Ireland Initiates ‘War on Climate Change’
This week the Irish Government has signed into law the Climate Action Bill. The legislation states that Ireland must halve its total carbon emissions by the year 2030, and achieves net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The aim of the bill is to make Ireland a “climate neutral” economy. According to Eamon Ryan, this is a “challenge beyond compare”, that will completely change how Ireland operates. This action is strikingly similar to other attempts by ‘Big Government’ to seemingly act in the public’s best interests, whether we like it or not. Their view is that climate change is our generational crisis, much like drugs, poverty, hunger, and terrorism that came before. Governments have tried in the past to address these issues, and none have succeeded.
In the 1970’s, Richard Nixon declared that drugs were “public enemy number one”, and intensified criminalisation of controlled substances. The total cost of this strategy, termed the ‘War on Drugs’, is almost incalculable. Thankfully however, it has proved to be completely uncontroversial and remarkably effective, and now 50 years later, nobody suffers from the harmful effects of illegal drugs as a result.
In the 1960’s, again in America, the US Government initiated the ‘War on Poverty’. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid were instituted. Food stamps became enshrined in law. Numerous government agencies were created to implement the policy. Now, travelling through the United States, it is nigh on impossible to find a single person who suffers from poverty, lack of housing or education, poor mental health services, or lack of opportunities to find work. Irish minister for Social Inclusion Joe O’Brien has this week announced his own aim to all but eradicate poverty in Ireland, let’s see if he succeeds.
When we are faced with social problems of this scale, the government has two options. On one hand, they can do nothing, take a back seat, and leave people free to decide the appropriate level of response to an issue based on their values. On the other hand, the government can act, which proves to be infinitely complex.
The Climate Action Bill, for example, represents an infrastructural challenge the likes of which Ireland has never seen before. It is attempting to substitute reliable and cheap energy sources for intermittent, expensive, unreliable, renewable energy, which is supported by natural gas, a ‘clean’ fossil fuel, and fuel bought from our neighbours via undersea cables. This will result in more expensive energy, and make us more prone to rolling blackouts in the event of extreme weather. The model for this is Germany, which has among the most expensive electricity in the world due to widespread adoption of renewables, and regularly fails to meet its energy demand, importing electricity from nuclear powered neighbours like France.
The Bill doesn’t mention that Ireland will source our solar panels and materials from countries like China, produced in coal-fired factories, which happily sell them to us. All while adopting carbon-free, clean, and safe nuclear energy to power it’s rapidly expanding energy demand.
Taking action at the national scale reduces a citizen’s ability to think and act freely. Policies like the ‘War on Drugs’, or the ‘War on Poverty’ use coercion through high taxes and public spending, which limit each of our capacity to decide what’s important to ourselves as individuals. They are completely undemocratic. If you are a lower income household, you probably don’t want to pay higher electricity bills. FF/FG along with the Green Party have decided that you will. The other main political parties in Ireland have an even more extreme social agenda, promising to wage wars on homelessness, the North, income inequality, even road traffic. So someone in a lower income household cannot vote their way to freedom. The only options are to stop being poor, more difficult than it seems, or to emigrate.
If you live in the developing world, you are more likely to suffer from extreme weather, due to the location and the infrastructure. What citizens of these countries need is access to cheap, reliable energy to build houses, schools, factories, and offices with air-conditioning and consistent electricity supply. The supposed ‘climate crisis’ is lower on their agenda compared to combatting actual poverty. In 1985 Bob Geldof hosted Live Aid to combat world hunger, and every year in Ireland we put money in Trócaire boxes. Allowing poorer nations to make industrial progress is what puts food on the table consistently.
Taking action is sure to prove politically gainful for FF/FG, who are happy to greenwash their parties for political gain, while those who are currently in office will be long gone by the time the effects of their policies come to fruition. No matter how extreme the ‘War on Climate Change’ will prove to be, there are those who say it is ‘watered down’, that it ‘doesn’t go far enough’. There are others who might think the problem is not really a problem at all, or who think it should be addressed in a more nuanced way. If an idea is really a good idea, rational people could be persuaded to support it. If it’s truly a bad idea, then the only way to gain support is to make it law.
This is not the first time governments have taken it upon themselves to be our moral and social guide. In the past, when politicians wage war, it’s a direct attack on the freedom of individuals, in the name of social good. Whether this war is necessary or not is impossible to prove. Whether it will be successful or not is much clearer.
