I couldn’t let the Paris Agreement on Climate Change go without some comment in a category with ‘carbon’ in the title. It may not be perfect but to quote Barack Obama it may offer the best chance to save the one planet we have. However, I’m very afraid that COP21 will translate into Irish as cop-out. Enda Kenny’s speech in Paris was bland in the extreme, most likely a simple cut-and-paste job for a speech writer. It also confirmed George Lee’s (RTE environment correspondent) comment that without Europe we’d be doing nothing.
I found it general and vague, just like the Energy White Paper published yesterday which to me read more like a text book on energy rather than a plan with goals and milestones – ‘big on vision but lacking the how and the when’ as Kate Ruddock of Friends of the Earth put it. I actually heard the Minister for Energy Alex White say something about decarbonising our economy by 2100 – 2100!! I reckon that as of today my house is carbon neutral – see my post ‘Expansion of Domestic Photovoltaic (PV) System’. Things do move slowly. We (i.e. my former energy consultancy company/partnership ENTRAC) provided technical support to the Oireachtas Parliamentary Committee on Energy which produced its report in 2006 and informed the last Energy White Paper published in 2007 – I don’t think much has progressed in the interim apart from studies and reports?