Climate targets and compliance costs
Jennifer Whitmore warned that Ireland is likely to miss its first carbon budget and could face major EU compliance costs. Coveney rejected the claim of failure, said the Government was accelerating delivery across sectors, and insisted it was more ambitious on climate action than previous administrations.
The Climate Change Advisory Council has warned that Ireland is unlikely to meet the targets of its first carbon budget for the period from 2021 to 2025. That will make meeting our climate targets after 2025 so much more difficult because there will be an awful lot of work and catching-up to do. That means Ireland now faces the prospect of multibillion euro fines under compliance costs applied by the European Union from 2030 onwards. While this Government excels at climate rhetoric, we do not, unfortunately, see good enough climate action. The reality is we are running out of time and we need climate action that is ambitious enough to meet the scale of the work we have to do. We really cannot do nothing. Nothing is not an option. Not doing enough is also not an option for us. Will the Minister therefore outline what changes the Government will make to change the trajectory it is on, which would mean that it would fail to meet its climate targets for 2025?
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We have not accepted that we will fail to meet targets for 2025. There is an enormous effort across government, in virtually every Department, to-----
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The independent experts say-----
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Yes, the independent experts have said that targets will be difficult to meet, but we are not in 2025 yet. It is up to the Government to accelerate delivery as regards climate action, which is exactly what we are setting about doing. We have broken it up sector by sector. A lot of those targets are difficult to meet, but the Government has been transparent about how we will go about this. It is not easy, but this Government is more ambitious for climate action than any Government we have seen in the past, and we will go after those targets.