2008 levels at the insistence of the Green Party, but there is little doubt the service was starved of funding for over a decade to ensure it was incapable of effectively carrying out its job of protecting our natural heritage.

Lest you think this arose simply because the State had to make difficult decisions about spending, bear in mind that the €84m of taxpayers’ money poured into subsidising greyhound and horse racing in 2019 was six times larger than total spending that year on the NPWS.

Biodiversity in dire condition

It is no coincidence that Ireland’s biodiversity is now in dire condition, with 63% of our bird species in decline and less than 2% of our marine waters having any kind of protection.

The situation for our key wildlife habitats as identified in the EU’s habitats directive is equally depressing, with less than one in six in ‘favourable’ condition. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than half of Ireland’s rivers, lakes and estuaries are now in poor condition.

The EPA drew attention to the ‘alarming’ deterioration in water quality as a result of nitrogen and phosphorus run-off, mainly from intensive livestock agriculture.

“The State has fundamentally failed to protect nature, and one of the most worrying things about that is that it was the biggest transgressor of its own laws and EU laws” Dr Ní­ Shúilleabháin noted. Failure to act now, she added, and “we actually won’t have access to clean drinking water on this island”.

Early last year, EU Commission official Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea decried the “increasingly aggressive stance” being taken in Ireland against environmental defenders. He was particularly critical of calls by some politicians to de-fund environmental NGOs.

The thinly veiled contempt of many Irish politicians for nature protection was best articulated by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, when in 2007 he expressed his frustration at delays in road-building projects “because of swans, snails and the occasional person hanging out of a tree”.

Anti-environmental rhetoric

If anything, the anti-environmental rhetoric has gotten far uglier since then. In recent weeks, Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice denounced a draft EPA scientific report on land use and forestry as “ethnic cleansing of the agricultural community”, with other rural TDs calling for the document to be “incinerated”.

Is it that Irish people simply don’t care about nature? The top three heritage and nature charities in the UK have a combined membership of about 7m people, that’s roughly one in nine of the total population. In Ireland, our top three equivalent charities have a total of about 30,000 members, or about one in 166 of our population.

Even allowing for some historical differences, it beggars belief that the average British person is 18 times more likely to support a nature charity than their Irish counterpart.

Small wonder perhaps that some Irish politicians feel safe in siding with pressure groups whose business model involves water pollution, biodiversity collapse and the destruction of our uplands.

This abject neglect and vandalism of our priceless natural heritage is one of the greatest failures of the first century of Irish independence.

If we are to begin to reverse this disastrous trajectory, the first step is to take on board the Citizens Assembly recommendation and hold a referendum to amend our Constitution to give enforceable legal status to our right to a healthy natural environment, and the fundamental right for nature itself to simply exist.

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Natural-born killers wreak ecological havoc

Posted on April 11, 2023 by John Gibbons

According to the French Novelist, Victor Hugo, “God has made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger”. It’s an apt description of these scaled-down apex predators. The fearsome toll they take on wildlife may come as a shock to many cat owners, but it’s well understood by ecologists, as I discussed in the Irish Examiner in April.

WHILE WE MAY think of them as cuddly and adorable, cats “both domestic and feral” are the ultimate natural-born killers, finely tuned by evolution with the agility, stealth and hunting instinct to wreak havoc on wildlife on a huge scale.

Globally, one in seven of all modern bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions are directly attributable to free-ranging cats on islands, according to the “Red List” of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

A study in the United States estimated that cats kill between 1.4-4 billion birds annually, with two-thirds of these kills attributed to un-owned or feral cats. A recent UK report found cats responsible for killing between 160-270 million small animals a year, a quarter of which were birds, but these are likely to be significant underestimates.

A pandemic craze for buying cats, along with cat videos on social media has seen a significant increase in their overall numbers. It’s reckoned there are around 750,000 cats in Ireland and 12 million in Britain. And some owners who tired of their new cats after lockdown ended simply dumped them, leading to a rise in feral cat populations.

And, with the nesting season once again underway, this time of year young birds just learning to fledge offer easy pickings for cats.

There are few hard numbers on the likely toll taken by cats on Irish wildlife, but assuming the ratios are similar to Britain, they probably dispatch around 22 animals each annually, bringing the expected Irish death toll of birds and small mammals at the claws of cats to more than 16 million a year.

The State of the World’s Birds report published last year identified that 63% of Irish bird species are in serious decline, a figure significantly worse than the global average. Predation by cats is by no means the most serious threat they face, but it is especially acute in urban and suburban areas, where birds would otherwise escape from ongoing habitat loss, hedgerow clearances, and pesticide usage in many parts of rural Ireland.

A number of local authorities across Australia last year moved to introduce bans on cats being allowed to roam after dark. Cat owners face fines of $200 if their animals stray into council-owned bushland, but moves are also being considered to extend the ban to footpaths, roads, and verges, unless the cat is on a leash.

Australia has an acute problem with feral cats, with each one reckoned to kill on average 740 wild animals a year. Every day in Australia, domestic and feral cats kill around two million reptiles, three million mammals, and a million marsupials, as well as an unspecified number of birds.

While to their owners they can be a loving companion, once set loose, cats are a dangerous invasive species that need to be closely supervised. A program to trap and neuter feral cats (which are then released back into the wild) is also underway in Australia.

The kiwi, New Zealand’s famous flightless bird, is especially vulnerable to feral cats, rats, and weasels. The New Zealand government spends tens of millions of dollars annually clearing invasive species from its many small islands. Since Europeans first landed in both Australia and New Zealand, a wave of invasive species that accompanied them, from cats and rats to rabbits, have triggered waves of extinctions of vulnerable native species. Undoing even some of the damage is a Herculean task.

Last August the German town of Walldorf ordered all residents to lock their cats indoors throughout the summer for the next three years, in a last-gasp bid to save the ground-nesting crested lark, of which only three breeding pairs remain in the district. Owners face a €500 fine if their cat is caught outdoors; if it kills an endangered lark, the fine rises to a whopping €50,000.

While there are no indications as yet that Irish authorities are prepared to consider such draconian steps to curb killer kitties, there are some practical steps cat owners can take to greatly reduce the risks to wildlife:

The most effective is a dusk-till-dawn curfew, as both cats and birds are most active at these times of the day. The evidence on attaching a bell to your cat’s collar is inconclusive. An alternative is to fit your cat with a colourful bib, which will help alert birds to its presence.

Simply playing with your cat for at least 10 minutes a day has been shown in studies to reduce its urge to hunt. Some research also suggests feeding pet cats with a diet that includes meat-derived protein may help dampen the primal instincts of these pint-sized killing machines.

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When all hope is lost, keep fighting

Posted on April 2, 2023 by John Gibbons

On the one hand, it’s simply impossible to overstate just how dire the climate and biodiversity emergency really is, and in truth, most people either have no idea, or else are in absolute denial. So, is it already Game Over? I don’t know. Nobody knows for sure. On the other hand, all we can say is that if we give up now, the odds of a global catastrophe unfolding in the near to medium term approach 100%, as I teased out in this piece for the Business Post in early April.

HAVE CLIMATE talks become the place where hope goes to die? More than three decades ago, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened with  “messages of hope” from world leaders. The historic UN Framework Convention was formally signed in Rio in 1992, ostensibly signalling the launch of concerted efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

Hope has, decades later, still not translated into actions, nor have lavish political promises been matched by cuts in emissions. In fact, since 1990 more greenhouse gases have been dumped into the global atmosphere than in all of human history up to that point.

Fast forward to the recent launch of the synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, was characteristically blunt in stating that “humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting fast”, adding that the latest IPCC report is effectively a “survival guide for humanity”.

After the usual nods and platitudes from politicians and the lightest dusting of media coverage, this crisis disappeared from view within 24 hours of the report’s release. Are we in denial, or simply suffering from a surfeit of irrational optimism? Humans are, after all, wired for hope. Why else do people persist in buying lottery tickets despite the odds being stacked against them?

Psychologists recognise that most people have an innate optimism bias, and tend to assume that bad things will happen to others, not them. Smokers, for instance, think they are less likely to develop cancer than other smokers. People also tend to believe they are better drivers than they actually are. And of course, aren’t we all of above average intelligence?

When it comes to large-scale risks like climate breakdown, we in prosperous temperate countries like Ireland cling to the mindset that yes, it’s happening, but not here, not now, and certainly not to us. How else to explain that, in the midst of a climate emergency, Irish emissions rose sharply last year, and there was opposition to even the mildest pro-climate or biodiversity actions?

Given that the situation is rapidly spinning out of control and nobody seems to either know what to do, or cares enough to even bother trying, is it time to face reality and throw in the towel?

It’s almost exactly 20 years since I was first confronted, almost by accident, with the stark reality of the ecological crisis. For most of the time since then I’ve been trying to raise awareness in the vain hope that it would in some small way help contribute to action on the scale needed to avert disaster.

All these years later, I feel like just another climate Cassandra, with the ability to clearly see what’s coming, but cursed never to be believed. The suspicion remains that while it might still be just about possible to avoid the worst outcomes, we as a species may, in essence, have already chosen to fail.

Hope is an essential component of the human condition but when it persists in the teeth of repeated abject failure, hope can seem more like a narcotic with which we dose ourselves to dull our existential angst.

Then 16-year old activist Greta Thunberg electrified the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 2019 when stating: “Adults keep saying: ‘we owe it to the young people to give them hope’. But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act”.

Many climate communicators disagree, arguing that focusing on the negative causes people to tune out. A report published last year by the American Psychological Association offered advice to its membership on how to address the climate crisis, including warning about the debilitating effects of excessive climate anxiety.

There is, however, a thin line between fear and despair. A paper in the elite science journal Nature in 2020 explored optimistic versus pessimistic framing of climate communications. Its findings were surprising: “The results suggest that climate change appeals with pessimistic endings could trigger higher engagement with the issue than optimistic endings”.

Fear, after all, is a powerful motivator. The Nature study added that setting out climate risks pessimistically increased “emotional arousal”, especially among what it termed political moderates and conservatives, the very groups most likely to understate climate risks.

“Optimistic endings may comfort a public suffering from apocalypse fatigue, but do not appear to increase risk perception or outcome efficacy”, it added. We are, in other words, lulled into a false sense of security by “hopeful” climate messaging that is completely at odds with the reality of the unfolding crisis.

The real worry about despair is that it may morph into doomism, a belief that all is already lost. Succumbing to this view is a self-fulfilling death wish. If we believe it’s all over and give up, then yes, the remaining window for action closes permanently and our worst fears become reality.

For some, doomism is a final refuge, having exhausted all other options after years of struggle. For others it’s a handy get-out clause, allowing them to shrug wearily about how it’s all too late anyhow as they drive their SUV to the airport for their fifth flight of the year.

In this sense, doomism is just climate denialism in a cheap tuxedo, since both doomers and deniers are united in their shared commitment to do absolutely nothing about the climate emergency. In the rapid online spread of what is known as climate disaster porn, there is also the distinct whiff of bad actors at play.

“Fossil fuel interests have actually weaponised doomism, as they recognise it leads climate advocates down the path of despair, hopelessness and disengagement”, Professor Michael Mann, the US climatologist and author, said.

To be clear, those who say it’s already too late may yet be proven to be absolutely right, and any reasonable reading of the science suggests there’s a good chance they are. However, there are also still very real opportunities to ease the level of suffering and death for countless millions of people and species this century, including our own children, and all future generations.

As long as any chance remains, however faint, it’s deeply immoral to even think about giving up the fight. The stakes could hardly be higher. After all, life itself is now on the line.

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Progress through technology? Nein, danke

Posted on March 30, 2023 by John Gibbons

Every country has its deeply entrenched lobby group, and in the case of Germany, its massive motor industry pulls the political strings, exercising a negative influence on policy throughout the EU. Ever wonder why European regulations on emissions from cars are weaker than their US counterparts? That’s the handiwork of the German car lobby. And, having been left on the starting line as EV technology is bringing in the most dramatic changes to the sector in over a century, the German industry is once again trying to hit the brakes on progress, as I wrote in the Irish Examiner.

EARLY ONE morning in July 2021, businessman Radim Passer raced his 1,500-horsepower sports car on a German motorway (autobahn), hitting 417 km/hr. Although the German transport ministry criticised the stunt as dangerous, what Passer did was perfectly legal, and he faced no sanction.

Germany is the only country in Europe to have no speed limits whatever on sections of its autobahn network. While famed for its prudence and moderation, Germany’s guilty secret is its love affair with speed, and its powerful motor industry lobby exerts a virtual stranglehold both on domestic politics and even across the EU.

This week, European Parliament president Roberta Metsola rebuked last-minute German attempts to block EU legislation phasing out all internal combustion engines in cars by 2035.

This legislation has already been passed by the parliament and that needed to be respected, Metsola said, adding the credibility of the EU was now at stake.

Transport accounts for one fifth of all emissions in the EU and the transition to electric vehicles is a vital element in the union’s roadmap towards net zero.

The International Energy Agency projects that production of all petrol and diesel engines for light vehicles has to end no later than 2035 if transport emissions are to fall in line with what the science demands.

Clinging to obsolete technology

German prowess in motor engineering is best captured in the industry motto “Vorsprung durch Technik” (Progress through Technology) yet ironically, the desperate attempt by some major manufacturers to cling to what is rapidly becoming obsolete technology threatens its own long-term survival, as well as helping to shred critical climate targets.

The fudge being pushed by German chancellor Olaf Scholz is the idea that what are called e-fuels could continue to be used instead of petrol and diesel, thus allowing internal combustion cars to continue in production indefinitely.

E-fuels are manufactured synthetically, but require enormous amounts of energy. Analysis published this week by the Brussels-based NGO Transport & Environment (T&E) found the average driver would end up paying €210 to fill their tank with e-fuels, some 50% more expensive than petrol today.

E-fuels are carbon-neutral but they do emit air pollutants, notably the toxic nitrogen dioxide.

“Ultimately e-fuels will be no more than a niche solution for Porsche drivers, but by undermining the clarity of the engine phase-out for the sake of an expensive and polluting fuel, Chancellor Scholtz is risking Europe’s green transition and the future of its car industry”, according to Alex Keynes of T&E.

Not all German car-manufacturers are hobbled by their own legacies. Audi’s chief executive Martin Duesmann said: “We have made a clear decision: we are phasing out the internal combustion engine in 2033 because the battery-electric vehicle is the most efficient method for individual mobility”. This stance is also backed by Volvo and Ford.

Having long dominated the international market for luxury cars, the German motor industry has been markedly slow to begin the transition to electric vehicle (EV) technology, allowing rival upstarts like the US brand Tesla to make large inroads into prestige car sales and grab the headlines as EV technology rapidly matures.

Despite the antics of its capricious CEO Elon Musk, Tesla’s market value is today greater than the vastly larger Toyota, General Motors and Ford companies combined. The smart investment money accepts the move to electric vehicles is now as inevitable as the transition from the horse-and-trap to the motor car was a century ago.

Companies who stubbornly fail to make the technological leap face being wiped out in the way Nokia, once the world’s largest mobile phone company, was obliterated in less than a decade when it failed to adapt to the arrival of smartphones.

Chinese manufacturers, meanwhile, are expected to bring about 80 new models of EVs to the market in the next year or two, spanning entry level to luxury models, while many European car-makers cling to their former glories.

What is particularly baffling about this German-led move to scupper the transition to EVs is that just last year, both Volkswagen and Mercedes publicly announced their support for the EU ban on combustion engine sales by 2035, while BMW had announced plans to have an all-electric line-up of cars by 2030.

Dieselgate

In the early 2000s, the motor industry invested heavily in so-called “clean diesel” technology, with companies spending billions on new engine systems that promised lower carbon emissions and less tailpipe pollution.

This proved technically impossible to achieve, so Volkswagen secretly installed electronic ‘cheat’ mechanisms into some of their cars that detected when they were being formally tested and changed the emissions settings so they would pass tough US Environment Protection Agency tests.

The scandal known as “Dieselgate” cost Volkswagen billions in fines for criminal charges and included the recall of half a million cars. Several other manufacturers were subsequently found to be involved in similar cheating.

The upshot of Dieselgate was to confirm that no amount of techno-fixes could clean up dirty fossil fuels and the only path for the industry was to make the clean break and move to all-electric drivetrains.

Whether a spineless German coalition government, egged on by an industry determined not to learn its lesson succeeds in wrecking the EU’s climate ambition now hangs in the balance.

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