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PB April-May
April-May 49
Be very afraid
1.75 degrees of global heating, already;
Ireland’s performance is hopeless, and
nobody is telling the public the truth
By Tony Lowes
Climate breakdown
“We are ot sleepwalking into an apocalypse
– we are charging towards it with a full
awareness of what is at stake”
— Professor Kevin Anderson
“An immediate end to business as usual is a
precondition to planetary survival”
— High Court Judge Richard Humphreys
Bad news, Jnury 2025
The 2015 Paris Agreement for good reason
committed to: “Holding the increase in the
global average temperature to well below 2°C
above pre-industrial levels and pursuing
e orts to limit the temperature increase to
1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”.
In 2022 the global mean temperature was
+1.2°C. But by June 2023 it had reached +1.5°C.
The fi gure for the whole year of 2023 was in fact
+1.55°C. And the last three months of 2024
were always above 1.6°C.
But the fi rst month of 2025 was +1.75°C.
Once we pass +2°C a succession of feedbacks
may automatically and inexorably carry us up
to +3°C.
EPA: “Curren Governmen
Policies re no suffi cien”
The low fruit has been eaten. But the
Government continues to deny it.
The Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]
is the gold standard of emissions recording due
to its mandate, expertise, and scientifi c rigour.
In its May 2024 report, “Ireland’s Greenhouse
Gas Emissions Projections 2023–2050”, it lays
down that “Current polices are not suffi cient to
meet the legally binding national carbon
budgets for 2021-2025 and 2025-2030”.
The State won’t have that. On 4 March, the
Taoiseach described warnings from both the
Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and the Climate
Change Advisory Council that Ireland will miss
its 2030 emissions targets and face fi nes of
between €8bn and €26bn as “highly uncertain,
highly speculative”. Worse, in last month’s
High Court challenge to the 2003 Climate Plan
by Friends of the Irish Environment [FIE] which
had succeeded in having the initial Irish Climate
Plan struck down by the Supreme Court in
2020, the State cited “research conducted by
Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir at MaREI in
University College Cork, which concluded that
Ireland is currently “on track to meet the First
Carbon Budget for the years 2021–2023”.
Hence, there is no ”unanimity of views among
the relevant experts”.
But what Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir
actually said in a video is that “we are on track
but not on target”. It doesn’t matter if emissions
increased or decreased in that limited three-
year period – the calculation must be for the
budget itself over the full fi ve-year period.
The Overshoo
An ‘overshoot’ (aka ‘anomaly’) is the term used
when emissions exceed targets.
The EU target is to reduce our emissions by
at least a further 42% by 2030. With current
implementing measures, the EPA calculates
reduction will be 9%-11%. If measures under
‘Additional Measures’ are implemented, the
EPA estimates we could achieve a reduction of
25%-29%. The di erence between 29% and
42% defi nes Ireland’s potential ‘overshoot’.
Having already exhausted 64% of the fi rst
fi ve-year budget, 8% reductions are now
required in 2024 and 2025 — almost double
the requirement in the original Climate
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
Years (C.E.)
200
250
300
350
400
CO
2
Concentration (ppm)
Last updated March 10, 2025
Keeling curve
OPINION
The State cited “research
conducted by Brian
Ó Gallachóir at MaREI
concluding that Ireland is
currently ‘on track to meet
the First Carbon Budget for
2021–2023’. But what he
actually said is that “we are
on track but not on target”
50 April-May
April-May PB
The unlloced 8%
In framing the first Climate Action Plan, the
Government left 8% unallocated. A pure
COPout, it proposed that these further cuts
would be in five areas: reduced energy use;
future energy systems; and sustainable
agriculture – all of which are already failing to
meet their reduction targets as it is.
The other two were Carbon Capture and
Storage [CSS] installed on modern factories -
and carbon removals through specially
designed plants. These are technological fixes
that remain untested at scale.
In fact, Ireland will have to purchase
international carbon credits. The average price
per carbon credit has increased by 72.5 % from
2021-2023. On 4 March, 2025, The Fiscal
Council and Climate Change Advisory Council
advised that Ireland remained a climate laggard,
with higher emissions per person that any other
EU state – and with the potential cost for missing
the targets of between €8bn and €26bn.
Don’t tell the public
On 6 January, 2025, the Government prepared
a ‘Briefing on Climate Policy’.
Released to the Irish Times under Access to
Information on the Environment, Kevin
O’Sullivan, the Environment and Science Editor
and former overall editor of the paper, covered
the document on February 23, 2025.
While giving the potential costs in fines, he
briefly noted that “Further comments on the
likely cost of compliance were redacted”.
In fact, the document was 12 pages long. The
section entitled ‘Consequences and Costs of
Not Meeting Targets’ was five pages itself and
more than four of them were redacted.
This poses a few questions:
1.
What consequences are the Government
hiding – and why?
2.
And why did the authoritative Environmental
Editor not tell us that 90% of the
consequences of current policy are to be
withheld from the public?
Shadows lengthen. What lies ahead is not
for the timorous.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Action Plan.
And for the 2026-2030, second, five-year
budget, the overshoot means excesses must
additionally be carried over into this budget.
Reductions of 8.3% per annum – twice what
was originally planned - will be required.
Electric Vehicles [EVs]
Ireland’s transport sector is responsible for
about one fifth of the carbon emissions in
Ireland, with close to half coming passenger
cars.
The Target: to electrify 33% of the roughly 2.3
million cars by 2030. This would mean about
945,000 electric vehicles on Irish roads by
2030. Of those, 845,000 would be passenger
EVs, 95,000 light goods vehicles, 3,500 heavy
goods vehicles and 1,500 buses.
EV sales increased from 15,462 in 2022 to
22,493 in 2023. To stay on track and deliver
2030 EV targets, we would have needed to see
about 41,000 EV sales in 2024.
However, figures from The Society of the
Irish Motor Industry [SIMI] report that 17,459
new electric cars were registered in 2024, a
decrease of 24% in the registrations seen the
previous year.
Wind Energy
In spite of all the hype and pressure from Wind
Energy Ireland and cheerful Government
Ministers and consultants heralding new wind-
farm capacity every year, the contribution by
wind energy has fallen steadily in the last three
years – not because there are not enough wind
‘farms’, but because the grid cannot handle the
power.
In 2022, wind energy provided 14.3
terrawatt-hours. It fell to 13.7 TWh the following
year, and last year produced only 13.2 TWh.
Alan Berry recently announced that his
Marine Institute’s plans to expand the
SmartBay ocean-energy test site in Galway Bay
to include test floating wind turbines are
surprisingly to be abandoned. The decision
was based on Spiddal resident Máire Uí
Mhuirnín’s two judicial reviews, and mounting
local opposition.
The media reported that “His tone stark and
slightly bitter”, he cited one definition of
insanity “as doing the same thing over and over
again and hoping for a dierent outcome”.
Perhaps worst of all was the Equinor story.
Equinor, a Norwegian energy company, had
partnered with Ireland’s Electricity Supply
Board [ESB] to explore and develop oshore
wind opportunities in Irish waters.
It planned to develop a floating oshore
wind farm o the coasts of Clare and Kerry, with
the intention of transforming the Moneypoint
coal power-station into a green energy hub.
Equinor pulled out in 2021, citing a
“dissatisfaction with the regulatory and
planning regime” – and selling its 36.5% of the
Corrib gas project at the same time ‘”to free up
capital that we can re-invest elsewhere”.
Forestry’s ‘carbon cliff’
Current greenhouse gas calculations for
forestry are based on planting 8,000 hectares
a year. This is another target that has no basis
in reality (or history). The truth is that we are
lucky to get 2,000 hectares planted – and
storm Éowyn took down 24,000 hectares of our
forest estate – the equivalent of more than two
years harvesting capacity, further undermining
land owners’ faith in Irish style ‘sustainable
forestr y’.
The necessary long-promised Irish land-use
plan required by the EU to allocate the various
competing uses of Ireland remains
unpublished.
LULUCF, which stands for ‘Land Use, Land-
Use Change, and Forestry’ relies on a land-use
plan, but Ireland’s was delayed because of
2021 explosive research from the University of
Limerick.
The research revealed that the emissions
from Ireland’s drained forest peat soils were
nearly three times higher than previously
estimated. Irish forestry was set not to absorb
CO2 but to ooze out increasing amounts
between now and 2037.
Known as the ‘carbon cli’, it is also due to
large amounts of land being deforested, and
inadequate rates of aorestation, resulting in
too little forest cover remaining to oset the
emissions from the large number of harvested
stands.
In 2022 authorised felling was 23,009
hectares – while the new area aorested that
year was 2,273 hectares.
Additionally, as forest stands mature, they
reach a peak in terms of net removal after which
the amount of deadwood and litter fall exceeds
the carbon sequestered in an individual year.
The Limerick researchers highlighted that a
barrier to their work was the failure of Ireland
to upgrade its forestry reporting from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
[IPCC] Tier 1 ‘Generic’ to Tier 2 ‘Country Specific’
standards.
This is something the current head of
Teagasc Frank O’Meara and Professor Connolly
of Trinity identified in a research paper in 2007
– but have done nothing about since.
Tier I relies in fact on data from eight forests,
only two of which are in our climatic zone.
The Limerick research highlighted that
Ireland’s drained peatland forests have unique
characteristics that are not captured by
‘Generic’ Tier I emission factors —
characteristics that upend previous
calculations about the value of Irish forestry as
a carbon sink.
In 2022, wind energy
provided 14.3 terrawatt-
hours. It fell to 13.7 TWh the
following year, and last year
produced only 13.2 TWh
