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Slaying some persistent myths about ‘rural Ireland’

Posted on September 19, 2026 by John Gibbons

I was back on the op-ed page of The Irish Times in mid-September with a piece looking at the disproportionate influence of the farm lobby on Irish politics and public life. This followed an Irish Times investigation earlier in the month into the number of Oireachtas members who are landowners. This found – unsurprisingly – that farming is massively over-represented among our elected politicians relative to the actual numbers involved in the sector. I have long been puzzled by the frequent mantra-like use of the term ‘rural Ireland’ by politicians and lobbyists to conjur up this monolithic group of farm-dwellers. The reality, as I explore below, is that even within rural Ireland itself, farmers are a small minority of the two million or so people who live there, yet the farm lobby has somehow appropriated their voices to amplify its own political and electoral significance, with most politicians still bending the knee to agri-industrial interests. The Irish Times article can be found here.

WHEN HE WAS taoiseach, Leo Varadkar argued for special treatment for Irish agriculture, on the basis that we are, in his words, “feeding 50 million people”.

Earlier this year, Varadkar – now retired from politics – expressed some markedly different views on the Paths to Power podcast. He noted that farmers “still see themselves as the people who bring money and jobs into Ireland, where actually a lot of the time they bring costs on Ireland”.

Presenter Matt Cooper pointed out that farmers are not the main source of food in Ireland, as it is estimated that around 80 per cent of food consumed in Ireland is imported.

Varadkar replied: “It’s actually worse than that. We now have so many cattle in Ireland that we can’t grow enough grass to feed them. So we bring in grain from South America, from Mercosur countries, to feed the cattle and we bring in oil-based fertilisers from other parts of the world. And that then pollutes our rivers, and then we all pay the bill.”

While Varadkar was subsequently excoriated for his remarks, they capture some broad truths. Yet no politician still in the Dáil would be likely to voice this view for fear of being hounded from office, so powerful is the farming lobby.

When we joined the EEC in 1973, that power was borne out by the numbers: one in four of the workforce was employed in farming, and the sector was the backbone of the economy. Today, the situation is radically different, with only one in 25 whose principal employment is in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Yet the agricultural lobby continues to exercise an influence entirely disproportionate to the numbers involved, and to its actual contribution to the national economy.

This can at least in part be explained by the fact that the sector is vastly over-represented in the Oireachtas. While barely four per cent of the working Irish population works in one of those three sectors, some 15 per cent of our elected national politicians are farmers or landowners, according to an investigation by The Irish Times published this week. They include Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon, who has the largest agricultural landholding among Ireland’s national politicians – a total of 245 acres.

While in 2023, there were around 133,000 farmholders, nationally the population of rural Ireland is just over 1.9 million. This means that even in rural areas, farmers are now a single digit minority of the local population. There are tens of thousands of teachers, civil servants, office workers, engineers, nurses and homemakers living and working in rural areas who have no connection whatever with agriculture, and get virtually none of their food from local farms. Yet when politicians or media commentators evoke “rural Ireland” most people think of farming.

Why this matters is that politicians mistakenly conflate this huge voting bloc of nearly two million with the vastly smaller farming community. As in the Wizard of Oz, it’s only when you pull back the curtain that you discover that the wizard is no giant after all.

The best recent illustration of the illusion of farming power occurred during the 2025 presidential election, when no fewer than nine former Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) presidents jointly called on “rural Ireland” to back Fine Gael’s candidate, Heather Humphreys. She lost by a landslide, only winning in one of 43 constituencies.

While the sector’s political influence is completely out of kilter with its actual size, this is in turn amplified by the iron grip that the livestock industry exercises over three critical State agencies with a combined budget of over €2.5 billion. These are the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Bord Bia, the Irish food board and Teagasc, the state agri-research agency.

As former EPA director, Micheál O’Cinnéide told an Oireachtas committee hearing in late 2023, Irish agriculture policy is controlled almost entirely by “vested interests in a narrow room”. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say the role of the minister and their officials is largely for handshakes and photo ops; the real decision-making is in the hands of senior agri-PLC executives and the farming lobbyists who collaborate closely with them.

Environmental sustainability is at the heart of Bord Bia’s mission statement yet its board is chaired by Larry Murrin, the chief executive of Dawn Farms, a meat company, and there is no environmental or ecological expertise at board level other than a “sustainability and business development consultant”.

Teagasc is similar. Until recently, five of the eleven members of the Teagasc Authority, including its chair, were dairy farmers, with no representation from tillage, beef farming, organics or the entire environmental sector. It’s less lopsided today, but it’s hard to avoid an impression of agency capture by the industry.

Teagasc’s dairy “roadmap” for 2027 sees milk output continue to grow, with another 1.5 billion litres of annual output due by then, yet the state agri-research agency pays remarkably little attention to the likelihood that serious climate or geopolitical impacts might put the kibosh on its growth forecasts.

Industry-led efforts to magic away the global warming impacts of methane emissions from ruminant livestock farming found their way into the 2025 Programme for Government, which included recognition of what it termed the “distinct characteristics of biogenic methane”. The programme also committed to advocate for methane to be reclassified at EU and global level. This is yet another attempt by the livestock sector to cut regulations, not emissions.

Earlier this year, Denmark took the bold step of abolishing its agriculture department, its incoming government apparently having grasped that reform was impossible due to near-total industry capture. Were Ireland to follow suit with our Department of Agriculture, I believe both Teagasc and Bord Bia should also be dissolved and their functions taken over by a new department of national food security that wrestles control of our food system from those “vested interests in narrow rooms”.

As of this year, Ireland is the only country in the EU27 with a nitrates derogation, which is, in essence, a licence to pollute. In return, there was a widespread expectation in Brussels that Ireland would support the Mercosur trade deal; yet once again, the Government capitulated to lobbying by livestock interests, squandering valuable political capital in the process.

As then National Dairy Council chief, Zoe Kavanagh, put it: “the public is feeling that the national value and economic contribution are not as strong as the price being paid on the environmental cost.”

Leo Varadkar’s glimpse behind the curtain showed him that “what is in the interests of farmers and agriculture is by and large not in the interests of Ireland as a nation”. Critically, what we need from our agriculture sector is food sovereignty and biodiversity protection.

A genuinely resilient, diversified Irish agriculture system focused on feeding people rather than livestock, would also help us mitigate against climate shocks to international food supply chains. We will never get the change we urgently need as long as our politicians remain convinced it’s too risky to be honest with us.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland

Posted in Global Warming | Leave a comment

Too much and not enough – water woes worsen

Posted on September 5, 2026 by John Gibbons

Almost uniquely in the western world, Ireland doesn’t charge for domestic water, preferring instead to lump the multi-billion euro cost of water treatment onto the general taxpayer. As our climate warms quickly, even Ireland’s famously wet climate is changing, with drought conditions, especially along the eastern seaboard, now a common occurrence, including during the summer of 2026. I wrote about our water system and its challenges and vulnerabilities for the Irish Examiner in early September.

AS THE climate system heats up, the global water cycle has become more intense, and this is playing out here too. In just the last 30 years, Ireland has become markedly warmer and wetter: average air temperatures have risen by almost 1C, and there has been an overall increase in rainfall of about 7%.

In such a short time frame, these are astonishingly rapid changes, and we are already feeling the impacts in real time. Last Thursday evening, Dublin’s Phoenix Park recorded 40mm of rainfall in just one hour, which is more than fell in the previous two months. On the same evening, Killarney was hit with an intense but localised downpour, described as “the worst flooding in a lifetime” by Killarney mayor, John O’Donoghue.

This is what weather whiplash looks and feels like, and in our rapidly warming climate, we can only expect these incidents to become more severe, more unpredictable, and more destructive over time.

Ireland is a wet country, our temperate climate dominated by proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, but even on this small island, there are sharp differences in local climates. The west coast of Kerry, for instance, typically receives about 1,400mm of rainfall annually, twice the rainfall in the Dublin area.

Rainfall is not, however, drinkable water, nor is water from rivers, lakes or aquifers, no matter how plentiful it may be. This is known as ‘raw’ water, and must undergo extensive — and expensive — treatment to be made safe for human consumption as treated water.

The average daily consumption of treated water in Ireland is 133 litres per person, which means we use about 730 million litres a day, or more than a quarter of a billion tonnes annually, all of which has to be treated and transported through 65,000km of ageing and often porous underground pipework, with 38% of treated water lost along the way through leaks.

Uniquely in the OECD, Ireland does not impose water charges on the public, choosing instead to fund it from general taxation. This means there is no incentive whatever on water users to conserve. It is also fundamentally unfair in that more affluent households with larger houses and gardens, heavy water usage is being subsidised by taxpayers living in apartments or smaller homes.

In late 2024, Uisce Éireann said excess usage fees of €1.85 per 1,000 litres would be levied on households using far above the national average consumption of 125,000 litres.

However, it is clear neither the Government nor Sinn Féin are willing to support any kind of water charges, even for excessive and wasteful usage, seeing them as a political hot potato no one is prepared to grasp.

In 2009, the programme for government included a commitment to introducing water charges, and on that basis, I installed a rainwater recovery system in my Dublin home during renovations that year, consisting of an underground water tank, electric pumps and UV and charcoal filters.

A few years later, the government abandoned planned water charges, and I too gave up on my water recovery system: after all, it made no sense to pay to purify water while also paying taxes that subsidise free water nationally.

The population of Ireland is growing rapidly, rising by 45% since 2000 to more than 5.5 million today — with a commensurate rise in water demand of about 225 million litres a day. Population is growing fastest in the areas most prone to prolonged droughts and heatwaves.

In the next two decades, demand will continue to spiral, with up to 40% more treated water needed by 2044. The big pressure is along the eastern seaboard, including the 1.7 million people living in the greater Dublin area.

A single source — the river Liffey — supplies 85% of the entire water needs of this huge catchment, making our capital city uniquely vulnerable to a catastrophic weather or contamination event affecting the Liffey.

The recent clustering of data centres in the Dublin region is not helping either. During the hot, water-stressed summer months from May to July this year, as the public faced a hosepipe ban, thirsty data centres swallowed over half a billion litres of water for cooling.

While the summer of 2026 will be remembered for its exceptional heat and prolonged drought conditions, it would be a grave mistake to see it as a one-off. Detailed supercomputer climate modelling for Ireland projects sharp temperature rises in the east of the country by mid-century, averaging 1.8C above the 1981-2000 average.

This rate of climatic change is without precedent, and will have profound impacts on agriculture in particular, as well as greatly increasing stress on our water supplies — at the very time that demand is spiking.

With this in mind, Uisce Éireann last December lodged planning permission for what would be the biggest water project ever undertaken in Ireland — a multi-billion euro plan to build a controversial 170km pipeline to transfer 300 million litres of water a day from the Parteen Basin on the River Shannon. This is the equivalent of about 2% of the flow of the river at Parteen. If approved, construction work will likely begin in 2028.

Building more infrastructure clearly has a role to play in keeping up with demand for treated water as the world heats up and the east coast of Ireland gets increasingly hot and dry. How we use water also matters: incredibly, we flush our toilets, water lawns and wash our cars with pristine drinking water.

Rainwater recovery and gray water systems that re-use waste water from sinks, showers and washing machines to flush toilets would greatly reduce household water consumption, but are almost unheard of in Ireland. And, since our treated water is “free”, there is no financial incentive for homeowners to install these systems.

What we use for immediate personal consumption is just a drop in the ocean compared with the ‘virtual’ water embedded in the food we eat, clothes we wear and items we buy — much of which is imported from water-stressed regions.

A kilo of beef requires over 13,000 litres of water, a kilo of coffee uses 19,000 litres, while a cotton t-shirt typically requires about 2,700 litres to make. Producing a smartphone uses about 13,000 litres of water — at the very time that more and more countries are facing intractable and deepening water shortages.

Many of the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil. In the 21st century, they are more likely to be about access to humanity’s most precious commodity — drinkable water.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of The Lie of the Land: The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged drought, Irish Water, Liffey, Uisce Eireann | Leave a comment

Ireland needs national food stockpiles – now

Posted on September 2, 2026 by John Gibbons

It has been a grim year globally for food production. And with a major El Niño building, 2027 is almost certain to be worse again. The globalised food system has worked well for decades in moving stocks around; if one major breadbasket has a bad year, not to worry, other food exporters will take up the slack. That system of just-in-time food distribution works very well – until it doesn’t. As soaring temperatures cause food production to plummet, countries respond in the first instance by curtailing exports. What we are now witnessing are simultaneous breadbasket declines, sharply rising food prices and, at least for now, food shortages in the lower income parts of the world who cannot afford to compete for stocks at higher prices. Ireland, at the very end of supply chains, and dependent almost exclusively on sea lanes for food imports, is highly vulnerable, given that more than four fifths of everything we eat, including hundreds of thousands of tonnes to fruit and vegetables that could easily be grown in Ireland, are instead imported. Even our highly export-oriented livestock sector is itself import-dependent, relying on huge quantities of animal feed and chemical fertiliser to function. All in all, our food system represents the worst of all possible worlds for the dangerous times we now live in, yet where is the public outcry or political debate about this? I recently filed the below piece of the Irish Examiner, which was also picked up briefly on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland and I did an interview on NewsTalk Breakfast to discuss it.

AT ANY given time, around 1.7 million tonnes of oil are held in the Irish State’s national reserve, most of it stored in facilities around the country.

This strategic stockpile is managed by the National Oil Reserves Agency (Nora) and is designed to provide a 90-day emergency buffer in the event of a dire emergency in which Ireland is unable to import liquid fuels for an extended period.

Nora is funded by a levy of two cent per litre of fuel sold. This levy might best be thought of as an insurance policy to hedge against disaster. And, like all insurance policies, it’s a total waste of money – until the day you need it.

While there is occasional grumbling about the levy, few have ever suggested it would be a good idea to shut down Nora, sell off its reserves and cross our fingers in depending totally on the international energy and shipping markets to always run smoothly.

Yet, when it comes to food, this is exactly what we are doing. Propelled by the marketing mythology of being a ‘Food Island’, Ireland has stumbled into a position of acute vulnerability to food system breakdown with no backup plan in place, no serious political discussion and a deafening society-wide silence as to just how dire our situation is fast becoming.

The warning shots have been landing with ever-increasing frequency, from the covid pandemic to the Ukraine war and the Iran imbroglio.

Looming over these crises is the fathomless global climate emergency, which has been simmering ominously in recent years, but this summer boiled over, with severe drought conditions and multiple heatwaves sweeping Europe, Asia, the Americas and much of the world’s oceans.

France is a European powerhouse of cereal production, but its 2026 harvest is likely to be 4-5 million tonnes below normal. Apart from severely depleting soils of moisture, intense drought conditions have seen Europe’s four largest rivers, the Rhine, Danube, Po and Loire all hit record low levels, with major impacts on these arteries of commerce.

Wildfires last year consumed well over a million hectares across Europe, and all indications point to this year being worse and 2027, with a powerful looming El Niño bringing even more extreme conditions to Europe and beyond.

Spokespeople for Irish farming organisations in interviews in recent days stress the “unprecedented” nature of this year’s drought, the unstated assumption being that things will be back to normal next year. However, the stable climatic conditions that made agriculture so predictable and productive are gone and are likely never coming back.

And however unpalatable some may find it, the new reality for food production in Ireland and across Europe is going to be vastly more challenging. I believe the Irish model consisting almost exclusively of monocultural, export-based intensive livestock production that in turn depends heavily on imported inputs will prove to be a monumental error.

We need to urgently pivot to a diversified system of mainly plant-based mixed farming system that works with, not against, nature and is capable of meeting the essential food needs of the Irish population, while exporting modest surpluses.

That, however, is not the focus of this article. Even if we could start next week, it will take time to begin this transition in earnest – time we no longer have. Long before we have made the switch, we could be facing the spectre of spiralling food prices, food shortages and empty supermarket shelves, occasionally at first, but more and more often over time as many of the world’s major food producing regions sharply curb exports to feed their own populations.

Global temperatures are beginning to edge past the 1.5C danger line climate scientists have long warned of, thus ushering in the end of the era of cheap, plentiful food.

A 2024 report for the UK government drawn up by an expert group of civil servants concluded there was a realistic possibility of the “catastrophic failure” of its national food system by 2030 as ecosystems crumbled. Yes, 2030.

While UK planners are alarmed that nearly half of the nation’s basic food needs depend on imports, why have their Irish counterparts nothing whatever to say about a situation where more than four fifths of our total calorific needs are imported?

Why the omerta? Perhaps it’s because our politicians have been colluding with the industrial livestock sector in peddling myths about our uniquely efficient, clean and green food systems for so long that they now fear losing face should they try to point out the obvious at this late stage.

After the second world war, many European countries maintained strategic food stores, especially when the shadow of the Cold War hung over the continent, but in recent decades, many of these giant stores were abandoned as globalised trade and just-in-time logistics ushered in an era of highly efficient food distribution.

The trade-off for efficiency is the loss of resilience. Nordic countries, notably Finland, maintained their stockpiles, mindful of their proximity to Russia. Since the Ukraine invasion, Norway and Sweden have rushed to rebuild emergency food stocks. Poland, Switzerland and Germany also maintain state-managed reserves of non-perishable food.

Few of these countries are as remote from supply chains and as import-dependent as Ireland. With ample cash available to our government for critical projects, surely now is the time to commission to build or purchase a series of giant warehouses, similar in scale to the scores of data centres that have sprung up in recent years.

It may make sense to co-locate them with existing security infrastructure. The Curragh military camp in Co. Kildare, with ample land and ready access to the greater Dublin area, would be one obvious place to build, given the need for these facilities to be absolutely secure.

If we follow the Nora model of holding 90 days’ supplies in storage, fully meeting the food needs of our population of 5.5 million would require warehousing around 750,000 tonnes of food – which is less than half the tonnage of oil in Nora storage, so this is far from an impossible task.

The task of managing this food reserve could be given to a new ministry of National Food Security, one I would suggest we create by dissolving the existing Department of Agriculture as well as Teagasc, the state agri research agency. Both are ossified within the existing productivist paradigm and neither appear remotely capable of responding to the dangerous new circumstances we face.

More than a century ago, US journalist Alfred Henry Lewis wrote: “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Let’s never have to find out how true that statement is.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of ‘The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland’

Posted in Agriculture, Global Warming | Tagged Finland, Germany, National Oil Reserves Agency, Nora, Norway, Poland, Russia, stockpile, Sweded, Switzerland, Teagasc | Leave a comment

Slouching towards ruin with our eyes wide open

Posted on September 2, 2026 by John Gibbons

Bill McGuire is a volcanologist and prolific author who has been ringing the alarm bell on the climate emergency for decades. I filed a review of his latest oeuvre, The Fate Of The World, for the Books section of the Irish Times recently. He rightly retires the term ‘sleepwalking’ to describe humanity’s shuffle towards catastrophe: ‘We are doing it consciously, with our eyes open, and hang the consequences’.

THIS IS A history book about the future. That’s how volcanologist Bill McGuire introduces his latest title on the climate crisis. The geological record, he reminds us, ‘is never wrong’, and what it has to say about our near- and longer-term future is anything but reassuring.

The closest analogue to today’s global climate occurred around three million years ago, during the mid-Piacenzian Warm Period, when sea levels were up to 25 metres higher than today. If global carbon dioxide levels remain at today’s levels, McGuire warns, all the world’s coastal cities will be drowned, with sea water ‘inundating vast areas of currently inhabited Earth’.

He dismisses recent backsliding on the climate emergency by politicians in Ireland and elsewhere under the guise of pragmatism as ‘dangerous drivel’, noting that doing anything less than what the science demands is recklessly irresponsible.

Our collective cowardice and selfishness, he believes, mean the world our children grow old in ‘will be marked not only by a broken climate but by mushrooming suspicion, prejudice and brutality’.

The brutal summer of 2026 seems to viscerally bear out McGuire’s concerns and his growing sense of outrage. ‘I am drawing on this anger in the fight to stop the madness’. It had been said that humanity is sleepwalking into climate catastrophe, but this is clearly no longer the case. ‘We are (now) doing it consciously, with our eyes open, and hang the consequences’.

If this all sounds like the counsel of despair, McGuire, a specialist in geophysical and climate hazards and a prolific popular science writer, is adamant there is still much to fight for. ‘I did not write this book to dismay or dishearten, to foster panic or to feed inertia but to galvanise action’, he stresses.

For those new to the science of climate change, this book is a solid, if sometimes blunt, introduction, though it is not one I would recommend to the uninitiated. For those already familiar with the field, it can feel repetitious and at times, somewhat hectoring.

McGuire is most effective when illuminating his uneven storytelling with vivid examples. For instance, he notes that every litre of petrol we burn today comprises 24 tonnes of prehistoric plant material. Or when he memorably compares the rate at which continents drift across the Earth’s surface as ‘about the same speed fingernails grow’.

Author: Bill McGuire. ISBN: 9780008806545

Publisher: HarperNorth. Guideline Price: €24

Posted in Extreme weather, Global Warming, Psychology | Tagged Bill McGuire, Irish Times | Leave a comment

When feeding the world is a fact, not a slogan

Posted on September 1, 2026 by John Gibbons

In June, I took the car ferry to Dunkirk, then drove from there to Amsterdam where I was based for several days of touring and visiting sites in Holland mainly related to their food sector, more specifically the famously productive Dutch horticultural industry, which covers over 100 square kilometres in high tech greenhouses that hugely extend both the growing season and general productivity. I also spent a memorable day in Wageningen University Research, a world-famous facility promoting the application of cutting-edge science to food technology. Though less than half the size of Ireland, and with far less farmland at its disposal, the Dutch food sector is five times the size of Ireland’s, and this tiny country is now the world’s second largest food exporter, after the US. Can we simply replicate the Dutch model in Irish conditions? Climatically, yes, but we lack the ready access to European road and rail networks, nor do we have any port to remotely rival Rotterdam. But could we have a much smaller scale version of, say Dutch horticulture here, growing under glass to meet much of our national need for self-sufficiency in vegetables and fruit? Yes, absolutely. What’s lacking is political will, while the farm lobby (which has effectively captured Teagasc, our state food research agency) is completely dominated by livestock interests who care little about such trivia as food security and are only interested in keeping a production line of bulk monoculture commodities flowing from farm to dairy and meat processing facilities and from there to god knows where. I filed the below report for The Irish Times Science & Climate page in late August.

AMID THE WELTER of government-backed agrifood industry plans based around the continued expansion of food exports, there remains a deafening silence around the crunch issue of Ireland’s national food security.

In contrast, in the UK there is growing alarm that, as geopolitical tensions escalate, climate-fuelled extreme weather events intensify and global supply chains fray, its population is likely facing into soaring food prices and outright shortages in the near term.

In May, the UK’s Climate Change Committee warned that climate breakdown is putting domestic food production under growing threat and urged the government to take active steps to ensure at least 60 per cent of its total food needs are produced locally. Ireland, remarkably, appears to have no targets whatever for domestic food production.

Despite Ireland having four times more farmland per person than the UK, we are in fact far more food-insecure than our nearest neighbour, as we import over 80 per cent of all our food needs, both for human consumption and our (non-grass) animal feed. Around five million tonnes of grains and feedstuff are imported annually, of which two million tonnes is for dairy cattle, as well as around one million tonnes of chemical fertilisers, mainly to feed our large livestock herd.

In 2024, Ireland imported a total of around 400,000 tonnes of potatoes, apples, onions, carrots, cabbage and tomatoes, all human-edible crops that grow well in Irish conditions. Horticulture uses less than two per cent of Ireland’s farmland, yet produces three times the income per hectare of conventional agriculture. It is also labour-intensive, accounting for one in 10 agri-food jobs in Ireland and producing over half a billion euros in farmgate value.

Horticulture is by some distance our most efficient system at producing food for human consumption, yet it receives little more than lip-service from either the state or farming organisations. In Ireland domestic production of fruit and vegetables has been in freefall for decades, with an 85 per cent decline in field growers of vegetables since 2000.

When it comes to producing food for human consumption, the contrast between Ireland and Holland could hardly be more stark. Despite having a land mass less than half our size, with a population of 17 million, Holland is the world’s second largest food exporter, with its remarkable horticulture sector a global trail-blazer, employing over 140,000 people, which is similar to Ireland’s entire farming population. Exports of Dutch horticultural products, including fruit and veg, were valued at €38 billion in 2025, that is double the size of Ireland’s entire food and drink export industry.

The key to its success is technology and expertise. Land is scarce in Holland and so is highly valued. Its vast complex of greenhouses covers around 100 square kilometres. These extend the growing season to almost the entire year, despite Holland having a similar climate to Ireland. Growing under glass typically leads to more than ten times greater productivity per hectare farmed.

One example I recently visited was the Voorhof nursery in Overijssel, a greenhouse complex covering 7.8 hectares that specialises in cucumber production. Manager René Kalter explained that their annual production amounts to around 16 million cucumbers, weighing 8,000 tonnes, and over 60 people are employed at the facility, which operates for around 10 months of the year and exports to several European countries.

A reserve of around five million litres of rainwater recovered from the rooftops is stored for use on-site while the facility also has 2,800 solar panels for electricity production. A key vulnerability of greenhouses is that they are energy-intensive. Typically, Dutch greenhouses are heated with gas, which apart from carbon emissions, also makes them vulnerable to price shocks, such as the Ukraine and Iran wars.

The Voorhof nursery is one of a cluster of five horticulture businesses all within a close radius. In 2012, they jointly invested around €10 million in a geothermal system, which is one of around 30 similar systems around Holland. This draws a steady stream of hot water from 2,000 metres underground to the surface, and this is distributed to the nurseries via a network of insulated underground pipes.

The Voorhof nursery has a giant buffer tank that holds around four million litres of geothermally heated water, and this meets virtually the entire heating needs of the plant.

Pest management is a major challenge for all monoculture food systems. Traditionally, Dutch horticulture has been a major user of chemical pesticides, but there has been a sharp recent shift towards biological pest control methods. These include introducing predators, such as parasitic wasps, mites, beetles, nematodes and ladybirds to consume aphids and other pests, as well as using sticky traps.

Hygiene is paramount. Before entering the greenhouse complex, we had to wash our hands carefully with disinfectant, while wearing plastic overalls to cover our shoes. Packs of biological agents were visible throughout the greenhouse, including pheromones designed to confuse insects with chemical signals to prevent them from mating.

The Voorhof nursery has not fully eliminated chemical pesticides, but, according to Kalter, they are “the last line of defence, and only called upon rarely”. Avoiding pesticide usage is also an important consideration in protecting the health of greenhouse employees.

While the investment and expertise required for high-tech horticulture are significant, so too are the rewards. A 2019 study on horticulture options for Ireland commissioned by the Department of Agriculture noted that Dutch glasshouse-based vegetable production was around 80 times more profitable per hectare than dairying, as well as being vastly more efficient at providing food for human consumption.

Holland is now among the world’s largest exporters of agricultural and food technology, including cell-cultured meat, vertical farming and a range of innovations that have allowed farmers to cut water consumption, pesticide use and carbon emissions. Incredibly, the Netherlands now accounts for one third of all the global trade in vegetable seeds.

At the epicentre of the Dutch agriculture miracle is Wageningen University & Research (WUR), a world leading agri-food research facility which in turn is surrounded by a cluster of research centres collectively known as Food Valley – a nod to California’s Silicon Valley cluster of tech enterprises.

Dutch agri-food expertise and training is exported to over 100 countries, many in Africa and Latin America suffering from food insecurity. This includes modified seeds and plants that are better able to cope with climate-related stresses such as drought, flooding and extreme temperatures.

On a recent visit to WUR, Rick van de Zedde, programme manager of the eco-phenotyping facility, took us into a light and temperature-controlled room where some 300 glass plates, each containing individual wheat plants were being exposed to differing growing conditions and stresses. Their root systems are scanned optically using a robotic system every day to precisely measure the responses of different genotypes to, for instance, drought.

In the university’s greenhouse research complex, tomato plants were being encouraged to produce more Vitamin C by tweaking the exact frequency of LED light the plants are exposed to at different parts of their life cycle. Researcher Rick Wieggers showed us a processing facility where freshwater algae are being used as a novel source of sustainable lipid and protein production to replace petroleum and palm oils in food and transport. Microalgae produce vastly more lipids per hectare than standard oilseed crops and WUR is working to scale this process up to make it viable at an industrial level.

The Achilles’ Heel of the Dutch food system remains its huge export-oriented intensive livestock sector which, like Ireland, is heavily reliant on cheap imported animal feeds and is a major source of emissions and water pollution.

That’s the view of Bart de Steenhuijsen Piters, senior food systems researcher at WUR. “Efficiency and resilience are in conflict with one another, and through the development of the European food system, including in Ireland, we have been optimising efficiency, while not being aware that we have managed resilience out of the system”.

With multiple shocks hitting the global food system in just the last few years, including Covid and two major wars, all amplified by worsening climate impacts, de Steenhuijsen Piters warns of growing near-term threats to fundamental European food security, a vulnerability he argues is greatly increased by excessive livestock agriculture.

While acknowledging the huge productivity of Dutch agriculture, he believes there is still an over-emphasis on meat production (especially pork) and consumption, which he describes as “neither sustainable nor particularly healthy”.

For a glimpse into a truly sustainable model, de Steenhuijsen Piters points to neighbouring Denmark, which recently abolished its ministry for agriculture, and – unlike Ireland – is cracking down hard on nitrogen pollution in a public backlash against its ultra-intensive pig production industry in particular.

While Irish politicians repeat the hollow mantra about Ireland ‘feeding the world’, the Dutch system, for all its flaws, is doing exactly this. If Irish agriculture wants to look at a model for the future that uses high technology to combine productivity with resilience and efficiency in the face of our fast-changing climate, then Holland has much to teach us.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of ‘The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland’

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Global Warming, Sustainability | Tagged Holland, Horticulture, Irish Times, vegetables, Wageningen University Research | Leave a comment

We need a Department of National Food Security – now

Posted on August 23, 2026 by John Gibbons

It’s been quite some time since I pitched an article to The Irish Times op-ed page, despite having been a regular there some time back. The below piece ran on Monday August 17th, under the newspaper headline: ‘The food industry should not control our agricultural policy‘. I had first teased the idea of scrapping the Department of Agriculture and replacing it with a new Department of National Food Security in my book, The Lie of the Land, last September, but the idea has gained little traction. I thought now was a good time to bring it to a new audience, given events in Denmark in recent months have made it look like a far less radical proposal than it may at first glance have appeared. I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction to the article. A LinkedIn post I put up about it attracted over 18,000 views and nearly 40 online comments, so it clearly struck something of a chord. NewsTalk invited me on to the following morning’s breakfast show to discuss the piece. Initially, it was to be a one-on-one interview with the presenter, but they called back to – inevitably – add an Agri voice to the slot, in the form of the ICMSA president, there to rubbish my proposal the very moment it is even floated and to tell tall tales about our uniquely efficient, green etc. livestock sector. This is a common problem in media framing in Ireland. it’s tough enough to get a dissenting view on the industrial livestock steamroller into the public arena, and even tougher to get even five uninterrupted minutes to tease it out. Oddly, when the ICMSA or IFA people are invited on to radio shows to lobby for deregulation or taxpayer bailouts, as per the latest demand for drought-related handouts, it’s rare indeed to hear them challenged in real time by someone like me arguing against whatever it is they are demanding. Balance, it seems, can be a one-way street.

EARLIER THIS summer, Denmark, a country of similar population to Ireland, did the unthinkable: it formally scrapped its century-old agriculture ministry, the first EU country to do so.

In a move that read like a plot twist from the Danish political drama Borgen, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen unveiled its new Ministry of Nature and Animal Welfare. At least part of this radical revamp has been aimed at breaking the decades-long stranglehold of agri-industrial lobbyists on government policy. Sound familiar?

And while the Irish Government is now back-pedalling furiously on even our existing modest climate commitments, Denmark has upped its ambitions, aiming for an aggressive 85 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions within nine years, on the path to climate neutrality by 2045.

The main driver for this has been deepening public unease at the severe environmental, climate and animal welfare toll of intensive livestock production, which in Denmark is dominated by its 30 million pigs. This came to a head in the so-called “pig election” last March.

If there was a good case to be made in Denmark for scrapping its agriculture ministry, I believe the argument in favour of a similar step in Ireland is even more compelling and urgent.

The Irish State does not have an agriculture policy as such. While on paper it may look like our minister and his department officials call the shots, the real power has long since passed to the industrial players who dominate the sector.

If this sounds like an overstatement, consider Food Wise 2025, one in a series of policy documents all of which carry the government harp on the cover. Despite this, it was, in the words of then Bord Bia chief executive Tara McCarthy, “industry-owned”.

The other main function of Irish agriculture ministers in recent years has been to try to undermine climate action, both nationally and at EU level – as seen most blatantly when minister Simon Coveney in 2014 announced: “I will not allow a situation where the potential for growth and expansion in agri-food will be compromised by the setting of emissions limits.” His successors have all been broadly compliant with industry-led narratives that have put the kibosh on our national emissions reduction strategy – as seen with Martin Heydon’s involvement in the controversial Dublin Declaration of 2022.

Meanwhile, as Ireland fiddles, Europe is burning following a series of deadly heatwaves, with billions of euro in food production already destroyed this summer. This is playing out against a backdrop of profound ongoing global geopolitical and climate upheaval.

Ireland’s food production model – based on the mass export of beef and dairy products while, as Mary Robinson pointed out in a recent lecture, importing more than four fifths of everything we actually eat – has been exposed as reckless.

Our huge livestock herd has been hit by rolling fodder crises in 2013, 2018, 2022, 2024 and now again this summer, whether from drought, extreme rainfall or both. Despite most of Ireland’s farmland being dedicated to grass production, supplemented by millions of tonnes of imported animal feeds and fertilisers, we are still incapable of reliably feeding our livestock, while depending almost entirely on imports to meet the actual nutritional needs of the Irish population.

There have been calls in recent days to convene a meeting of our National Fodder and Food Security Committee. This, as the name suggests, is chiefly concerned with animal feed. The penny has not yet dropped that it’s only a matter of time before the climate crisis makes human food security an issue that can no longer be ignored.

Where is Teagasc, the state agri research agency in all this? With a budget last year of a quarter of a billion euro, it should be ringing the alarm bells on our chronic national food insecurity, but instead, Teagasc, dominated at board level by dairy farmers, has doubled down on promoting aggressive expansion of dairy in particular and downplaying its climate impacts.

The evidence points overwhelmingly to the need for radical reform. Our state agencies have in effect been captured by industry interests. The starting point for this is to dissolve both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine as well as Teagasc and replace both with a new Department of National Food Security, one freed from industry interests and corporate ideology.

The first task of the new department should be to audit our critical national vulnerability to food shocks, and to lay out a roadmap for an Irish agriculture sector that is resilient, diversified, locally rooted and genuinely sustainable, with a strong emphasis on organics, horticulture and tillage. It should also look to establish a strategic national food reserve, similar to our oil reserves.

This would be the exact opposite of our current profit-driven monocultural model that is accelerating biodiversity loss, carbon emissions and water pollution while seeing farming largely reduced to commodity bulk food production that is almost completely cut off from its immediate hinterland.

Claims that Irish agricultural exports are “feeding the world” are baseless. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Ireland is a net importer of food calories, equivalent to the calorific intake of 2.5 million people.

And by selling high-emissions luxury food to the rich while fattening animals with imported grain and soya that could otherwise feed people in places where food is scarce, Ireland is also exporting food insecurity.

The 2024 Lancet Countdown report warned that climate change is already driving record-breaking threats to health and survival, including worsening food security.

We won’t be able to confront this existential crisis with the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess. And in these dangerous times, the most radical approach would be to carry on regardless, yet this is exactly the path Ireland is now choosing.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland

Posted in Agriculture, Agriculture, Global Warming, Pollution, Sustainability | Tagged Denmark, Irish Times, Martin Heydon, Mette Frederiksen, Simon Coveney, Teagasc, The Lancet | Leave a comment

Stumbling ever deeper into the Pyrocene

Posted on August 5, 2026 by John Gibbons

I ran the below analysis piece in the Irish Examiner at the start of August, to coincide with Europe’s fourth heatwave of the crazy summer of 2026. Europe is heating at more than twice the global average, for a number of reasons. As of July 29th, some 435,000 hectares (that’s over a million acres) has burned in Europe so far this year, versus the long term average of 172,000 hectares. The previous record year? 2025, when 346,000 hectares had burned by the end of July. The only positive to be taken from the ferocious heating across Europe is that it is propelling climate change back up the political agenda, while also providing a timely boost for the renewable energy transition, which is, despite many attempts to sabotage and undermine it, is powering ahead. This is based on the simple fact that renewable energy is affordable and accessible, as well as being clean, domestically produced and freeing us from the whims of tyrants, whether in Moscow or Washington.

[As an aside, ThinkOrSwim, which has been in abeyance since last September as I focused on promoting my book, The Lie of the Land, is now officially back in action. I will be back-filling the site with a bunch of articles, interviews etc. from over the last few months. Good to be back.]

‘OUR MASSIVE tampering with the world’s interdependent web of life – coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change– could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we barely understand’.

This is an extract from an open letter signed by over 1,700 elite scientists, including scores of Nobel laureates, which they titled ‘Warning to Humanity’.

It went on to warn that ‘no more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished’.

This letter was published in 1992, more than a third of a century ago. We were warned, over and over again, but tragically, we chose – or were persuaded – not to listen. And now comes the reckoning.

With much of Europe on fire, France is facing what president Emmanuel Macron described as its worst mass evacuation crisis since the end of the second world war. Hundreds of thousands of people in the heart of the European Union have had to flee for their lives as unprecedented wildfires have consumed vast swathes of south-western France as well as tens of thousands of hectares close to the Spanish capital, Madrid.

We are coming to terms with new and terrifying phenomena, including what are being labelled as ‘fire clouds’, these are weather systems generated by the raging infernos, creating pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCB clouds.

These clouds can climb 10-15 kilometres upwards, rising to the edge of the stratosphere and creating powerful winds that fan the flames below. To add further menace, these pyroCB clouds, nicknamed by NASA as ‘the fire-breathing dragon of clouds’ are triggering widespread lightning strikes, so spreading the fires even further and making them all-but-impossible to contain.

Europe is heating at more than twice the global average, creating the furnace-like conditions now being witnessed. Last year’s summer heatwaves, droughts and floods cost the EU economy an estimated €43 billion, a number expected to treble to €126 billion by 2029.

In Britain, three of the five worst harvests on record have occurred between 2020 and 2025, with this year looking to be equally bad.

Ominously, the June heatwave alone wiped out around €2 billion in European agricultural output, including nine million tonnes of grain lost and hundreds of thousands of livestock, mainly poultry, dying in the sweltering heat.

And with August only just beginning, it is incredible to consider that Europe has already endured four heatwaves this summer alone. London has seen the number of days where temperatures breach 30C more than quadruple in recent decades, while across England and Wales, heatwave conditions have claimed the lives of around 2,700 people so far this summer.

If this extreme heat were just a European phenomenon, that would be alarming of itself, but it’s far more extensive. The continental United States is bracing for its third ‘heat dome’ in recent weeks, with 70 million people facing extreme heat advisories, and temperatures due to breach 40C. The US interior is well used to scorching summer temperatures, but even here, all-time heat records are being broken on an almost weekly basis.

Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, is the world’s second coldest capital city, yet on July 14^th last, temperatures hit 39.5C, an astonishing 4.1C hotter than the previous record. Japan is currently experiencing all-time record-breaking temperatures approaching 38C, while Korea is facing 40C in the coming days and temperatures have breached 43C in Mongolia.

It is of course summer across the northern hemisphere, yet at the opposite end of the world, winter temperatures in the mid to high 30s are sweeping South America, from Paraguay to Guyana and Brazil.

More than two thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. June 2026 saw global sea surface temperatures hit a new all-time high, as ocean heating is now penetrating to depths of over 2,000 metres. More than 90% of the excess heat arising from global warming is being absorbed by the world’s oceans, which itself is accelerating sea level rise.

Were this not happening, the average temperature of the land surface today would already be over 50C – heat that would be fatal to most forms of life, including humans. There are now clear signs that the ability of the oceans to transfer heat downwards is diminishing, while marine life is also struggling to adapt to rising water temperatures and an increasingly acidic environment due to an overload of dissolved carbon dioxide.

As if all this wasn’t enough to contend with, a powerful El Niño is building up in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which scientists say is likely to lead to a further spike in global temperatures in 2027. The El Niño is part of a natural climatic cycle, but it is now turbocharged by the huge additional energy in the global climate system resulting from human activities.

While collating and reviewing this dizzying set of data from around the world, my mind drifted back to aninterview with the late James Lovelock, one of the most brilliant scientists and inventors of the 20^th century. Lovelock famously developed the Gaia hypothesis, the concept of Earth as a self-regulating super-organism.

Reflecting on the climate emergency, he offered this advice in 2008: “Enjoy life while you can, because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan”. It’s too soon to know whether Lovelock will be remembered as a gloomy misanthrope or simply a cold-eyed realist.

Lovelock presciently wrote to oil giant, Shell, in 1966 warning them the climate is worsening and “the combustion of fuel is responsible”. One thing he got completely wrong was about renewable energy, which he regarded as a joke, but in the last decade, renewable technologies have matured faster than even their boosters could ever have imagined.

They now offer humanity an unlikely exit ramp off our current highway to climate hell – if only our politicians and business leaders had the wit and mettle to grasp this slenderest of lifelines.

Unlike most English-speaking countries, Ireland does not have a toxic billionaire-controlled media environment to contend with, yet despite this, in the 18 months since it took office, the current government has shown little belly for the fight.

It has chosen instead to cosy up to tech giants by greenlighting unsustainable data centres, while blocking the ability of civil society to object to highly damaging projects such as the proposed new LNG facility or Dublin airport expansion – all while dragging its feet on the green transition as our Europeans neighbours power ahead.

Meanwhile, Ireland remains among the very worst per-capita carbon polluters in Europe, largely due to our oversized but politically untouchable livestock herd. While we may be physically separate from the European mainland, Ireland’s carbon emissions are directly contributing to the heartbreaking wildfires in France, Spain, Greece and Italy.

One thing is clear: the ferocious summer of 2026 will almost certainly be one of the coolest of the rest of the 21^st century. Yet still we dawdle and dally, as every month that passes brings us another step closer to the greatest tragedy in the brief 300,000-year history of our species.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of ‘The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland’

Posted in Agriculture, Extreme weather, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Pollution, Renewables, Sustainability | Tagged fire clouds, food security, heatwave, Irish Examiner, James Lovelock, pyrocumulonimbus, Shell | Leave a comment

The heat is on: climate-fuelled carnage intensifies

Posted on July 26, 2026 by John Gibbons

I filed this piece with TheJournal.ie in late July as wildfires swept Ireland and Europe, and particularly in light of ongoing efforts by the current government to stymie climate action by undermining the 2021 Climate Act under the guise of cutting red tape and streamlining a planning process that had been held captive by mendacious eco types, allegedly. Truly nauseating to see how quickly FF and FG, without the Greens there to keep them in line, have lurched towards populism and sleevenism. They say we get the politicians we deserve. I sincerely hope this is not the case.

IT FELT LIKE the house was on fire. One night recently, the stench of smoke sent us scurrying around our home in Shankill, Dublin checking to see if anything was burning or smouldering.

The source of the smoke, as we quickly figured out, was external, blowing in from the nearby Wicklow mountains. This smell – and taste – is something countless millions of people around the world are having to contend with regularly. If you could smell the future, it would be the acrid scent of burning landscapes.

While it’s still July, wildfires across Europe have already burned more land than the entire annual average of the last two decades. On Thursday, Spain declared a national emergency as wildfires rage in the region of its capital, Madrid, forcing 70,000 people to evacuate. Across France, nearly 200,000 people have had to flee, including many from the area around Bordeaux

Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez set out the crisis in plain language: “Year after year we clearly see how climate change kills and destroys wealth in our communities. This isn’t politics. It is science, it’s about facts”.

I well remember the 1995 European heatwave and am just about old enough to recall the previous major heatwave, two decades earlier, in 1976. These events were memorable precisely because they were so absolutely abnormal and vanishingly rare.

No longer. As a Met Éireann analysis confirmed, the 1976 heatwave was a strictly regional phenomenon, centred over Ireland and Britain, while mainland Europe was largely unaffected. On the other hand, last year’s multiple European heatwaves were beyond continental scale, as were the three heatwaves so far this summer.

What’s more, even though we experienced no heatwaves in Ireland last year, the average temperature for Ireland in the summer of 2025 was 16.2C, which is significantly warmer than the average 15.8C for what we remember as the scorching summer of 1976. The other marked shift has been towards warmer nights, one of the fingerprints of global warming.

Meanwhile, from the depths of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a powerful El Niño is building, leading scientists to fear that 2026 and into 2027 may see unprecedented temperature rises. While El Niños are part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling related to upwelling of ocean currents, these have become supercharged by the additional energy in the global climate system.

Next year, global average temperatures may breach 1.7C above pre-industrial, a simply mind-boggling scenario, given that as recently as 2015, the governments of the world signed up to the Paris Agreement on climate change, which stressed the need to keep temperature increases this century below the 1.5C danger line.

At the time, the common belief was that this threshold could not be breached before the 2030s, yet 2024 saw this line crumble as global temperatures reached 1.55C above pre-industrial. Around 90% of the excess heat absorbed by the Earth as result of global warming heats the ocean, not the land, which is the only reason that much of the Earth’s land surface is not already too hot for humans, wildlife, livestock or crops to survive.

Heating is now penetrating two kilometres into the ocean depths, and energy is building up there at a rate unprecedented since humans evolved. Last year, the world’s oceans absorbed around 23 zettajoules of energy, which is the equivalent energy released in exploding 12 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs every secondin 2025, that’s around 370 million Hiroshimas for the full year. The climate bomb is being primed.

Scientists have identified nine critical planetary boundaries which define the safe operating space for humanity. These include biosphere integrity, climate change, land-system change, nitrogen and phosphorus flows, ozone depletion and more.

Scaled to a human body, these critical systems are analogous to our vital organs – heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, etc. As of 2026, seven of these nine planetary boundaries have been breached. If planet Earth were a patient, this frankly would be a terminal diagnosis requiring drastic emergency intervention and even then, with no guarantee whatever of success.

I’ve been tracking and reporting on the fast-emerging climate and biodiversity crisis for the last two decades. In the early years, many of the dire warnings from scientists were scoffed at as alarmist or improbable.

The reason that we have stumbled blindly into this dire situation is far from accidental. The global energy industry has been funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars into a disinformation campaign stretching back to the 1990s aimed at manufacturing doubt, undermining scientific authority and co-ordinating with think tanks and billionaire-owned media outlets to spread and amplify climate denial while denigrating and ridiculing scientists and activists who dared to speak out.

All this frenzy of denial has been orchestrated to defend the vast wealth of the trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry, to whom renewable energy poses not an opportunity but an existential threat.

The advent and proliferation of toxic social media outlets and the rise of anti-science populists like Donald Trump has given a new lease of life to climate denial and has further stymied vital efforts to accelerate towards net zero.

And while it might be reassuring to think that this has little to do with Ireland, the facts suggest otherwise. We may be small, but when it comes to negative impacts, we punch way above our weight. In terms of carbon emissions, we are per capita the second worst in the EU. Our outsized emissions are largely due to Ireland’s huge livestock herd, which is the main reason why two fifths of our entire national emissions come from a sector that accounts for barely 4% of our economy and only 6.5% of total employment.

With Ireland now holding the presidency of the EU Council, it appears to be using the opportunity to push the ‘simplification’ agenda, ostensibly to lighten the regulatory burden on businesses, but in reality bowing down to industry lobbyists keen to protect highly polluting operations – in Ireland’s case, this is predominantly intensive industrial livestock production.

As a recent report by the investigative website, DeSmog put it: “Ireland’s long record of lobbying the EU on behalf of its polluting agricultural sector raises alarm bells for the presidency among campaigners”.

Since the Greens were dumped from government at the end of 2024, the new administration led by Taoiseach Micheál Martin has lurched sharply to the right, as evidenced by its attempts to completely undermine climate action by exempting a raft of infrastructure projects from Section 15 of the 2021 Climate Act, which requires such projects to be compliant with the emissions-reduction objectives of the Act.

The politicians engaged in this drastic u-turn are, it should be pointed out, the same people who enthusiastically voted for the Climate Act just five years ago. Public expenditure minister, Jack Chambers claimed on Friday of this week that this was necessary because climate legislation had been, in his words, “weaponised” by NGOs and other activists to stymie and stall major projects.

This is manifest nonsense. What NGOs for example are responsible for the utter shambles that is the new National Children’s Hospital, a project more than a billion euros over budget and years behind schedule due to political and managerial incompetence?

If Chambers is looking for someone to blame, he could always start with Tánaiste, Simon Harris, who was the health minister responsible for commissioning this fiasco. Even before the latest moves by the government to financially penalise those challenging bad planning decisions in the public interest, senior EU officials in 2022 had noted with alarm the “increasingly aggressive stance being taken against environmental campaigners in Ireland”.

There is evidence “not only of increased use of Slapp (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) suits, but also negative reporting in mainstream media, and even from politicians – like threatening to cut off funding to certain NGOs.”

Senior European Commission official Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea added: “we believe radical change of behaviour is necessary, because it is highly unusual for an advanced society like Ireland to witness such conduct”.

While clearly the moral imperative to act strongly to try to avert or at least lessen the coming climate tragedy cuts little ice with Irish politicians of almost any hue, their staggering lack of concern at looming EU fines for our chronic non-compliance with legally binding emissions targets remains a mystery.

According to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, the fines we face, ranging from €8-€26 billion would, if invested in critical infrastructure, allow instead a €7 billion upgrade of our national energy grid while rapidly accelerating our transition to electric vehicles, with €1 billion left over for rewetting of peatlands. This is, IFAC noted, a “colossal missed opportunity”.

While similar sized EU states like Denmark and Holland race ahead in the green transition, revolutionising their energy and food systems, Ireland remains mired in the past. Politicians like Chambers, Simon Harris or Micheál Martin seem more focused on mollifying sectoral lobbyists and engaging in populist follies like tearing up the rule book to facilitate chaotic rural one-off housing – a move supported by Sinn Fein – in the teeth of all the expert advice from planners.

As Europe and much of the world is already learning, the climate crisis is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. The hundreds of thousands of people now forced to flee the flames in France and Spain are but a harbinger of an ever more dangerous near future of forced mass migration and chronic shortages of food and fresh water.

We are also witnessing the relentless rise of extremist politicians who, like their fascist counterparts in the 1930s, thrive amid chaos and fear. Ireland is not immune to these forces.

Our open, import-dependent economy ties us closely to the wider world and it is foolish to think that the virus of geopolitical breakdown will not jump the Irish Sea and arrive on our shores as extreme weather begets extreme politics and we witness the chaotic unravelling of decades of globalisation and economic integration.

How will we cope? What steps have our politicians and economic planners taken to weatherise our society and to sharply increase, for example, our domestic food and energy resilience? Sadly, our national strategy, insofar as we have one, seems to be to plough ahead and hope for the best. We’re going to have to do a whole lot better – and soon.

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of ‘The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland’

Posted in Agriculture, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Sustainability | Tagged Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea, El Niño, heatwave, IFAC, Met Eireann, one-off housing, Paris Agreement | Leave a comment

Taking tea with the President

Posted on September 21, 2025 by John Gibbons

AN undoubted highlight for me, not just of the last week but of the year, was a Courtesy Call on September 18th to Áras an Uachtaráin to present President Michael D. Higgins with a copy of ‘The Lie of the Land’. After the photos, introductions and formalities, we sat down for coffee and conversation for nearly a full hour.

President Higgins receives John Gibbons who presented a copy of his book “The Lie of the Land” , a game plan for Ireland’s the Climate crisis…….. Pic Tony Maxwell 18-9-25

President Higgins is extremely well versed in climate and environmental issues, and came armed with a heavily dog-eared copy of my book, which he had clearly read in full, and questioned me closely on many of the points it covered, especially around agriculture and food policy. The conversation ranged widely, to include the history and evolution of agriculture in Ireland and globally since the mid-19th century, and the role and impacts of industrial farming in particular.

I was accompanied on the morning by my daughters, who too were delighted at the unique opportunity both to visit the Áras and also to meet the head of State just weeks before the end of what has been a highly consequential 14-year stay.

Later that day, I joined Matt Cooper in studio for my weekly Last Word on the Environment, which he introduced by noting that the official account of the President of Ireland had tweeted out details of our meeting, including the above picture. Earlier that week I got confirmation that the book had reached No. 3 in the national non-fiction bestseller list, a rise of six places since its first week of launch.

Early last week, The Currency published an extremely positive review of The Lie of the Land. “As much as the book is a devastating critique of what Gibbons calls “dishonest discourse” from agribusiness lobby groups and in the media, the book also offers an unsparing review of the role of policymakers in bringing Ireland to its climate-vulnerable position”, Niall Sargent wrote.

And on Saturday last, I was beyond delighted to read an effusive in-depth review of The Lie of the Land in the Irish Examiner by Jack Power, headed ‘Greed and duplicity pollutes our politics and environment’. The book, he wrote, was the first he had read in the last 27 years that “kept me awake at night”. The review of what Power called “this shocking book” concluded as follows: “John Gibbons has indeed done the State and generations as yet unborn some service”.

A very positive note indeed on which to conclude what had for me been an extraordinary week. The recording of The Last Word on the Environment as mentioned here is linked below:

Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability, TodayFM | Tagged Michael D. Higgins, Niall Sargent, The Currency, The Lie of the Land | Leave a comment

A night to remember

Posted on September 14, 2025 by John Gibbons

The date – September 4th – had been etched in my mind for at least the last two months. That was the official launch day for The Lie of the Land, and as it drew ever closer, I was filled with a mixture of anticipation and, to be honest, dread.

All the usual stuff, really. What if nobody shows up and the room is half empty? What if the venue is a disaster, the caterers fail to appear, there’s a power cut, etc. etc. In a rush of optimism, I had gone for a bigger venue – the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin’s Dawson Street – which realistically needed upwards 75 attendees to look reasonably busy. As the date approached, my anxiety intensified as I scrambled to complete a series of last minute tasks related to the launch.

As tends to happen, the day did indeed come around. I completed my usual weekly Today FM slot a little earlier that day, and made my way to the RIA for around 5pm, an hour or so ahead of the event kicking off. Even before 6pm, there was already a good crowd gathering, and by the time the speechifying kicked off at around 6.30, it was standing room only, with the crowd of around 150 overflowing into the adjacent hall.

My commissioning editor at Penguin, Brendan Barrington, introduced the event and explained their rationale for choosing to publish what they believed would be an influential book about Ireland and the climate emergency at this time, and also, why they chose me to write it.

Matt Cooper, a man alway in heavy demand for his skills as a chair, agreed to be MC for the launch, and delivered a characteristically sharp and on-point speech, which was very generous indeed towards both book and author (he penned a piece around the event as part of his Business Post column three days later, text included at the foot of this article). My own remarks concluded the formal part of the event. I had lots of people to thank, and was delighted to do so, but overall, I kept it (at least by my standards) fairly short and to the point. The previous speakers had already covered much of the ground, so no need to keep people any longer than absolutely necessary.

The rest of the event was a blur of faces, book signings and general good cheer. There was a sea of familar faces, from family, friends and work colleagues to politicians, media colleagues and many people from both academia and the environmental community.

By 8.30pm, the stragglers were being ushered out of the RIA and we headed across the street to Cafe En Seine, where the after party continued until the wee small hours. Despite my earlier concerns, it was to be an evening to remember; one of the most enjoyable, even joyful events of my entire life, one I was hugely privileged to share with so many people.

Meanwhile, the book garnered a lengthy and very positive review in that Saturday’s Irish Times, with another equally positive review in the Irish Independent the following Saturday, and lots of media work, from interviews to podcasts and articles in between. I was absolutely delighted to see the book hit No. 9 in the Irish non-fiction bestseller list in the week to September 9th (UPDATE: the book rose to No. 3 in the bestseller list for the week to September 16th).

Where it goes from here, I have no idea, but it’s hard to describe just how good it feels, after a mostly solitary 18+ month slog, to emerge blinking into the daylight and take the fruits of that effort into the public domain.

Here’s Matt Cooper’s piece from the Business Post on September 7th:

The Land, the Lie, and the Climate Fight
On Thursday evening I was invited to make a speech at the launch of The Lie of the Land, a book about Ireland and its response to the climate crisis by John Gibbons.

A well-known journalist who has written for many publications, including this one, Gibbons is a weekly contributor to The Last Word on Today FM, where we spend between 12 to 15 minutes discussing environment stories of the week every Thursday.

We have done so for over four years now and I regard his contributions as essential to our editorial content.

I know him to be passionate, principled and pugnacious, features that come across strongly in this well-argued and well-written book, one that is loaded with facts to buttress his arguments.

That approach can be regarded as a problem in an era where facts and expertise are derided by those who prefer to believe the deniers who can be found on the internet, many of whom may be promoted by those with nefarious intent.

Gibbons is consistent and determined, especially in calling out the hypocrisy of corporate greenwashing, and he is strong enough to take the abuse he gets in return, although it can’t be pleasant.

The vitriol that is present in many of the comments we receive about his appearances on the radio show can be shocking, and I don’t show him all of them.

Some people simply don’t want to believe what he is saying because it is too uncomfortable for them. Some ignore him but others attack. They deny his facts, they deny climate science, and they are angry that the change he wants will led to a diminution in their standards of living.

Farmers get upset when he points out that farming is responsible for 38 per cent of Ireland’s greenhouse emissions – and only 7 per cent of gross national income – which he repeats with force in the book.

“There is a storybook image we love to sell to the outside world and to ourselves: that Ireland is a green and pleasant land, all fertile fields and rolling hills – but this image obscures the reality of biodiversity loss, nitrogen-polluted lakes, and the fact that we are far away from meeting our climate change commitments,” he writes.

He claims that Ireland’s “dramatic shift towards the most polluting food sectors – driven by a small number of agribusiness giants and facilitated by the state – benefits the few while imposing huge costs on the many”.

He proposes that we can “embrace a low-emissions farming model while preserving farmers’ livelihoods, making the countryside a better place to live, and delivering something Ireland conspicuously lacks: food security”.

Gibbons argues that where once politicians regulated the sector, they are now largely consigned to the role of cheerleading and funding industry plans. Another strand of that story, he contends, is the spectacular rise of the billion-euro agribusinesses as powerful players in shaping agri-industrial policy in Ireland.

He condemns the “wishful thinking and outright dishonesty that have propped up the status quo in Irish agribusiness”, and is particularly critical of how the decision to lift the EU milk quota in 2015 caused agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket.

“Any intelligent and responsible strategy for the future of Irish agriculture has to be rooted in an acceptance that it is senseless to continue with a food production model dominated by meat and dairy,” he writes. “Even those who do not accept the moral and economic reasons for this will soon have to bow to the reality that the Irish agricultural model simply cannot be sustained.”

For all of that, I suspect that the chances of him having his way are slim to nearly non-existent. Any change will be gradual, incremental and limited. There are too many people who depend on agriculture, in many guises, for their livelihoods.

That is their picture, not the bigger one that Gibbons espouses. We will see that in the debate over the Mercosur deal the European Commission wishes us to ratify in the coming weeks.

Posted in Agriculture, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, TodayFM | Tagged Brendan Barrington, Matt Cooper, Penguin, The Lie of the Land | Leave a comment

Risky ‘global cooling’ projects mooted

Posted on September 11, 2025 by John Gibbons

Recording of my Last Word on the Environment with Matt Cooper broadcast on September 11th is below. We began by discussing controversial new plans to cool the global atmosphere artificially, using a range of possible technologies. As I explained, given the complexity and interconnectedness of Earth systems , the scope for unintended and frankly catastrophic consequences by tinkering with the system is massive.

No surprise then to see the UK government, among others, spending tens of millions on such projects, which Cooper described as “a frankly mad idea”. Apart from the colossal risks involved, the critical thing about these projects is that they distract from what actually needs to be done urgently, and that is to phase out carbon emissions by scrapping fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

Small wonder this dirtiest of industries and its political allies are rushing to support untested, unproven and risible projects to distract the public and media into believing this is some form of meaningful climate action, as all the while, tens of billions of tonnes of carbon emissions continue to be dumped into the global atmosphere, altering its fundamental chemistry for thousands of years into the future.

We also discussed the uncanny accuracy of global sea level projections over the last three decades. Based on satellite measurements that began in the early 1990s, SLR projections dating back to the 1996 IPCC report have been borne out by direct observations. We concluded the segment by discussing alarming declines in global phytoplankton, and the vulnerability of these keystone marine species to rapidly warming waters.

The link to the recording of the segment broadcast on September 11th is below:

Posted in Global Warming, Sustainability, TodayFM | Tagged IPCC, Matt Cooper, Phytoplankton, sea level rise | Leave a comment

First broadcast interview on The Lie of the Land

Posted on September 3, 2025 by John Gibbons

On Wednesday, September 3rd, I did my first broadcast interview to discuss the launch of my new book, ‘The Lie of the Land’, and chose The Last Word on Today FM to do the piece, given that the show and presenter Matt Cooper have given me a weekly platform for the last four and a half years to discuss climate and environmental issues in a systematic way, rather than simply covering them around a specific event, as is the norm.

You can listen to our conversation here, and the transcript is below:

Matt Cooper Over the last four years, this programme has given a commitment to using John Gibbons on a weekly basis to talk about environmental issues. He has now extended into another branch of media, you could say, by the publication of his first book, The Lie of the Land, which has the subtitle, a Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis. John Gibbons, thank you very much for joining us. The title, The Lie of the Land. There’s a double entendre there. Explain what you mean by it.

John Gibbons The first thing as the name suggests is to lay out the situation. Where do we stand, how do we get here, and where are we off to? So really that that’s the lay of the land. Obviously, inside there, there’s also a double meaning, and that is the lies that we tell ourselves and one another about our relationship with, for example, the land. That very fundamental relationship is one that I examine in some detail in the book. And I suppose my own background coming from a farming background gave me some insights that I wanted to explore and to sort of really tease out. So that’s where that comes from.

Matt Cooper ?I was quite surprised to read that there was a time when you would have taken a shotgun out and you would have been killing animals on the farm.

John Gibbons Yeah, well, that was what we did. I was regularly dispatched, a shotgun or sometimes, a .22 rifle another time, a hurley the odd time. Basically, I think the way I describe it is that that in our farming life, there were two types of animals that you encountered, one was livestock, and the other was what the generic term was vermin. And essentially anything that wasn’t livestock was fair game. And that was the reality now, maybe there’s other farms where that didn’t happen. But certainly I don’t recall anybody saying it was unusual at the time, nor did I ever hear anybody remark on how strange it was. To be honest with you, in hindsight, it’s pretty strange, but at the time, that’s what I grew up with.

Matt Cooper But do you regret it, now? Or do you think that that is just part of the natural process that has to be done in farming?

John Gibbons Yeah, I do. I have regrets, for sure. I think when you look back at that kind of context, you know, obviously I was young, I wasn’t in a position to know what was good or what was not so good. But yeah, I would have regrets. The idea of shooting animals like that – is it’s pretty unpleasant. Also, that sort of antipathy to nature, which really was part of what was drilled into me, I regret that too. I think, you know, that was considered to be progressive farming. I think maybe we’ve had that with the passage of time, we’ve all had an opportunity to reflect on the fact that farming has to happen alongside nature. It can’t be one or the other. And I think we’ve seen that really with the major declines in wildlife in Ireland, in biodiversity and pollution and so on… we humans have taken a very heavy toll on the landscape and obviously farming by dint to the fact that it occupies so much of our landscape, is very much part of that, and I suppose part of the purpose in writing this book, maybe is to be honest about it, Matt, look it in the eye, call it as it is, and say, okay, this is where we are, this is the reality of the systems that we’ve developed. Now, can we do better in the future? And my argument, of course, is that we have no choice. We’re going to have to do better, we cannot continue. with business as usual, across a range of areas and subjects.

Matt Cooper But do people want that? Isn’t this part of your problem and that you have maybe as well, for readers of the book as well as you might have on the radio on a weekly basis, that people don’t necessarily want to confront these issues. They want to believe that solutions will come up that won’t impact on their existing ways of life.

John Gibbons I think you’re right. I think there is a belief, and I refer to, say, Ireland, as this Goldilocks country. The idea that we are climate that’s not too hot, not too cold. And I think that has lulled us in this country in many respects, into the belief that the climate emergency is something happening elsewhere that will impact other people severely, and nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, Goldilocks basically is dying. We are exiting that phase of temperate, moderate climate. In Ireland, we’ve already seen it across Europe and so on, so we’re exiting that, and we need to face that honestly. And I think part of my reason for wanting to write this book, Matt, is I just believe that much of the public conversation around climate around is it just beats around the bush. and it’s very noncommittal. And I think every time we encounter a vested interest group, it’s well, we can’t upset them, we can’t offend them. And I think our politicians in particular have been very cowed, no pun intended by the lobbies here. They’ve backed away from difficult decisions and the issue really here is that sometimes you have to take tough decisions now in order to safeguard our future. and we know that we look into our own history all the way back to Ardnacrusha, a plant which was commissioned a century ago this year. These were difficult decisions made by a young government that needed energy independence. And I think that type of strong radical thinking, it just seems to have seeped away from our politics. Now it’s full of fear. It’s full of looking over our shoulder at which lobbyist is going to give me a belt of a stick, and we need to keep clear of them. And I think that fear fearfulness, we see it in our planning system, we see it in ridiculous things like opposition, for example, to solar farms, to greenways. We just see a kind of a NIMBYism and a fearfulness. And I think what is missing in my opinion, even, from the discussion is an honesty. And that honesty is that we’re in a time of radical climate change and the most radical thing you can do in a time of radical change is nothing. The era of business as usual is already over. Many people may not have noticed this, but it’s over. We’re heading into a a much more dangerous future, a future, for example, where our energy systems are threatened, where our food systems, our food supplies in Ireland are threatened. And that’s something, Matt, I think that you and I have talked about here, many times over the last four years, but I still think people are incredulous. We’ve convinced ourselves part of that lie are referred to in the opening. We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re uniquely good at food production, for example.. and you hear people like the Taoiseach saying that we’re feeding 40 million people. That’s another lie, and that’s a lie I explore in some detail. We’re doing nothing of the sort. In fact, overall, Ireland is a net food calorie importer. We are actually drawing food resources away from the rest of the world to feed our small population. And that, quite frankly, is disgraceful. And yet that has happened because we haven’t been honest about it.

Matt Cooper There’s something that you haven’t addressed in the book to the rest of my knowledge, and excuse me if I’m wrong with this, but I didn’t see it. It’s in the news today, the Mercosur Agreement, for example, and this is an agreement that’s going to take place between the European Union and Latin America in relation to trade. And farmers are up in arms about it, but don’t they actually have a point in the sense that if farmers in Ireland are being asked to reduce their output for environmental reasons, what’s the point in doing that when suddenly we’re going to have lots of cheap foods imported from Latin America, which is produced as well without any real environmental concern?

John Gibbons There certainly are concerns with the Mercosur trade agreement, I would agree with you, but I do think it’s a little rich for the Irish agricultural lobby to criticise Brazil, for example, for its destruction of biodiversity. Huge tracts of Brazil, are intact biodiversity. Ireland, on the other hand, is largely a biodiversity desert. So I do think it is rather rich for us to criticise the Brazilians, for doing with their land, what we’ve already done with ours. Now, of course, we don’t want that to continue. We need to stop it, but I think there’s an inherent hypocrisy in this. I mean, is somebody, for example, who’s concerned about the loss of Brazilian biodiversity, are they prepared to put their hand up and say that they will support rewilding here in Ireland, for example? I haven’t heard a single voice from that lobby support that. So I think it’s really, it’s more hypocritical to say, we’d like the Brazilians to clean up their act, but don’t ask us to do anything.

Matt Cooper And one of the things that came across as well about your own regrets of the family farm that you grew up in was that you had one particularly large field, I think it was called the Big Seven, because all of the hedgerows and gaps had been literally been taken away to provide for this big piece of land.

John Gibbons That’s right, when my father bought this farm, it would have been back in the 50s, essentially, he was a progressive farmer, and part of that involved making fields much larger. So the Big Seven, as we called it, there’s an old map at home, which shows the original layout of it. So there was miles of hedgerows were dug out using excavators to make this large field that was suitable for large machinery. We also extensively drained the land to improve it. And all of these things were, in many respects they were improvements, and certainly in terms of productivity, but probably the thing that I, again, I look back on with some regret, is there was really no discussion around the fact that, in Ireland, given how little space there is for wild nature, our hedgerows are probably the only places left for biodiversity to cling on. So when we remove hedgerows, as we did, and as many other farmers have done since and are still doing, you’re destroying that last toehold for nature because there’s very little room for nature, for example, in our current monocultural ryegrass set up, which absolutely dominates the landscape in Ireland. We have a remarkable lack of diversity in our agricultural system, and that’s the issue here. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have livestock, we shouldn’t have dairy. What I’m suggesting is we need to have a balanced agricultural system that is part primarily focussed on meeting the food needs of the population of Ireland, not the export desires of multinational PLCs.

Matt Cooper However, is there not an issue for you again, another problem in that the book is full of facts outlining your arguments, but do we tend to live at present in what is largely a fact free environment, that for an awful lot of people, it’s how they feel. It’s emotions that seem to get the attention rather than facts or things for experts and experts are denigrated.

John Gibbons I take your point entirely, Matt, and I think that’s probably why I broke my own rule of the last 20 years, and I put myself into this story, because you’re right. Facts can be very dry and very hard to digest. So I did inject my own perspective, my own experience into the story. I hope to make it a more palatable read, something much more accessible, and something that I hope brings a sort of a town-and-country flavour to it, because I’ve lived my early life in the countryside, in that farming background, and the rest of my adult life, really has been spent away, and obviously a good chunk of that as an environmental commentator. So I’m trying to meld those messages together and to sort of offer an overview that is, I hope, sympathetic, I certainly hope readable, and of all those stats that you refer to, I think it’s important that we have a factual basis for our discussions, whatever our political positions. So, yeah, I make no apologies for putting in lots of facts, but I hope I’ve done it in a way that doesn’t impede people’s ability to catch the flow of the story, because I am trying to tell a story, I guess it’s framed through my own experience, for sure, but it’s also the story of the evolution of modern Ireland, in the era of climate breakdown.

Matt Cooper One last one, John. As you know, when you’re with us every week, we get lots of text messages and WhatsApp messages coming into the programme. We get a lot of people who are very supportive of you. We get a lot of people who are highly critical. If the highly critical people, many of whom are farmers, were to pick up and read this book, do you think might have changed their minds?

John Gibbons I would like to think so. I certainly hope so. I think if people approach it with an open mind – a colleague sent me a text text the other night, having read an advance copy of it, and basically said, look, the arguments are solid, and if people approach it with an open mind, then they’re open to be persuaded. If people simply want to project their own views on it, well, of course, we’re not going to meet in the middle. So I hope I’ve tried to frame it in a way, Matt.

Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity, Irish Focus, Sustainability, TodayFM | Tagged Brazil, Matt Cooper, Mercosur, The Lie of the Land, Today FM | Leave a comment

Finding out the Lie of the Land

Posted on August 18, 2025 by John Gibbons

IT’S ALMOST two years since I was approached and commissioned by Penguin to write a book – my first – about Ireland and the climate emergency. While genuinely chuffed to be asked, I did also have something of an inkling – or premonition – about what I might be letting myself in for. Well, I thought I did, but it still turned out to be one of the toughest tasks I’ve ever undertaken.

After all the preliminaries, including sketching out and agreeing a detailed briefing document and book plan were completed, work got underway in earnest in January 2024, with delivery of the first draft originally slated for October of that year. This turned out be a rather optimistic schedule. In short, 2024 was a long, long year.

By December last, I was still writing, and the original target word count of around 80,000 had ballooned out towards 130,000, as I scrambled to throw my net as wide as possible, and to cover off every possible angle, including almost 1,000 notes and references. This approach, it turns out, works far better in academia than when trying to craft a book for a general audience that is actually likely to be ever read.

While I may not have appreciated it at the time, my Penguin editor ripped away over 50,000 words and restructured the chapter sequence to make it flow more logically. By early 2025, the chrysalis was being gradually shed and the book was beginning at last to take shape.

The rounds of editing, stretching over around three months, were brutal, as we argued back and forth, as I fought (usually in vain) to have some pet theme or sidebar spared from the spike. I won a few battles, but then again, too few to mention. By the second quarter of 2025, lots of my references were already out of date, and so part of the process was to update as many as possible with the latest available data.

By definition, any book is going to represent a snapshot in time, but at least you want its shelf life to last as long as possible. Finally, and after some delays in the printing process, a box with 10 advance copies finally landed in my hands on August 14th, a slightly surreal moment.

The book, which is billed as a ‘bracing critique of the bad decisions that have put Ireland into such a vulnerable position on food and energy security as well as climate mitigation and adaptation’. Part of this, as I explore, is down to complacency, at political, state and media level, about the real risks that face Ireland, while this is also a story of how vested interests have stymied and blunted Ireland’s response to this unfolding tragedy.

Names are named. Feathers are ruffled and the status quo is called out for the dangerous sham that it is. Unless they manage to ignore it entirely, expect the Usual Suspects to be up in arms over their warts-and-all portrayal in this book. Given the amount of soft PR and endless media space they already enjoy, I make no apologies for putting the boot in firmly.

There is also a bracing critique of our media and how it has, with some honourable exceptions, failed utterly to sound the alarm on the climate emergency. As the state broadcaster and given its large budget and public service remit, RTÉ comes in for close – and largely unflattering – scrutiny. In unrelated news, there has been an eerie silence emanating from Montrose in terms of any of their talk or current affairs programmes wanting to discuss the book or do an interview. Guess this climate nonsense is yesterday’s news, at least as far as RTÉ is concerned?

The book is formally launched on Thursday September 4th at an event in Dublin, and will be available in bookshops nationwide from that day. I also recorded an Audiobook version of the book over the summer, and this will also be released on services like Audible, Spotify etc. from September 4th. If you’d like to have my dulcet tones in your ear for nearly seven hours, now you know where to go. Will discuss the actual content of the book in more depth in future ThinkOrSwim postings, but in the meanwhile, do hope you’ll consider picking up a copy and giving it a read.

Posted in Agriculture, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media | Tagged John Gibbons, Penguin, The Lie of the Land | Leave a comment

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