Ireland and Climate Chaos

national | environment | feature

Monday February 12, 2007 15:43

by Terry

EU Propaganda

Climate chaos has begun to rate as newsworthy for the corporate and state media in Ireland with both Prime Time and The Irish Times recently covering the issue.

These came in the wake of scientific report after scientific report underlining the gravity of the situation. However, the main corporate/state media focus is on reducing individual consumption, with technical fixes coming second. This focus on individual consumption serves to mask the routes of environmental crisis, routes which are inherent in the structures of society, i.e. in the way society is organised. It is no co-incidence that we see EU governments promoting the idea ‘You control climate change’ and that the solution is a personal reduction in individual consumption.

his coming week the state’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to publish a report which will show a steep rise in the Republic’s emissions of greenhouse gases in 2005. The 26 counties’ emission rate is said to have risen by 25% since 1990, leaving the Republic behind only the USA and Luxembourg worldwide for per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate chaos has begun to rate as newsworthy for the corporate and state media in Ireland. There has recently been ‘Prime Time’ coverage of the subject, and an Irish Times had an ‘Earth Special’. These came in the wake of scientific report after scientific report underlining the gravity of the situation. The main corporate/state media focus is on reducing individual consumption, with technical fixes coming second. Naturally there's the headline grabbing stories like Richard Branson’s announcement of a massive cash prize for someone who comes up with a scheme to remove excess carbon dioxide from the Earth’s air. This focus on individual consumption serves to mask the routes of environmental crisis, routes which are inherent in the structures of society, in the way society is organised. It is no co-incidence that we see EU governments promoting the idea ‘You control climate change’ and that the solution is a personal reduction in individual consumption.

The truth is the role of individual consumption in global warming is, at the most generous, marginal, and principally stems from certain forms of cars, plasma screen TVs, and some air travel. I say some air travel as a lot of it, especially of the short haul variety, is for business trips, rather than holiday making. It is then part of the operations of companies, rather than a matter of individual consumption.

The coming EPA report, flagged in the media earlier this week, unmistakably demonstrates the role of government policy at least in the South’s contribution to climate chaos. For instance, a declining growth rate in the emissions produced by electricity generation was reversed due to the stunning genius of building two new peat burning power stations.

Proponents of ’individual consumption’, could of course argue that well there is the consumer demand there for electricity. Which there is. One would wonder why this cannot be met by renewables, after all there was hydro-electric power here back in the 1920s. Part of the reason, it could be said, is technical, due to the fluctuating amount of the electricity generated by wind power, a national grid needs a back up source. Which in itself doesn’t account for building two new power stations driven by the worst polluting fossil fuel. Especially when the government’s own ‘National Climate Change Strategy’ in 2000 envisaged shutting down Moneypoint, the coal burning power station in Clare. This plant was recently found by EU agency the European Pollutant Emission Register to be the worst polluter and worst greenhouse gas emitter in Ireland.

If for any technical reason it was judged necessary not to phase out all fossil fuels in electricity production, there are of course newly found quantifies of natural gas available off shore. Gas is the least worst of the lot when it comes to electricity production via fossil fuels. Or, well, it would be available but for the fact it was given away to Shell, Exxon Mobil and Tony O’Reilly. So just how the electricity is produced is the cardinal question, not whether a certain amount of people forgo or not a certain amount of electricity usage.

I’m not sure if the air industry figures in the EPA report. I’m not sure as in a cooking of the figures that will help the cooking of the planet emissions due to air transport are left out of the Kyoto process. Kyoto being the international governmental response to global warming. However the air industry is a big factor in climate chaos, and of that, the sheer stupidest part is ‘short haul’ flights. In the Sunday Tribune of the 4th of February there is a report on local opposition to the local environmental problems posed by the proposed extension of the runway at Sligo regional airport. The airport is principally controlled by the local government, and the proposed extension part of a large state subsidy, which amounts to 122 euro per each Dublin to Sligo return passenger. To cap it all off Sligo is in close proximity to Knock international airport.

The transport sector provides the major part of the rise in emissions in the EPA report. This we can divide into two categories, transportation of people, and transportation of goods. The second, road haulage, can be accounted for, principally not by levels of individual consumption, but by such things as centralised ‘economies of scale’, making it more profitable to source goods from a wider geographical spread, globalised production, it being more profitable to shift around particular parts of the production process, and ’just in time’ production, where information fed from the barcodes in retail, goes into more flexible production, and trucks take the place of warehouses.

The first, the transportation of people, is, in this country, largely dependant on the private automobile. What public transport exists, exists as a supplement to that, rather than as an alternative. Apart from the fact that public transport is overpriced and uncomfortable it is totally incapable of catering for the amount of commuters forced further and further out of the main urban areas due to house prices. The difference between the extent of the rail network here fifty years ago and today is profound. Government policy based around road expansion contributes greatly to this.

The Department of the Environment’s response to news of the EPA report was to claim that the Republic would still meet Kyoto targets through carbon credit trading. Kyoto makes for an average reduction of annual emissions across the industrialised world to 5.2% below the 1990 level (industrialised world apart from the states that have not ratified it - the US, and Australia). Its gross insufficiency is obvious, as it deals with, for the most part, the emissions growth rate, rather than total emissions.

Each state has an allotted emissions quota - which can actually be higher than the 1990 level. A state which reduces below its quota can ‘carbon trade’, sell the right to pollute. This carbon trading is dependant on a quirk of history, the quota of Russia and other former states of the Soviet Union was calculated according to their situation in 1990, before their economic collapse, and resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

So the Irish state’s “climate change strategy” is dependant on that collapse and its massive devastating social impacts, such as poverty, ill-health, and homelessness. The Irish state has already allotted 270 million euro for carbon trading, a figure likely to go up now with this new report.

In one sense of course the EU/Government propaganda - ’You Control Climate Change’ is true, but only in the sense of the famous quotation from George Washington: ’Evil triumphs when good men do nothing’. For that a recognition of where the evil lies is essential, and dealing with it will take more than washing out plastic bottles for the recycling bin.