From top: Enda Kenny addresses the COP 21 climate conference in Paris; Dan Boyle
Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s address to the climate change conference in Paris this week was insipid, cowardly and an utter embarrassment.
Dan Boyle writes:
Damn right I’m going to write about Climate Change. Maybe I’m coming from a well defined, and pronounced, perspective on this. Probably enough, too much, has already been written about it. None of that changes the fact that it is the issue that affects all life on this planet.
Slowly, too slowly, it has sunk into our collective consciousness that we have a problem. Some, motivated it seems out of contrariness and obtuseness, want to quibble with the nature of the problem. Others want to believe that it’s someone else’s problem, so let them deal with it.
Our esteemed Taoiseach has placed himself in both these camps. His speech to the Paris Convention this week was an utter embarrassment.
It should be considered the ultimate embarrassment of a term of office that has seen him stagger from prevarication, to outright lies spun from folksy, but untrue, tales of people that didn’t exist and events that never occurred.
This should be considered the Taoiseach’s ultimate embarrassment but it won’t be. The street savvy Mr. Kenny is all too aware that Climate Change as an issue rates, if at all, quite low on the pecking order.
We’re three months away from a general election where being honest about this won’t help him or his party achieve re-election, and possibly the prospect of being able to govern on its own (may the Lord protect us all!).
There are precious few votes in climate change. It is an issue that of itself is a political poison. The first law of politics is don’t tell voters what they don’t want to hear.
The fact is that it is our profligate use of fossil fuels in the ‘developed’ World has bought us a standard of living denied to most others on this planet. It has come with a potential cost to end life here within an historically short time frame.
It is politically impossible to sell the message that those of us who live well need to live our lives less. That is if you equate living with consuming. There is the prospect of far better lives being lived merely by living differently. This is an even harder political message to sell.
Those who want to defend the status quo, or deny the need for change, invoke those with less in our society the homeless; the widow woman. The very people they have ignored consistently and constantly.
It has never been argued that those without would be asked to live with even less. There is a fear among the more prosperous that dealing with climate change might bring about a more equal society, a more equal World. Damn right it will.
A more equal society doesn’t fit into the Fine Gael world view. These are the interests that Enda Kenny seeks to represent. If the country was to seriously live up to its global responsibilities, a consequence of that would be a more equal society.
Something our vested interests would not put up with. If anything indicates the failure of our politics it is the weight that the special pleading of vested interest groups is given, with the antipathy against those with real needs who then suffer further.
I didn’t think it was possible to think less of Enda Kenny. I was wrong. His speech in Paris revealed that he could never be taken seriously as a leader. He may convince enough to sidle back into office. He is likely to benefit from a disparate opposition.
He’s probably right in thinking he will win more votes by going for the ignorant ‘no surrender’ vote on climate change, even if such thinking is dangerously short term in nature. The democrat in me will continue to respect the office he holds. However, given his insipid and cowardly speech I could never respect his conduct in government.
Still he will always have Paris.
Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle
Good article Dan, except for:
1. In government Green party’s action on climate change was to increase fossil fuel taxes, and nothing else.
2. In government the Green party gave a €5,000 grant to someone who could afford to buy a €150,000 hybrid BMW, equality?
3. In government your leader Eamonn Ryan talked a lot but did nothing to combat climate change. For example what happened to the proposal to get energy suppliers to fund home insulation and then recoup the monies from householders?
4, What did you do to improve building standards via legislation? The legacy of your time in government is Priory Hall, Longboat Quay, and many others.
Sorry Dan, too much hot air from Green Party to criticise others for inaction, but I still agree with your synopsis of Kenny!
What did we do 100,000 retrofitted houses, a new planning act, new building regs, emission based motor tax, the bike to work scheme, a climate bill published and being debated in the Oireachtas torn up by Phil Hogan. Sadly was very little take up for the electric car grant. It was available for everyone. For cars priced at €30000 and beyond. It didn’t apply to hybrids. We introduced the carbon levy, one off charge with less inflationary effect than VAT or excise duty.
Thanks for liking the article but you need to work on your blind hatred.
I’d love an electric motorbike, or small car, but 30k plus does not account for a lot of people. You cut out most people who’d have availed of such an offer, people who would use a discount are those with less, pretty simple eh?
Emission based motor tax???
A certain 1.6L petrol that gets 38mpg is €A to tax.
A certain 2.2L diesel that gets 65mpg and has less emissions costs €A+450 to tax.
That is a fact. How is that logical?
The bike to work scheme is an excuse for people to buy €1000 plus bicycles instead of the one half the price no one would have robbed. Which worked wonders for the thieves around Dublin to be fair.
Kenny is a festering lump to be fair though.
Emissions based motor tax just ensured that wealthy people that could afford very expensive brand new cars paid very little motor tax, where as many of us who can’t afford to change our 15 year old Mondeo continue to pay upwards of €600 a year in tax. The bike to work scheme (while I availed of it myself for a decent road bike) is widely abused and mainly used to buy ride-on lawn mowers.
Rather than subsidising the price of a €30k car, which is way beyond the means of most people, though perhaps not yourself, it might have been an idea to do something about the ever increasing cost, and worsening of services, in the public transport networks.
The sad fact is that climate change is not something anyone really cares about. The even sadder fact is that no matter what we do here in Ireland, it’s going to be irrelevant in the grand scheme unless the USA and China get on board too, which they aren’t.
The car emission tax is a joke Dan in all fairness. It hasn’t done what it was intended to do, Disastas’ example being a stellar example of its failure.
But on Kenny, yep, can’t argue with that.
Dan, seeing hatred as opposed to a fair critique of the legacy of the Greens is your blindspot. I too enjoyed the article and fair comment on Enda. I also deem Ollie’s comment as both fair and accurate.
Far from accurate. Ollie’s comments are consistently negative. The narrative the Greens did nothing is untrue and deserves to be challenged. It’s lazy thinking. Few of things mentioned today were the Greens responsibility or resulted from Green actions.
You were the one that mentioned emissions based motor tax, electric vehicles and the bike to work scheme. How has us taking apart those “successes” of yours and pointing out how they have actually failed suddenly become not the Green’s responsibility? The NBS was another scheme that was massively abused by the company awarded the scheme. It did nothing for rural broadband and only served as a subsidy for an already massively profitable international company.
The carbon levy was not a one off charge either, it applies by usage to all carbon fuels. VAT applies on top of the carbon levy too, and the levy itself has doubled since it was introduced (though not by the Greens).
From my point of view, I was originally in favour of the Greens in government as the party’s manifesto did look quite good. However, it seemed to sell out everything the party stood for just for a seat at the table. Was it worth it? The electorate seemed to disagree, which is why the party was decimated at the last election. When in power, you defend your crazy decisions as being for the best, and when in opposition you criticize the others for making the same crazy decisions as a means of scoring points. Standard stuff for Irish politics.
Paul said: “From my point of view, I was originally in favour of the Greens in government as the party’s manifesto did look quite good. However, it seemed to sell out everything the party stood for just for a seat at the table.”
‘Selling out’ is one way of putting it. The word I’ve heard is ‘co-pted’ and it happens a lot. Liberals+Cameron, for instance. Labour+Kenny. Watch what happens to Corbyn if he ever gets in power, or the British Greens.
Dan, until you admit the illogical system you introduced for car tax is what it is, a absolute failure that targets the less affluent, you’ll never get a vote again from me. (Greens got my vote before).
And I’m sure many people, given the parties success in the last election, agree.
You realise, when you’re taxing older cars heavily, you’re punishing people who can’t afford a nicer car. I mean you think they’d drive the old one if they could afford a shiny new lower emissions one?
Also you realise that for a new car to be bought the materials have to be mined, refined, machined, transported, assembled to create the new one? And then that has to be transported here from Europe or further. Did you factor that in?
Nah sure f*** it you’ll be grand like.
…you failed in buildings too. As someone who builds NZEB and Passive houses for a living, the legacy of your partys Part L and DEAP policy is an umitigated disaster. When you have people being forced to build LESS efficient houses to meet regulations, because the alternative doesn’t tick some box in a poorly-designed Excel worksheet, then you know the people who are behind it are clueless. The BER process is a ‘suffered’ evil for most and runs contrary to engineering and physics principles.
Others believe differently. You can tell by tone when people are applying a fair critique.
John, you are being more than a little bit unfair & impractical.
The point about these regulations is that they will become gradually more sophisticated & more onerous over time.
The construction industry (including people like yourself, it sounds like) needs then to interact constructively with the system as part of this process.
That’s what we elected.
Send Enda back to his teaching job.
it’s unfair to children
If you’ve seen ‘Cowspiracy’ you’d be forgiven for thinking fossil fuels are not the real problem but intensive animal (mostly beef) farming. Very interesting documentary. On Netflix.
Not really that great. American cattle farming is horrific in most cases with few grass fed farms selling their beef at a premium. But you shouldn’t need a film to tell you that.
Conspiracy is right in that documentary’s name so it should have given you a good idea of the biased reasoning & lack of research in it.
The most damning thing about is this: conspiracy claims that more than 50% of all emissions are related to animal ag
The IPCC on the other hand, the highest authority in climate change puts it as 14.5%!
So who do you believe?
Not quite. The IPCC states “animal agriculture” is responsible for between 14% and 22%, depending on what time frame you use (shorter and more recent = higher). Cowspiracy uses (an average of) 18%, as does the UN’s Livestock’s Long Shadow (which incidentally is something I recommend EK reads and acts upon).
This is where the 51% comes from: http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf
Actually no, Cowspiracy cites both figures 18% and the 51% figure as if they were equal. This is despite the fact that the WorldWatch findings have been widely panned due to using a longer time period ONLY for animal agriculture and didnt use the same longer time period for other GHG which would have also increased them.
Cowspiracy’s continued use of the 18% figure doesnt really make sense since LLS has been superseded by the more updated FAO estimate of 14.5% but hey when have documentaries made by “activists” ever worried about accuracy…
Confusing alright.
Still, GHGs have to be brought under control. Short- to medium-term, it means consuming less meat and driving less, insulating buildings more and using more efficient materials and products.
It won’t be enough, though. Increased temperatures are locked in.
His speech was like the introductory chapter to an EIA. All consultancy waffle and no actual information or actions. The problem is, the rest of Endas EIA was never made and there are not plans to make it.
He essentially showed up and spoke. Nothing more can be taken from it.
Remember the infamous “Tonight, that may be the truth as you live it, and know it.Let me say this to you all: You are not responsible for the crisis.” – PR-commando for “pixie-heads”. FFS…
So much of the criticism of Kenny is that he is a Blueshirt, who wants to help the rich, is a friend of DOB, who buys into a version of Europe directed by Merkel.
The truth is that he has absolutely zero vision – good, bad or indifferent – on climate change or anything else and no desire to govern aside from the prestige and perks of the job.
Good article Dan. I too was embarrassed hearing EK’s drivel on this issue.
Plus we hear much ranting of the “give up jobs, cars, homes for the planet? Good luck with that!” type of polyfilla. No dealing with the problem, no offering workable solutions (not even outlandish ones), just more shameful trumpet-blowing.
Ireland – an island of manageable size and resources – could be in the forefront of climate change mitigation, along with places like Costa Rica and Bhutan, with very simple ideas.
The fact that a mere handful of countries take climate change seriously says we’re fecked.
blah blah blah. one moron criticises another moron. blah blah blah
hang it up dan, no-one cares.
“No-one cares”. How very nearly true.
…considering the noose of baseless carbon taxes the GP has lumbered us with, and the disaster that is CO2 emission based motoring taxes, coupled with a materially deficient building standards regimen the GP were part of, you have some neck to criticise that speech. And I’m not an FG either.
Emissions based motor tax is a tax on the poor, and a tax imposed on those not running out spending big money on new cars. How else can you stand over a system where a 2000 Fiat Seicento worth €300 costs €331 per annum to tax, but if you’re, oh, I dunno, a TD and can buy a €45,000 BMW 5-Series you can tax it for €200 per annum ? Hypocrisy much ? That and the fact it’ll come to light eventually that the CO2 move in cars, at the expense of NOX emissions is a complete fraud.
This post-failed-to-get elected whinging by Greens in general, and Dan in particular, is just nauseating.
I refer you to answer I gave earlier on this thread. You seem to have some expertise on being nauseating.
That’s not entirely fair.
John – and everyone else – is struggling with a situation where a handful of band-aids and bits of duct tape have been badly applied. He has a right to point out the anomalies and difficulties in the small changes the Greens were allowed to make, which were always going to be a compromise.
Piecemeal approaches to climate change are never going to work.
I rarely encounter fair criticism here. It’s either the Greens did nothing or what the Greens did do was useless. Either point is expressed in pretty angry terms by people, invariably never supported the Greens. I will strike out. When you get constantly poked at it’s the only natural response.
The Greens did little. It’s all they were allowed, for pity’s sake, it was in proportion to their representation. They’ll always claim to have done a fair amount, but that’s politicians for you.
As I said, it was all sticking-plaster, minor victories, what else could it be? You said it: “The first law of politics is don’t tell voters what they don’t want to hear.” The Greens would have been thrown out whether they did nothing, little or a lot.
I didn’t want the Greens to go into government. I couldn’t foresee what would happen to them I did know that, as a minor partner, they could do little.
you put your musings up for scrutiny and then you get upset when you are criticised. maybe the best thing would be that no-one comments on your work – would that suit you better?
Scottser, much/most of the criticism is not directed at the musings.
Rather, they tend to be an attack on the record of the Greens brief spell in govt.
Sometimes this criticism is reasonable & balanced, often it is overly harsh or factually inaccurate, sometimes it is bewildering.
But we rarely engage with the musings themselves. This ‘attack the man not the ball’ is a depressingly frequent part of all public discussion in Ireland.
New Zealand, one of the most comparable countries to Ireland, totally showed us up.
Kenny embarrasses us all, I’m ashamed to be from a country where someone like that rises to the top.
I’d be more interested in sorting out trickle down economics of which global warming is a part of and not global warming itself per se
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/the-green-delusion/
Worth the read.
Exactly the point I was making. This is a spurious. I have never heard it argued that those without should have less.
Matt Ridley? Really? The Matt Ridley? Hahahahahahahahahahahna…
That was not worth the read, dhaughton99.
Pretty poor in fact.
Richard Tol, late of the ESRI, is not one of the world’s most respected climate scientists.
He’s an economist.
Economists should stop pretending that the finger-in-the-air-waving they do is science
…I agree with the general consensus here that Kenny was an embarrassment at the climate change conference…but no more of an embarrassment than the hapless opportunists who have dragged the Green movement into disrepute for a generation.
And once again. Those who feign indifference feel obliged to comment….
…I’m far from indifferent to climate change but I see no common cause with the likes of Gormley or Ryan who were swept into power and ministerial office and were found out.
So you keep telling me. I look forward to your hollow judgements every week…..
Poor auld Dan, still pushing a tired old meme with no actual evidence to back it up.
“Until world leaders can explain their way past two specific graphs, their gathering in Paris this week to combat so-called global warming might as well launch a War on Leprechauns. It would be bad enough if President Obama and some 150 other heads of state were pursuing destructive solutions to a legitimate problem. Far worse, they are poised to adopt policies that will slow economic growth, spread poverty, and stymie human progress, all in slavish service to an utterly bogus “problem” of their own imagination.”
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427823/paris-climate-conference-no-warming?yLYs2PlsljPhx6h7.01
LOL. Ahem: Lord Monckton, the man who invented a cure for aids. Put it in the trash with Matt Ridley.
Here’s a better version of your first graph:
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/02/much-to-dismay-of-christopher-monckton.html
As for the second, it is rather ridiculous.
I looked at Kenny’s speech to the conference. I can’t see anything in it that could warrant Dan’s ‘I’m mad as hell’ rant. Can people quote the offending sentences or are we just taking the NGOs views whole?
There isn’t one stand-out sentence.
It is the lazy, ill-thought-out, wishy-washy, visionless nature of the speech which is causing such angst.
No vision except using up Irish political goodwill to disproportionately help the agricultural sector.
Especially now that the tide seems to be turning a little in terms of political attitudes worldwide – two of the main developed world sceptics up to now, the US & Australia, are both much more keen to press forward & deal with climate change.
The you have Kenny’s empy gombeenism as our representative.
classter said, “No vision except using up Irish political goodwill to disproportionately help the agricultural sector.”
This aspect of his speech was a giveaway. Cognitive dissonance?
I amn’t understanding you, David.
Is the cognitive dissonance mine or Kenny’s?
Not yours, no, sorry. EK accepts animal agriculture is the biggest culprit in climate change without openly admitting it – the opposite in fact.
The efficiency of electric cars is less than that of power stations so they actually result in increased emissions :
Consequently in order to generate the same motive power the electrical generating system has to burn more fuel than the diesel engine – ie 1.48 litres per 3.3 kWh. In Ireland this results in the emission of close to 50% MORE CO2 than would be emitted by burning the equivalent amount of fuel in a diesel automobile.
http://irishenergyblog.blogspot.de/2015/11/electric-cars-how-green-are-they.html
Like with most “green” things they are another scam. Next decade it will be global cooling and the threat of an ice age to scare us :
http://irishenergyblog.blogspot.de/2015/12/irish-times-is-it-global-cooling-or.html
Good point, there’s literally no other way to generate energy than burning dead rotten organisms.
I agree, Disasta. Whatever can we do?
I for one vow to keep eating excessively and will attach a tube to my abdomen to pipe excess fat directly into a furnace to keep my house warm in winter.
In summer I’ll probably cut down on the eating. Nah who am I kidding. I’ll just be in a house that’s too warm.
@ Windyhoe
“Like with most “green” things they are another scam. Next decade it will be global cooling and the threat of an ice age to scare us”
You are a clown. Is there a name of a Circus you belong to or are you a freelance amusement and where can we see you perform your special talent live…?
I’d like to get the full laugh out loud experience of your clearly ignorant and biased manipulation of reality.
:-J
@ Joe, (as if thats your real name).
Do you know if there is a way of making you pay instead of me for the damage your fantasies are doing ?
99.9% of people on this site are completely ignorant of climate science and the complexities involved. They have never heard of the AMO which will be turning negative soon and Ireland will be entering a long period of global cooling as it did in the 60/70/80s.
These jackassess then have the nerve to question me, one of the few experts on this site, which is full of supporters for “free” money and “endless” houses, “infinitive” growth a la ESRI fraudsters. The same s@@@ was thrown at me when I questioned it, and here I am again getting crap thrown at me by people who wouldnt know the AMO from the M50.
Go back to reading Harry Potter.
As you point out Dan Boyles record isn’t the greatest. Something to celebrate as he has the termerity to come to Wales occasionally to be Campaign Manager for the unionist Wales section of the Eng&Wales Green Party National Assembly for Wales/Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru election 2016 to work for a ‘leader’ who boasted “Yes I drive a Jaguar – but why should that stop me leading the Green Party?” and other eccentrics who havent won so much as a council seat in Wales. Lol. His job paid for by the Green party HQ London. No respect for Plaid Cymru the only party of Wales. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/pippa-bartolotti-yes-i-drive-a-jaguar-but-why-should-that-stop-me-leading-the-green-party-8061667.html
So now I have trolls on both sides of the Irish Sea. I feel honoured.