The government has got it wrong

Come the next General Election, Green Party deputy Eamon Ryan will be knocking on doors in Dublin South, seeking re-election as TD for the constituency. He believes climate change will be one of the main issues for people come election time.

“It’s more than an election issue – it’s the challenge of our times,” he says. “Not just at this election but the one after, and the one after that. But also it affects what type of car you are going to buy, what type of house are you going to buy and so on. These issues require us to review everything.”
He echoes the sentiment expressed by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth that climate change isn’t just an environmental problem, it’s a moral one.
Ryan argues that the policies of the current government have been pointed “diametrically in the wrong direction” in terms of the environment. “We’re spending three or four times more on roads this year than we are on public transport. That, when you look at the climate change issue, is almost criminal.”
Housing is another area where Ryan suggests that opportunities to support environmentally conscious schemes are being missed. “We’re building 90,000 houses this year. When you look at that figure, the fact that the Green Homes scheme might affect 4,000 at most is remarkable.”
Ask Ryan where successive governments have made mistakes in this country’s environmental policy, and his answer is simple. Planning.
“It’s the lack of proper long-term planning that has been the real fault – we have allowed our cities to become more akin to American cities, we have allowed the sprawl to occur. You can’t buy houses close to where you grew up, and that means you to travel long distances.”
With the new emphasis on global warming as an issue, the Greens might be somewhat miffed that their message is being hijacked. But Ryan insists they’re not. “There’s very little for us in saying we told you so. The fact that we’ve been saying it for 20 years doesn’t really matter.”
He says he’s more interested in the strategies that are now being proposed for the future. “The science of climate change is incontrovertible. We need to reduce our emissions, and that’s not easy. But it is achievable.”
In Ryan’s view, oil supply and climate change are the two major areas that need to be addressed by the international community. As oil supplies run out, the pressure to find alternative solutions will grow.
But he adds that one of the positive ideas contained in An Inconvenient Truth is that we have a unique opportunity to arrest the negative impact on the global environment. “It’s a personal thing as well – just simple stuff like taking the Luas instead of taking the car. It helps if we have political will rowing in behind that. But it’s both personal and political.
“It requires radical change, but that change is going to be for the better. Yes we can do it, but we must start doing it today.” b