Climate Action Ambition Needs To Smash Current Boundaries

Yesterday, the Irish Academy of Engineering released a detailed report analysing Ireland’s energy transition needs between now and 2050. The report compares the projected supply need with the planned net-zero energy targets and finds the progress of the Irish government wanting. No surprise there. Then, faced with boundaries they call “realities of engineering, finance, & project delivery”, the surprise comes when the IAE turn to the only “proven fuel” for back-up generation they say Ireland will need to bridge the gap now and beyond 2050; pollutant fossil fuel gas. There are two fundamental problems with this recommendation.

Firstly, if there is a fire, you don’t throw petrol on it in an attempt to quench said fire. Building infrastructure to lock the country into years of even more fossil fuel gas use and emissions does exactly that. No more new fossil fuels, it’s a simple requirement.

Secondly, the first order problem-solving deployed by the group of engineers(!) demonstrates that they have not engaged in any meaningful way with the reasons why the net-zero targets are in place, why the EU is incentivising countries to reach net-zero using a fining mechanism, or what the effects that green house gas emissions have had and will have on the climate.

If they had engaged with the underlying motivations, they would see that attempting to solve the problem of implementing a net-zero energy system by 2050 by accepting the constraints and boundaries of the problem space as it is today is wholly deficient of responsibility, and quiet negligent to their stated goal of providing “thought leadership in a time of great change”.

This is not thought leadership, it is the oxidised thought of climate delay. They are correct to identify the current constraints of planning delays, slow infrastructure rollout, and a government both devoid of political will and demonstrated competence to enact large scale climate action, as major impediments to meeting the targets. But the solution is not to simply bounce off these boundaries and offer the next least bad option available, which in their opinion is more LNG. The solution is to smash through the boundaries to find better options that don’t involve more emissions.

This, my friends, is where the climate action rubber is beginning to hit the road, which necessitates having frank conversations about why emergency action is needed to both mitigate and adapt to the climate impacts we are facing, and about how bad those impacts will get.

These frank conversations need not be complicated. Erratic, unpredictable, and increasingly devastating weather changes and localised events will result in crop failures, destruction of property and livelihoods, destabilisation of food systems, and in short order, disintegration of civil society.

Misery and death, if you want a shorthand for it.

Accepting this and treating it as a crisis that needs an unprecedented emergency response is, for me, where said rubber meets said road. Once you accept that society will soon be on the brink, you won’t be as quick to accept a boundary such as planning delays, because everything becomes trivial in the context of what is at stake. Even the boundary de jour of energy security becomes a petard to hoist our children by, because what good is energy security when we can’t guarantee that civil society will be there to benefit from it?

At this point, if you haven’t gone out of your way to learn about the Climate Emergency, you may be inclined to think that I’m over-reacting, being naive, or sensationalist. I understand the impulse. I thought the same when I first read This Is Not A Drill 6 years ago. I invite you to read any book on the Climate Emergency. There are lots of excellent ones available now, such as The Climate Book, Not The End of The World, There Is No Planet B, or Climate Justice. If reading isn’t your groove, try one of the great podcasts like The Climate Alarm Clock or Hot Mess. Your instinct will be to not believe it is that bad. When you do, read the section B.5 of the IPCC CLIMATE CHANGE 2023 Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers.

Having accepted that the situation is that bad, you may begin to despair at how world leaders know too how bad it is, and still refuse to take emergency climate action at the scale and speed required. This is a natural reaction, but there is no need to despair. The latest IPCC report shows that the climate mitigations to date are working, but that we just aren’t reducing emissions fast enough, or at enough scale, yet. A recent University of Oxford survey of 73,000 people across 77 countries showed that 80% of people want governments to take stronger climate action. The will of the people is there, so all we need now is the political will to accept that system-wide change is needed, and to start doing it.

The good news is that the world has implemented system level changes for long-term gain while enduring short-term pain before, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) was established by G7 countries to identify weaknesses in the global financial system that allowed the 2008 crash to take place, and to propose and facilitate the implementation of reforms to prevent it from happening again, and it’s working!

When we have to, society can come together and make changes for the greater good. Unfortunately, to date the motivation for change has been to save the financial system, to save money. We now need to motivate ourselves and our politicians to save the planet, to save ourselves.

Doing so starts with frank conversations across every cabinet, boardroom, and kitchen table about what we are facing and what we need to do to mitigate and adapt. Then we need political and industry leadership to recognise that resilience, adaptation, and mitigation need to come before growth, ROI, and GDP. That an emergency response needs to smash through pre-existing boundaries, in the same way the COVID emergency response did, to make options available that before were unthinkable and insurmountable. We need global system change that implements reforms through consensus, responsibility, and ambition. We need to remember that we are all in this together. We need to remember what is at stake.