ThinkOrSwim (the Climatechange.ie Blog) | Climate Change, Sustainability and Global Warming. Climatechange.ie

McCarthy: ability without sustainabilty?

Posted on November 5, 2009 by John Gibbons

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This well-known Latin phrase from the poet Juvenal, loosely translates to “Who will guard the guards?” It came to mind when thinking about the Talented Mr McCarthy and his oversized shears, better known as An Bord Snip Nua. Regular readers will know that I have a slight ongoing problem with what we refer to as orthodox economics, and its practitioners, our mighty Fifth Estate, the economists.

Whatever degree factory churns them out, our economists mostly march metronomically to the rhythm of the all-seeing Market. Too bad the world has moved on since Milton Friedman was their pin-up boy. Meanwhile, An Bord Snip Nua is cheerfully both diagnosing what ails Ireland Inc, and prescribing our remedial treatment. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged Bord, Bord Snip Nua, Colm McCarthy, Comhar, eco, economists, Friedman, Green N, John Gibbons, McCa, sustain, Sustainability | 2 Comments

Now we’re getting somewhere

Posted on October 28, 2009 by John Gibbons

Earlier today, at a very well attended press conference in Leinster House, the all-party Oireachtas Committee on Climate Change and Energy released their report, ‘The case for a climate change law’.

Committee rapporteur, Liz McManus likened the position we now find ourselves in and the scale of what is required to address it as being “like a war effort”. This, from the Opposition, is extremely encouraging. McManus has for the last year or so, given the distinct impression that she realises this is no phoney war. In that regard, she remains in a small minority within Dail Eireann.

I’d like to believe the numbers are growing, but with the scant, patchy and highly erratic way the media in general continues to cover this issue (with more scare stories about how we “can’t afford” to do anything, or contributions from the it’s-all-a-scam circus) doesn’t lead to any excessive optimism. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Climate law, EPA, ESRI, Labour, Liz McManus, Media, Rachel English, radio, Richard Tol, RTE, Sunday Times | 29 Comments

A smart tax, on so many levels

Posted on October 23, 2009 by John Gibbons

James Tobin had a very, very good idea. So good, in fact, they named it after him. And that’s the Tobin Tax. It’s a small tax with very big potential. And best of all, it’s a damn good idea, in that it’s a tax that places a levy on socially, financially or economically non-productive (or even destructive) activity.

The Tobin Tax was proposed back in 1972, shortly after the break-up of the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system. The idea was to place a tax on foreign currency transactions that would shield national governments from having their economies at the mercy of speculators. a tax on financial transactions. The reason you may not have heard of it is that it exists in theory alone. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged bankers, banks, foreign currency, Germany, greed, speculation, tax, Tobin tax | 3 Comments

There (still) is no plan B

Posted on October 21, 2009 by John Gibbons

One of my earliest posts on this blog, on December 12, 2007, was headed ‘There is no Plan B‘. The headline was taken from a quote from the then new Australian PM, Kevin Rudd to delegates at the UN climate conference in Bali.

The line re-emerged earlier today, when British PM, Gordon Brown said in London: “This is the moment. Now is the time. For the planet there is no plan B”. He outlined a catastrophic scenario of heatwaves, flooding and droughts if an ambitious new deal is not secured in Copenhagen in December. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Barack Obama, climate change, Copenhagen, Dav, David McWilliams, Energy, environment, Gordon Brown, John Gibbons, Obama, RTE, Sustainability | 12 Comments

Cool, sparkling sense comes dropping slow

Posted on October 19, 2009 by John Gibbons

Amazing the things you never knew you never knew. This morning, for instance, I found out that if you spell ‘naive’ backwards, you come up with Evian, the cool, sparkling spring water that is full of, er, volcanicity – this apparently being the distinctive flavour of this tipple as it percolates up from caverns measureless to man, emanating, no doubt from a sunless sea of startling purity (with apologies to S. T. Coleridge).

This nugget was texted in to Tom Dunne’s breakfast show on Newstalk, where I was his studio guest for a slot discussing the great bottled water swindle, a topic I had covered in last week’s IT column. That piece led off with a reference to a vintage video clip from Penn Teller’s satirical US documentary series entitled “Bullshit”, where they looked at different areas of pure bull, from the Bible to bottled water, and had a lot of fun along the way. By popular demand, you can view it in its entirety, including the unforgettable Amazon bottled water, complete with dead spider: Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged bottled water, David McWilli, David McWilliams, economists, Newstalk, Peak Everything, Tom Dunne, water | Leave a comment

Challenging the infallible economist

Posted on October 15, 2009 by John Gibbons

Colm McCarthy chaired the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes, better known as An Bord Snip Nua. It issued its various prescription for what ails us in July, and much of the national discussion since then has been framed through the McCarthy lens.

McCarthy fancies himself as a straight-talker, and last Friday he excoriated Comhar’s Green New Deal proposals in a newspaper article headlined: “Green plan a recipe for fudge and confusion in economic policy”. Deeper into his piece, McCarthy opines: “The “Green New Deal” package from Comhar is seductive in several dimensions, apart from the catchy moniker. It promises to help the environment and to create jobs, all at no apparent cost. Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Arctic, Bord Snip Nua, carbon, climate change, collapse, Colm McCarthy, Convery, emissions, Energy, Sustainability | 6 Comments

Blowing up a political s**t storm

Posted on October 13, 2009 by John Gibbons

Fintan O’Toole is, for my money, the most insightful commentator on Irish life, and has been for years. Like any of the rest of us, he has his hobby horses, and I’ve often been disappointed that he rarely turns his intellect to the rich grounds of the sustainability/climate/environmental catastrophe that’s now unfolding.

On Nama, he’s been superb. Were it not for the intervention of two of Fine Gael’s eminence grises, in the forms of Garrett Fitzgerald and Alan Dukes, I’m pretty sure the anti-Nama arguments, so forcefully articulated by O’Toole, would have prevailed. As it was, while naturally the Greens are getting it in the neck, in fact two ageing FGrs sealed its fate. The Greens pissed O’Toole off on Nama, and, thanks to John Gormley’s gormless travel arrangements, O’Toole has hit them in their ethics, where it really, really hurts. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sceptics | Tagged Daily Mail, Fintan O'Toole, Gormley, Green Party, Kevin Myers, Nama, RTE | 6 Comments

A fair wind for renewable energy sector?

Posted on October 12, 2009 by John Gibbons

The Green Party seems to have snatched an unlikely victory at the weekend – they somehow maneuvered themselves from being pinned between the proverbial rock and a hard place and wriggled free with party unity intact and a hatful of new concessions wrung from their senior government partners. Harry Houdini would have been impressed.

Certainly, Eamon Ryan sounded uber-chipper on RTE radio yesterday morning, including giving Sunday Times editor Frank Fitzgibbon as good as he got in some fairly heated exchanges. Meanwhile, the Sunday Indo yesterday decried the revised programme for government as a cynical deal. Given that newspaper’s deeply cynical campaign to repeal stamp duty at the height of the property bubble, and their even more cynical support for B. Ahern & Friends in the lead-in to the 2007 General Election, this is clearly an area of expertise for them. The opening 2 paras of yesterday’s lead story are worth reproducing: Continue reading →

Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Irish Focus | Tagged Andris Piebalgs, Arklow Bay, car, carbon, CO2, Eamon Ryan, elect, electricity, Energy, fossil fuels, Green Party, interconnector, supply, wind, wind farms | 6 Comments

The Anthropocene draws to a close

Posted on October 8, 2009 by John Gibbons

The term Anthropocene was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen a decade ago to describe the new ‘Era of Man’, a distinct geological epoch shaped almost entirely by our actions and impacts. “The Anthropocence has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last”, wrote Bob Holmes in the current edition of New Scientist in an intriguing article that rolls the clock forward to see how Earth would cope in the era after Man.

Mass extinctions are already well advanced, so much so that scientists have already designated the current era as the Sixth Extiction – since these measures cover close to a billion years, Extinction eras are rare indeed, the last being the event 65 million years ago that did for the dinosaurs and ultimately created the wiggle room for our ancient ancestors, the early mammals, to get a toe-hold. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Anthropocene, Arctic, climate change, CO2, Crutzen, David McWilliams, emissions, famine, global warming, John Gibbons, methane, New Scientist, permafrost, RTE, species loss, Sustainability | 4 Comments

A good day for Ireland, but where’s Copenhagen?

Posted on October 4, 2009 by John Gibbons

I was in the city centre on Friday night, just as the polls were preparing to close, and happened upon the hugely impressive illuminated Liberty Hall (hard to miss, in fact, and far and away the most dramatic installation the city has seen since poor Lord Nelson got blown off his perch in 1966).

Below is some footage I recorded with my trusty iPhone video:

By 10.30pm on Friday, the bush telegraph was rattling furiously with news from Fine Gael’s exit poll indicating a thumping 2:1 Yes vote. And by the 11am news bulletins on Saturday, it was clear that Lisbon was done and dusted. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media | Tagged carbon, climate change, CO2, collapse, Comhar, Convery, Gormley, Irish Independent, Lisbon, Media, RTE, Sustainability | 4 Comments

Comhar’s Green New Deal makes sense

Posted on October 1, 2009 by John Gibbons

At 11am today in the Irish Academy in Dublin’s Dawson Street, Comhar, the sustainable development council formally launches its Green New Deal for Ireland. It’s a genuinely impressive document, as I’ve outlined in the Irish Times today, with much to offer.

Sources tell me the Comhar document will inform much of the ‘green’ component of the review of the Programme for Government currently underway. If so, it should prove an extremely tempting carrot for unhappy Green Party members contemplating pulling the plug on participation in this administration ahead of that party’s special conference on Saturday 10th next. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Sustainability | Tagged climate change, CO2, Comhar, Convery, emissions, Energy, environment, Green New Deal, pollution, Sustainability, sustainable | 2 Comments

Hot air, melting ice, ticking clock

Posted on September 28, 2009 by John Gibbons

Hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting Declan Ganley of Libertas until yesterday. Well, Declan is of course a stickler for accuracy, so perhaps ‘encountering’ would be a more accurate term. The brief encounter occurred around noon yesterday, as I was entering the Newstalk studio. Ganley, Prionsias de Rossa and Richard Boyd Barrett were just finishing up what had been a heated discussion on Lisbon when the air began to turn blue with expletives.

Presenter Karen Coleman thought two of her guests, Ganley and de Rossa were actually going to trade blows. Here’s how Karen describes what ensued as the interview ended: Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Arctic, climate, CO2, Coleman, Ganley, Greenland, IPCC, Karen Coleman, Lisbon, Nature, Newstalk, sea-levels, warming | 3 Comments

In the frame for Lisbon

Posted on September 24, 2009 by John Gibbons

Am usually happiest to operate from the safety and relative anonymity of this side of the keyboards, but decided to face the music, so to speak, and contribute to a press briefing held in the dramatic setting of the upper deck of Trinity Point, a brand new low-energy building opposite TCD in Nassau Street.

An odd experience, all told, for someone quite used to being on the other side of the microphones. A planned doubling of the plastic bag tax (from 22-44 cent) seemed to be uppermost on the minds of the substantial turnout of journalists for the event. Minister Gormley described Lisbon as a “no brainer” for anyone serious about climate change, a point picked up on by Duncan Stewart, who stressed the extraordinary urgency of this issue.

Would I do it again? As Voltaire famously mused, on being invited back after attending his first orgy: “Once a philosopher; twice a pervert.”

Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Irish Focus, Media, Sustainability | 3 Comments

It has to be Yes to Lisbon

Posted on September 23, 2009 by John Gibbons

On June 11th, 2008, the day before what we now call Lisbon 1, my Irish Times piece was headed: “If you care about climate change, vote Yes to Lisbon”. There are those who’d say I got my answer. I’m not so sure. If there had been a third option on the ballot, called ‘Don’t know/haven’t a clue’, it would have won by a landslide.

Declan Ganley and his cohorts ran a slick negative campaign that clearly tore the limp ‘Yes’ effort to shreds, successfully converting the Don’t Knows to No Thanks. This time round, there seems to be a far broader coalition out batting for Yes. This week it was joined by, among others, Brian O’Driscoll, Dennis Hickey and Kilkenny wonder-coach Brian Cody. Continue reading →

Posted in Global Warming, Irish Focus, Media, Nuclear, Sustainability | Tagged climate change, CO2, deBurca, Duncan Stewart, electricity, environment, Gormley, Lisbon, referendum | 1 Comment

Where have all the fish gone? (we ate them)

Posted on September 22, 2009 by John Gibbons

The world’s oceans are in deep, deep trouble. Industrialised fishing, in full swing since around 1950, has in essence waged a war against the marine ecosystem. And the bad news is: we’re winning. Species extinctions, population crashes and vast disruption to marine food chains are all the direct consequences of overfishing.

And that’s before you factor in ocean acidification, pollution and dramatic changes in ocean surface temperatures arising from global warming. All in all, the prognosis is grim. Nor is there some ready fix. “The recovery from the changes we’re making will probably take a million years”, according to Achim Steiner, director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Steiner’s comments assume of course that we stop what we’re doing right now, in order to give the marine ecosystem some chance of recovery. Continue reading →

Posted in Biodiversity, Global Warming, Habitat/Species, Media, Sustainability | Tagged Achim Steiner, collapse, extinction, fishing, global warming, marine, maritime, oceans, overfishing, population, sharks, species loss, Sustainability, UN, UNEP | Leave a comment