Paul Murphy: Government lacks political will on climate targets

It's not about 2027, it's about 2026, the annual plans. All the climate action plans build on each other, so climate action plan 26 builds on 25, 24, 23 etc. But it is a plan for the year, I mean it's... Not particularly because of the vast majority of measures taken underneath tend to take their multi-annual measures anyway and we have to move towards a multi-annual approach to this because measures taken in an individual year tend to be not terribly impactful, whereas measures taken over many years have greater impact. It's linked to the Act which is the 51% so overall you have to get your plans to be able to deliver that. But I mean up until last year, last year the plan didn't come out until April, we're now looking at sounds like July or August or something. Prior to that they were published in December for the following year, which would seem to me to make sense if you got a plan for the coming year, you'd publish it in advance of the year. Would that not be good practice to publish it in advance of the year that the plan is for? Um yes but the difficulty we have Deputy is the one that Deputy McGrath pointed out, we're quite far off implementing, reaching our targets and the difficulty has been to date, we've been focused on producing an annual plan by a particular date and then reporting on it as opposed to focusing in on the measures that will give us biggest impact, deliver the biggest reduction in greenhouse gases that we can achieve. So the Minister has been working with us on trying to make climate action planning more impactful and to that end we've been working with him on trying to do that in a different way other than just in the way we've done heretofore which is here's a plan, here's quarterly reports, here's another plan, here's quarterly reports and at the same time the EPA is telling us we're not getting any closer to achieving our targets. Well yes I mean I disagree I suppose that the reason we're not reaching our targets is because we've had too much reporting and it's too much focus on reporting the issue, the reason we're not meeting our targets is no political will from the government to do it in my opinion but that's obviously in a sense political and you probably aren't in a position to comment on it. I mean I ask the question that your Minister kind of casually in January said that we're not going to reach the targets. Up until that point whenever we said, it seems to us we're not going to reach these targets, we have these supposedly legally binding targets, it doesn't look as if we're going to reach them, what are you going to do about it? The government up until that point had always said oh these are legally binding targets and we're going to reach them and then casually it all wasn't in session, it was early January, the Minister kind of dropped we're not going to reach them which everybody knew we're not going to reach them because there isn't the political will to reach them. Did that flow from discussion within the department or alternatively did it have an impact on your approach where you're not really under pressure to reach these targets anymore because the Minister said you're not going to do it? I suspect without recalling the particular comments what the Minister actually said is we're not going to reach our targets without leaning into additional delivery and doing more impactful things because that's what he's been saying to us and to that end he's been asking us to try and revise our approach to do more impactful climate action plans that will actually get us closer to delivering on those targets and that has involved a shift in our approach that's undoubtedly the case and bearing in mind Barry has spoken about the fact we need to talk to the CCAC, talk to our stakeholders and that has all been done so we will be in a position now to move to that revised approach to climate action planning. I think Deputy just in terms of the Minister's statements that was linked to the to the WAM which is around the 23 percent so I think that's what he was referring to is based on that analysis that's what the EPA is projecting we will hit by 2030 at the moment. I don't think you're accurate in terms of the way he said it and he didn't say it in the way that we're currently not on track but therefore we need to up your, he said we're not going to reach them, he did he said we're going to miss them by a somewhat significant amount. In terms of the figures, what it will cost us, you've mentioned I mean after being pushed you kind of accepted that it could cost us billions. I presume you're aware of the joint study by the Climate Change Advisory Council and IFAC which projected that it cost cost between Do you agree with that estimate of if we continue on the track we're at, i.e. we miss our targets by a very substantial amount, are they the kind of figures that we're faced with paying in just a few years time? We have never stated that we agree with that estimate and there's a really good reason for that as I've already explained. First of all we don't know how close we're going to be to our targets. We don't know what other member states are going to achieve in terms of their targets so we don't know how many carbon credits would be available, we don't know how many countries will be chasing them, we don't know what price they're going to be and we don't know if the same system is still going to be placed there for in 2032. So to be honest with you that's a very interesting estimate by the CCAC and IFAC and they're both you know government bodies, I'm not going to deny that but we couldn't possibly give a credible figure to compliance costs at this point. When will you? After 2032 I suspect. So we won't have, I mean we're facing this massive bill for the public and you're not going to estimate how much it's going to cost us until the point that it costs us that much money and then where are we going to go and get this money from? Deputy I won't be, we won't be able to estimate until we know how well we do. In the meantime our focus has to be on trying to meet as much of the of our base of the EU target as we can. And you will refuse up until the point that we actually find some horrendous amount of money and you will not be providing any estimate? It isn't a fine deputy, it's purchase of carbon credits if they are available at whatever price they are available. If they are available and I emphasise that point because they may not be. Or they could be extraordinarily expensive as a consequence of a small number being available and almost everybody meeting their targets or is it the case that the department or a small number available on almost nobody, no member state meeting their targets in which case does the system even operate? Well exactly and that's what I think the government is actually banking on. I don't know. Are you not actually just banking on the fact that no one's going to reach these targets and everyone's going to agree to it? Certainly not deputy. And our children and our grandchildren will pay the price for it. We are already in conversation with the European Commission about how the compliance system will work in the future and we're discussing with that and how potentially investments in Ireland in necessary climate action could help us meet those targets. But it is an elaborate European system. It will take member states large and small to agree to change it if it is to be changed. But in the meantime we cannot give an estimate. Okay to move on to measures that will have an impact. What's your assessment on how the one-stop shop system has been operating? The SEA is one-stop shop system? The SEA I know have been increasing the number of one-stop shops and the number of participants in that which is a necessary thing. As I said one of the big constraints in delivery of retrofitting is the available labour and the available number of contractors signed up to it. It's definitely the model approach I think and we support the SAI in doing it but they do need to expand it and make sure that it's working effectively. I mean the changes that were announced to the grants earlier this year in January were some of those for example the availability of the window and doors which weren't previously available for a lot. Kind of a recognition of the problems with the one-stop shop approach? I think it's more that the introduction of the passport approach as opposed to specifically the windows and doors was a recognition that by asking people to take on a very large project and possibly leave their homes to do it when housing is tricky to obtain might be a bit too much of an ask for people and so what we needed to do was move people along the retrofitting journey and do so in chunks. So one-stop shop works for some people and let's face it we have a lot of people doing that but I suppose the passport approach allows people to move along that journey in a more staged way, possibly a more affordable way in other words you can do one bit this year and another bit in two years time or whatever you know. And just maybe a final question in terms of this being the model I mean like a problem with the one-stop shop approach seems to me is that you've got an overall contractor and there's a grant available for project management they charge you more than that than for the project management they take and they're kind of it's an extra they're normally not employing labour directly it might be that they specialize in external wall installation they do about that bit themselves but they just get other subcontractors to do the attic and the windows and the doors and the heat pump and so on so you have a whole kind of layers of different contractors all of whom have to make profits like would it not be simpler to have a state-driven approach and therefore you can work state by state which brings massive efficiencies as opposed to this like we have this market we put all these grants into it a large part of which gets added to the price and the idea really is we're incentivizing more companies to come into it is this not all like a relatively inefficient way of doing it compared to saying this is an urgent urgent thing we need a state company to drive it. So sorry are you talking about an estate by estate approach or the state doing it? Both, the state doing it would facilitate doing an estate by estate approach so as in a state set up semi-state company who are a major retrofitting company and they do it and they employ people directly and we don't have these layers of contractors on the nest that that creates. Okay well on the estate by estate approach the SEIR piloting doing that now it does in even a mixed tenure estate so you need to have the private people to do it alongside but there may well be efficiencies to do it in an estate by estate approach. As to establishing a state company to do retrofits is way above my pay grade but let me just say the five years it would take us to establish it and get it staffed up might mean we miss our targets for that alone. We don't have to stop while we're doing this. Thanks a lot.