Update on Climate - the Climate Law kicks in

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The start of an urgent, radical transformation

What is really exciting for our climate campaigning in recent weeks has been to see the new climate law we campaigned so long and so hard for begin to have an impact. The law has teeth and it has begun to bite.

The law puts the new target of reducing emissions by 51% by 2030 on a statutory footing. The new Climate Action Plan has just been published too, which should act as a roadmap to guide Ireland in reaching this target. That’s the plan we all made submissions on back in May.

Meantime, the newly strengthened Climate Council has just published its proposed Carbon Budgets for 2021-25 and 2026-2030. These are the binding limits on total emissions that are the central driver of action in the climate law. This is what we campaigned for.

The genius of the Carbon Budget system is that it means that each sector, and each Government Department, is now competing with each other for their slice of the “pollution pie”. But the pie is now set, if one sector pollutes others have to pollute even less. In the past the Government just made a bigger pie and we missed our targets. Now the numbers have to add up and the plans have to match the targets.

Read our press release on the Carbon Budgets here. RTE used our headline “the start of an urgent and radical transformation” as their framing for the opening of the RTE Nine O’Clock News on Monday and on Morning Ireland on Tuesday.

Oisín has been doing a lot of media on all of this in recent weeks, in an effort to inform and shape the public debate on how Carbon Budgets work (“it’s nothing to do with money!”) and how the transformation they will drive can be positive and inclusive. And to make sure people understand that the alternative to action is not business-as-usual but rather accelerating climate breakdown, with all the costs and devastation that would bring.

Some selected clips from Oisín's media appearances to talk about the Carbon Budgets and Climate Action Plan are included below:





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Climate Change