Transport accounts for 20% of Ireland’s overall emissions (and 27% of our non-ETS emissions), with 52% of overall transport emissions coming from private cars, 24% from freight, and 4% from public transport.

Project Ireland 2040: Investing in the Transition to a Low-Carbon and Climate-Resilient Society

• Decarbonising Ireland’s transport sector needs to become an urgent priority for Government, and agencies such as the NTA. Transport is the only sector to have increased its share of emissions since 1990. In fact, emissions have doubled since 1990 to one fifth of Ireland’s total. Actual total transport emissions rose 4% in 2015 and are continuing to rise quickly.
• The Environmental Protection Agency expects a 13% increase in national GHG emissions from transport between 2016 and 2035.
• As noted by Ireland’s ​ Climate Change Advisory Council​ , progress in tackling transport emissions has been very limited.
• Most especially for transport, Ireland’s ratification of the Paris Agreement equates to a limited fossil fuel budget, including oil and gas. That means an overriding imperative to reduce the petrol and diesel use every year no matter what.
• It is notable that the ​ Department’s priorities​ fail to mention climate change or emission reductions. The only reference in the Department’s annual report is a mention of the National Mitigation Plan, which suggests that insufficient regard has been taken to the urgency of what is required in this sector. The Minister should fully support a roadmap for the decarbonisation of the transport sector, specifying annual emissions reductions and how these will be achieved.
• How is the Department contributing to the targets set by the​ National Policy Position​ ? By 2050 the long term vision was to see an aggregate reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of at least 80% (compared to 1990 levels) across the electricity generation, built environment and transport sectors.
• Failure of the Government to reach targets set for ​ Smarter Travel​ and ​ cycling​ policies to achieve emissions savings. Why are they not being implemented

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The EPA’s projections, published today (here), reveal the colossal scale of Ireland’s collective political failure to rein in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with our legally binding EU and global commitments.

It is quite staggering to consider that instead of achieving the modest initial target of reducing our national GHG emissions by 20% versus 2005 levels, the EPA today confirms that “at best”, we will have only managed a negligible 1% emissions cut by 2020.

In terms of our performance on tackling the dangerous and rapidly escalating threats posed by climate change, Ireland has moved from being an outlier to, essentially, a rogue state on the international stage.

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Introduction: This document is written as a high level background brief to inform discussions of the Citizen’s Assembly. The paper draws on the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – especially the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which represents the latest consensus view of the scientific community. These reports are compiled by hundreds of scientists from across the world, who summarise developments and insights from the scientific literature published in peer reviewed journals. The report is signed off by all countries. The IPCC thus provide an authoritative assessment of our state of knowledge on all aspects of climate change. The subsequent sections of this brief are organised around the key questions that I was requested to cover.

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The Citizens’ Assembly has published its report on climate change (Assembly press release here). The report includes the Assembly’s 13 recommendations on ‘how the State can make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change’. These were agreed by the Assembly after four days of expert presentations in 2017 and following a major public consultation which received close to 2000 submissions.

The Stop Climate Chaos coalition* is calling on the Government to respect the mandate of the Assembly by immediately establishing a dedicated Oireachtas Committee to take the report’s recommendations forward, as was done with the Assembly report on the eight amendment to the Constitution.

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This evidence for the government really doing nothing to mitigate excessive emissions from Transport calls into question its poor provision for every day cycling. Faced with this critique Minister Ross needs to urgently divert funding away from new roads and motorways into cycling infrastructure. Read article

In December 2015, Ireland along with nearly 200 other nations signed up to its commitment to do our full and fair share to ensure carbon emissions are reduced in line with the advice from science so that global warming does not irreversibly destabilise the world’s climate system.

Actions, however, speak far louder than words. As data produced today by the Environment Protection Agency confirm, instead of the required sharp reductions, Irish greenhouse gas emissions instead climbed in 2016, to the equivalent of 61.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the highest level since before the economic crash.

In just the last two years, total national emissions have increased by 7.3% or 4.16 million tonnes of CO₂. Ireland is legally mandated by the EU to reduce national emissions by 20% by 2020. By comparison, Scotland has already achieved its far more ambitious 2020 emissions target cut of 42%, and achieved these five years ahead of target.

“There is no magic involved. The missing ingredient in Ireland is political will and the backbone to stand up to the special pleading of well-funded lobby groups”, according to John Gibbons, An Taisce’s Climate Change Committee spokesperson. He continued “Ireland has among the best average wind speeds in Europe, yet the share of wind energy on the grid actually declined by nearly 2% last year, while there was an overall increase of 3.8% in the emissions intensity of power generation.”

Ireland’s shambolic transport sector has recorded its fourth straight year of emissions growth, adding 3.7%, or nearly half a million tons of additional CO₂ in 2016 versus the previous year. The other price of this failure is ever-worsening traffic gridlock as the excessively car-dependent transport model inevitably leads to congestion, inefficiency and chaos. The ongoing neglect of cycling and public transport is fuelling this national transport debacle.

Agriculture and transport together accounted for almost three quarters of Ireland’s entire EU 2020 target sector non-ETS emissions in 2016. Since 2011 agricultural sector emissions have increased by +10.2%, contrary to the misleading media talking points being recently repeated by agri lobbyists. Last year, agricultural emissions rose by the equivalent of over half a million tonnes of CO₂. This followed a 6.2% increase in dairy cow numbers and a 4% increase in milk production. For 2017, the quantity of nitrogen fertiliser used is already known to be up by 12%, which will push agri-sector emissions even higher than in 2005, the reference year for a 20% ‘Non-ETS’ reduction by 2020.

Dairy and beef production are both highly emissions-intensive, and today’s EPA data proves that the industry spin about ‘efficiency’ and ‘carbon neutrality’ is all just hot air. There is no effective way of reducing Irish agriculture’s massive emissions profile without tackling the root cause of these emissions: ever more, fertiliser-boosted grass fed to ever more cattle results in ever more climate pollution. Controlling beef and dairy emissions requires a production cap or a price on agricultural emissions so that efficiencies can actually be realised.

This underlines the findings of an EU study published in April this year that found Irish agriculture to be the least ‘climate-efficient’ in the entire EU28. Ireland produced the highest level of greenhouse gas emissions per euro of agricultural output, the study concluded.

“Governments come and governments go, but CO₂ lingers in the atmosphere for decades to centuries. Increasing agricultural methane and nitrous oxide emissions greatly increases Ireland’s responsibility for near-term climate warming. The decisions we take and fail to take today will have long-term implications for our children and their children. True sustainability means providing for our needs today without compromising the needs of future generations. Ireland is today stealing from the future, calling it growth and leaving a toxic legacy to all future generations”, according to John Gibbons.

He continued “We as a nation are better than this. The recent Citizens’ Assembly recommendations proved that the Irish public is prepared to back strong action to tackle climate change, but these shocking pollution figures from the EPA show Ireland’s citizens are being shamefully betrayed by its political and business classes for short term gain.”