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Every year in Ireland we each produce
17 tonnes of greenhouse gases
that's enough to fill 2 million
balloons for each and every one of us.
Driving to work, building and heating our homes,
powering industry, commerce,
food production, every move we make is backed
by energy from fossil fuels.
These gases are invisible to the eye and
we took them for granted until we
started noticing their effects.
Now there is no avoiding climate change,
it is well under way and accelerating.
Even if all emissions were halted now the greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere will go on
warming it for centuries.
We now have to completely rethink our use
of fossil fuels and find solutions
before we run out of time to act.
This is a daunting task.
Last year was a big year globally for climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change
told the world in no
uncertain terms how serious the situation is,
their work was rewarded
with the Nobel Peace Prize.
The EU was the first to lead the way forward
and accept its responsibilities.
It announced new tough targets of its own.
In England the Stern Report to the
British Government showed that if
we act now it is still possible
to make the necessary reductions to limit
warming. Water shortages, fires,
hurricanes and flooding again made headlines
and glaciers with ice hundreds of thousands of years old
continued to melt, shattering all records.
We were shocked to see the
North West Passage melting enough to become navigable,
something we never considered possible.
Al Gore also got a Nobel Peace Prize
for his contribution and an
Oscar for bringing "An Inconvenient Truth" to the big screen.
Global warming is now a reality that even diehard sceptics find hard to deny
and it looks as though the timeframe for solutions is even shorter than
we think.
If we do nothing to correct our actions we can expect a rise
of 5 to 6 degrees Centigrade across the planet by the end of this
century with devastating consequences.
So how did we get here?
We made a mistake in the world, it's just how we have evolved
because fossil fuels were wonderful and they allowed us to do
wonderful things but nobody anticipated that putting all of these
emissions, carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere would have
this effect.
The latest report which came out said that the science is unequivocal
The science is now very confident that we are actually changing the
nature of the climate system. The climate in the Twenty-First Century
is going to be quite different from anything we have experienced
during the whole period of civilisation, 6000 to 10,000 years. We're
pushing into unknown territory and science cannot always tell you
what's going to happen.
Well Ireland is really a very poor relation in all of this. We got a very
generous 13% increase on our 1990 levels in the Kyoto Negotiations
and in fact we are well above that in our emissions.
The EU is committing to a 20% reduction by 2020 and even going
beyond that to a 30% reduction by 2020.
So it really is a huge challenge because as we all know our emissions
have been increasing fairly rapidly so we are not just going to flatten
out but we are going to have to cut back.
They've set themselves a target of reducing CO2 emissions by 3%
every year - never been achieved in history before, by any economy.
So you need a sustained national effort with all the stakeholders
buying into it.
The good news is that although we have been buying our way out of
our obligations our potential for reducing our greenhouse gases here
at home is good.
The Celtic Tiger may have sky rocketed our emissions but it has also
given us the money we need to invest in solutions.
Now quite simply it's payback time.
People need to realise that the lifestyle that we are currently living is
unsustainable and it is leading to increased CO 2 emissions and we
have a part to play; people need to realise that they are part of that
problem and they can offer a solution as well.
Tackling climate change means taking greenhouse gases out
wherever we can. Agriculture has twice the global average of
emissions because of our huge numbers of cattle and sheep.
Large savings could be made by bringing our poor performing buildings up
to standard and our transport still stands as a record of failure with so
many opportunities for public transport and rail freight wasted.
It is absolutely crazy to have people driving a hundred miles, 200
miles per day in single occupancy cars, to and from work.
We need leadership on this issue as we've lost so many opportunities
through poor infrastructural planning.
Locked now into our cars, on motorways clogged like arteries leading
to towns at the end of massive commutes, we can rightly look back at
all the routes we could have taken to today's Ireland.
Now because of climate change we will have to redo so much of what
we have done.
You can have a Climate Change Strategy but if people continue to
lead unsustainable lifestyles and if there isn't inter-departmental
thinking, if you like, if you have the Department for Transport doing
one thing, the Department of Agriculture doing another then I'm afraid
a National Climate Change Strategy won't achieve very much.
People are beginning to accept the science of climate change they
are immediately asking "what can we do about it?" They're looking for
leadership to solve this problem because the consequences are very
severe.
Anybody with children wants to hand on a world
in as good a shape as we got it.
To actually cut emissions at home we need to reduce waste and
inefficiencies and bring online all our renewable energy sources.
We've huge natural resources, with the rising price of oil and gas in a
shrinking world market we would have been forced to make the switch
out of fossil fuels anyway.
Gordon Brown announced his plan to embark on a wind power
revolution that will produce enough wind energy to power every home
in Britain by 2020. If they can do that in the UK, imagine what we
could do here with our natural advantages and greater wind speeds?
And I for one delight and revel in the fact that oil's gone so expensive
because only now are people beginning to be motivated, big
business, governments all around the world saying "we cannot be
dependent any longer on this source that brought us all our wealth so
far, we've got to change."
And of course when humans are faced with any challenge they're
brilliant at changing and we are brilliant at changing.
All we need is the motivation.
All we need is the motivation.