The New Greening of Ireland

IRELAND may be famous for its 40 shades of green, but how environmentally green is the Emerald Isle? Not very is one answer. Not nearly enough is another.

The grass may grow in multiple shades of green here thanks to all the rain we get - and boy, have we been getting it in the last few weeks! But that hides the uncomfortable fact that Ireland is much less green from an environmental point of view than we should be.

In fairness, when you live on the edge of Europe in a cold and damp climate, as we do, you have to spend a lot on heating and transport and power to keep both home and economy warm and productive.

That's one reason why our per capita carbon emissions in Ireland are the worst in Europe, around 50% above the European average. The other reason, of course, is that we are too lazy and self-indulgent to do much about it.

Or certainly we used to be. We are starting to change.

Irish people are now becoming genuinely concerned about climate change, as they should be, and are probably getting near the tipping point where that concern will allow an acceptance of uncomfortable measures to do our part to tackle it.

Small signs of this change have been visible for a while. One of the first to read these signs was the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, who astutely brought the Green Party into government with him after the election last year. And the Greens, as they are called, have been plugging away at the issue with Ahern's blessing ever since.

Last week, for example, the energy minister, the Green Party's Eamon Ryan, announced a major new ocean energy initiative (that's wave power to you and me.)

A program of grants and supports to develop ocean energy around Ireland will get over *26 million in state funding over the next three years. Plus Ryan announced a significant boost for the future of the sector with a guaranteed price for wave energy electricity, when it becomes available.

As the surfers who flock here from around the world will tell you, wave action around Ireland is pretty spectacular. Those big rollers have the whole Atlantic to pick up energy before they reach the shores of Ireland, so it would seem like a no brainer to harness their power. But the technology is in its infancy.

In fact two years ago Ireland became one of the world leaders in sustainable wave power technology when two prototype wave devices successfully produced electricity at the Ocean Energy Test Site in Galway Bay run by the Marine Institute and Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI), a state research body.

One of the devices was called the Wavebob, and it looked like a very large buoy. It had two parts, a circular floating collar and an internal cylindrical float that rose and fell within the collar, generating electricity from the motion. It was a quarter size of the real thing, and it worked.

The new funding will now allow more research, but there's no reason why we could not have a whole farm of full size Wavebobs linked together and bobbing away in suitable locations off the west coast before too long.

The same applies to wind energy, although on that front we are much more developed. In fact one of the biggest business stories here in the last few weeks was the sale of Airtricity, the Irish-developed wind power company, for over *1 billion.

The company had been very successful, not only in Ireland but also in various European countries and even in the U.S. But it needed huge amounts of capital for future development, and that was one reason for the sale.

It's not generally recognized, but wind power is already a significant part of electricity generation here. Peak electricity demand in Ireland this winter will be somewhere around 5,500 megawatts. Already we are producing around 600 mw from wind power, and by the end of this year that will be up to 1,000 mw, or around a fifth of peak consumption.

So it's happening already, and being on the windblown edge of Europe means we have huge potential in this area.

There are other signs of our new green awareness. We were the first to put a levy on plastic shopping bags, something that has been copied in other countries.

And in the next year we are about to do the same to traditional light bulbs. The Green Party is promising legislation to force the entire country to switch to the new low energy, high efficiency bulbs.

This caused some unease among householders here in the last few weeks, since most people have yet to try the new energy saving bulbs because they're more expensive. But it's going to happen.

The fact is that this switch will lead to long-term savings in energy bills for consumers, and it will reduce our total national carbon emissions by around 1%.

Many other initiatives are also underway or being considered. After the recent Bali climate conference our determination to live up to our Kyoto commitment to limit our greenhouse gases to 13% above 1990 levels has been renewed. But we are way over our limit, thanks mainly to the Celtic Tiger, and we are way behind in our schedule to cut our carbon output as promised.

When this government was formed last year, the Greens managed to get an annual 3% reduction in emissions agreed as part of the program for government. Also agreed was that the minister for finance would present an outline carbon report (or carbon budget) in conjunction with the annual financial budget every year to keep us on track by taking any taxation measures that might be needed to force carbon cuts.

Even more significant was the agreement that a general carbon levy would be phased in over the lifetime of the government to push consumers and business into making reductions in all areas.

We'll see how it goes. It ain't possible to do this stuff on a pain-free basis (which is why Ahern cleverly brought the Greens on board to take the heat!), and the truth is that none of the changes so far have really hit us where it hurts yet. The heavy lifting is still to come.

But there are signs that it will happen. One of the items in the program for government that raised eyebrows last year was the agreement to introduce taxation measures to move people away from gas guzzlers and towards cars with lower emissions. That is happening from this summer, and car dealers are already moaning that New Year car sales have been badly affected.

And this week it emerged that a Green Party plan for carbon offsets for all state flights is to be implemented. What this means is that every time a minister or a government official or even a lowly civil servant takes a flight on official business, the carbon emissions of that trip will be offset by the state spending a similar amount on carbon reduction projects, mostly in the Third World.

That might seem like a step too far for many ordinary people, because although the Green Party is pushing this, it is the ordinary taxpayer who will end up paying for it. It will double the cost of all official travel here and will add up to many millions every year.

Yet the announcement has been met with hardly a murmur, further evidence of the growing awareness that we must all play our part in the battle against climate change and global warming. If it stops even half of the unnecessary official travel that goes on at the moment (have state expenses, will travel) then it will be worthwhile.

But important though gestures like that are, they only scratch the surface. As I said above, Ireland's Kyoto target in the period 2008-2012 is to limit emissions to 13% above the 1990 base line.

Yet in 2005 (the last year for which there are figures) we were 25.4% above the base line. And in fact we are only avoiding getting even more out of line by spending hundreds of millions buying so-called "carbon credits" from low pollution (usually undeveloped) countries.

Industry and transport (especially road transport) are major contributors to the problem. But the biggest output, believe it or not, comes from agriculture (manure, etc.), and there's not much we can do about that.

Under the original Kyoto Protocol, the industrialized countries of the world (other than the U.S.) agreed to reduce their aggregate greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008-2012.

Ireland's contribution to this objective was to limit average national greenhouse gas emissions over the five years to no more than 13% above 1990 levels. So far we are failing miserably to meet even this. But at least we are now starting to take our responsibilities seriously.

Uncle Sam is also starting (I said starting) to see sense, after President Bush denied for years that the U.S. had a problem at all. The U.S., per capita the most polluting nation on earth, has a lot further to go than Ireland.

There's a lot of talk about leadership at the moment in the U.S. Here's one area - the most important issue facing the human race - where there's more leadership coming out of Ireland than there is out of the U.S.