 Felly, mae'n gollwch, yn y pethau, mae'n gweithio eu bod yn meddwl yn y llwydd. Mae'n gweithio eu bod yn cyfnod yn y dda, rywbeth fel y ddod, ac rhan o'r ffrind i'r rywbeth ar gyfer y dystiolaeth ym Mhwy.цы'r ddysgu, mae'r ffrind i'r cyffredig yn y ddysgu i'r ffrind i'r ddysgu i'r ddysgu i'r ddysgu i'r ddysgu. Fynau'r ddysgu i'r ddysgu i'r arddangos cyllideb am y gweinidol, ar y bod ni'n gweithio gwbl yn gweithio ac mae'n cyfnod ar gyfer i'r gweithio. Fylau yr iechyd yn y cwm ddiweddon i ddechrau ac yn gweithio i ddod yn y gweithio chi ar yr ymddangas yn ei cyfnod yma. Felly mae'n meddwl meddwl y byddwn i gyda phoedd yr angen, i fewn ni'n cyffredin ar y cyvelyniad, byddai chyfnod oherwydd gyd, oherwydd chyfrno mairead yr hynod. Not the hype and the nice headlines, but fundamentally what it would mean to be net zero. And in that context I want to explore what a unilateral carbon policy looks like. Because that after all is what net zero is all about and indeed what all the initiatives that you, ESB and others are taking forward are engaged in. What is it that comprises the argument that you should do stuff even though Ireland is such a small part of the global warming picture? And to be blunt what you do will make very little difference to global warming itself. So why should you act unilaterally as a country and back to that carbon diary personally? And I want to argue that carbon pricing and particularly carbon border adjustments are absolutely critical to any attempt to do this in an economically efficient way. And that's not just because I'm an economist it's because if it's not done in an economically efficient way the burden on the population will be substantive and particularly to the poor and more vulnerable members of society. We have to find an efficient way to carry this out if we're going to do it unilaterally. And I want to throw into that mix something that's not discussed very much in climate change discussions which is that there are two halves to this problem. There's the stuff we put up there and there's the stuff the natural environment takes back out. A natural secretration what natural capital does is half at least of the problem. And while we're merrily pumping carbon into the atmosphere we're also trashing our rainforests, our soils, our peat bogs and so on and these are utterly crucial parts of the climate change story. And then I'll come back to you and your carbon diaries at the end. So let me start with net zero. I'm not very good at modern technology, I did my thesis with a typewriter and Tipex and carbon paper. So I'm going to ask a very crude way of doing this. How many people in this room think that at least by 250 Ireland should aspire to be net zero? Put your hand up. Right that's nearly everybody. A few exceptions. Now let me tell you what net zero actually means. We in the UK, our climate change committee has said that when we get to net zero in 250 we will no longer be causing climate change, any climate change will be no longer making any contribution to global warming. Utter rubbish, we will a lot unless of course we stop imports entirely. Carbon production as a net zero target is only part of the story. Oh and by the way just in case you think that you just project forward what you think current carbon production emissions look like in Ireland or the UK or elsewhere. Remember how implausibly set these numbers are. Where's the carbon loss from the soils? Where's the carbon loss from the peat? Where is the fact that the English Fens are blowing away gradually just inside at any reasonable carbon price? There'd be no agriculture in the British Fens whatsoever because of the peat loss from carbon. So just be careful about the number that the baseline you have at the beginning is. But this measures production. And when the climate change committee made their great announcement a few weeks ago, at the same time in the British news was the possible closure of British steel. Now if you want to do net zero carbon production you must be praying that British steel is going to close. Because of course that reduces your emissions of carbon in the UK. Why not finish it off? Actually just do Brexit. Close down the car industry take out Grangemouth the petrochemical plant. In fact close down British industry entirely. We would achieve net zero and we would significantly increase global warming because that steel would come from China with 60 to 70% coal production base. The petrochemicals would come from around the world. The fertiliser, the cement, the aluminium, all the stuff that underpins our modern economy will be imported from elsewhere at higher carbon intensities than we produce at the moment. So I hope you get my drift. Carbon production and indeed we have been reducing carbon production Europe does not reduce climate change. The deindustrialisation of Europe which has gone on since 1990 is part of the reasons why emissions in Europe have gone down but global warming has gone up. If you want to do net zero it's net zero carbon consumption and that includes imports. It's what you do, it's what you consume, it's what industry produces from you and it doesn't matter a dam whether it's produced in the UK, in Ireland, or in China or in Indonesia. What matters is the net carbon effect of the consumption that you do. And that's why you have to be very very careful that when you're really eager for net zero carbon production by 250 you are actually going to make things better. And if we look backwards over the last 30 years of all the efforts we've been making to reduce the impacts of climate change to mitigate climate change itself. There are some quite worrying characteristics. This chart is very familiar I think to most people just to really emphasise the point that David King was making. These are extraordinary times we're in. There isn't anything over the last 800,000 years which looks anything like what we're doing. In that sense the notion of extinction, rebellion and climate crisis is correct. It is extraordinary but the one graph that I find most troubling is this. In the last 30 years since 1990 there isn't a single blip in the increase of carbon concentration in the atmosphere. It goes up at now over two parts per million per annum. You can't even find the global financial crisis in there and the collapse of the Irish banks and the collapse of the financial systems in the US and in Europe. It just goes on remorselessly. This 30 years that we've had fighting climate change has in fact not just been 30 wasted years. It's been the greatest 30 years the fossil fuel industries have ever had. And it's really worth bearing that in mind. This is the great glorious age since 1990 of the oil, gas and coal industries. Behind all of that lies the enormous growth of China. Used to export coal at the end of the 1990s. It's now more than half the total world coal trade. If you look at the sorts of numbers that lie behind what's happened in the last 30 years it should give you pause for thought. And it should particularly give you pause for thought about whether we should rely on Kyoto and now Paris to do the job. Georgia, yes, great. But is it going to actually overcome the free rider problem? Is it actually going to deal with the scale of the problems we confront? Is top down going to work? My answer is might be helpful. But we have to confront the fact that at six to eight percent GDP growth per annum. China, India and Africa double the economic size every ten years. So by 2030 there'll be two China's, not one, two India's, not one and two Africa's. Oh and Indonesia, Brazil and all the other countries thrown in. And by 240 there'll be four China's, four Africa's and four India's. That is an enormous wall of consumption and it comes back to my central point. It's about decarbonising consumption, not just of affluent European countries, but of countries where people are coming out of poverty and aspire to the kinds of living standards we have. So if you think that what Kyoto has done has made any difference at all to climate change, tell me where in the numbers you can detect that. And on the Paris front we're nearly five years down the track. And what is the outcome? A series of pledges which don't add up to two degrees? Nobody's doing very much. And of course 1.5 on top of it we're way off course. So the question is if that is not going to do the job, maybe very useful, maybe helpful, maybe a good thing to pursue, what else is? And this is where we fall back to unilateralism. We've got to do it ourselves. And why? Well there are lots of different reasons put forward. The most important one is the moral one. It's your ethical duty not to make climate change worse, even if other people are. Just like it's your ethical duty not to steal, rob, murder, etc. Just because other people might be doing so. It's a deep moral commitment and that's what the young extinction rebellion and others are tapping into. It is also about leadership but you have to be very careful about bringing forward exemplars. They actually have to work. They have to show how to do it and how to do it efficiently. No good doing the energy vendor, closing your nuclear power stations and building 13 gigawatts of new coal and not bothering to close the rest of your dirty coal industry until 238. That isn't a good exemplar. Germany has demonstrated what you shouldn't do if you want to tackle climate change. We need something better, more enlightened, more directed. And we need to take into account in the process not just the climate but the extinction of species, a biodiversity, a natural capital and a natural environment where there are enormous opportunities. So unilateralism is the game in town but you need to do it properly and you need to do it with a view to your carbon consumption, not your carbon production. The most efficient tool in all of this is a carbon price, a uniform carbon price. To date climate change has been a wonderful home for lobbyists, campaigning for subsidies for their own particular technologies and we have ended up in Europe with some of the most expensive things being done first while leaving low hanging fruit sitting out there and not harvested. Take agriculture. In the UK agriculture is 0.7% of GDP. Less than the additions to the ONS numbers for the national accounts of the illegal sex and drugs industry. It's trivial. It's not to belittle what farmers do, it's incredibly important what farmers do. But it's very small. And of the 9 billion it produces, this is the UK numbers, 3 billion is direct subsidy. It has cheap diesel, red diesel, subsidised carbon consumption. It doesn't pay for the pesticides, the nitrates, the fertiliser run-offs etc. We don't have inheritance tax for farmers, we don't have business rates etc. The net economic output is low. And yet farmers in the UK cover 70% of the land area and the soils are by far the most important carbon sink we've got with peat together four times more important than the atmosphere. And the way we treat the soils, the way we secretrate the carbon, the way in which we plant trees etc. These are cheap low hanging fruit and we haven't done anything about them at all. Instead we've concentrated on some of the most expensive renewables technologies first and as a side it's not true that offshore wind is grid competitive or cost competitive and that's because it's not equivalent firm power. Once you add the full cost intermittency on to a system we've still got quite a long way to go. That's not to say the cost reductions aren't fantastic and really good news but this idea, oh it's all subsidy free now. Well great, get outside Parliament. No subsidies for renewables, banish them now, abolish subsidies now. If that's what you believe that you think it's cost competitive you don't need any subsidies and of course you do. It's vital those subsidies are there because we are not on a level playing field yet for the renewables. We'll get there but not quite yet we need the support. So we need to have a uniform carbon price which allows people to search for the most cost effective ways of finding emissions reductions and we need to think quite hard about how we normalise renewables into the electricity system and that's essentially equivalent firm power auctions. And of course the carbon price must apply at the borders to imports as well as home production. That makes it carbon consumption based net zero, not carbon production. I just wanted to mention quickly before coming back to you and your personal responsibilities, natural sequestration. So there's a lot of talk rightly about how the hell we get the carbon back out of the atmosphere and bury it in some form or other because it's not clear that we're going to decarbonise the generation of those emissions fast enough. And all the focus goes on CCS and that's what I call industrial sequestration. Piping the stuff into holes in the ground, storing it in those holes in the ground, monitoring them etc having first separated it. But the other side of sequestration is the environment does it for us all the time. Our planet would not be habitable but for the sequestration by the oceans, by the great rainforest, by the soils, by the peat bogs etc. And these turn out to be often much much cheaper options than the options of industrial sequestration. Not saying we shouldn't do industrial sequestration but on a par we should think very clearly about our land. And think how much better you can use the land than we use it at the moment. Think how modern agriculture has abused our landscape. Think of the biodiversity, think of the mental, physical, recreational other benefits from benignly looking to sequestrate carbon in our soils to planting the right kinds of trees in the right kind of places to making it possible for our natural environment to be green and prosperous to use the title of my recent book as well as carbon sequestrating. Net zero on agriculture should meet up and have a pretty good marriage pretty quickly and indeed celebrate it in Irish fashion as well. Which brings me finally to personal responsibilities. It's a great illusion and it's a particularly illusion of all those people demonstrating that you know the cause of climate change is those ghastly corporates, those fat cat executives who sit in these international companies and don't give a damn about the environment and the climate. It's nice and convenient and they can pay for it too. The trouble is it's just not true. All the production that takes place in the world's economy is for us. It is us that do the carbon consuming. It's us that live in the houses. It's us that need the steel. It's us that buy the food off the supermarket made from fertilisers from the Harbour Bosch process with loads of CO2 emissions, the pesticides, the nitrates, et cetera, et cetera. It's us that uses the transport. It's us that goes on personal holidays. And therefore it's us that ultimately the cause and therefore the solutions to climate change lie with. That's why I'd like you to keep a carbon diary because what you'll observe is two things. One is just how remarkably carbon percolates almost every aspect of your life. That's how we got from 2 billion people at the beginning of the 20th century to 7 billion people. It's a carbon century. So, first of all, realise that, but also realise the huge opportunities to improve one's own life by being lower carbon, by walking, by cycling, by taking those holidays here, not abroad, by doing a whole variety of things, buying local products, all those small little steps that enable you at least to say that you personally have accepted the moral responsibility that you are not causing any more global warming. And, of course, if we have a carbon tax with a carbon border judgment, that's actually the best way of getting back to the top-down solution. If you're a Chinese exporter and you have to pay a carbon tax at the border coming into Dublin port to the Irish government, but instead you could have a carbon tax at home, keep the money for yourselves, and therefore have an exemption from the carbon tax coming in because you've already priced carbon. What are you going to do? You're going to be encouraged to get on your own carbon tax as well. A domestic carbon tax with a border adjustment, a target focused on net carbon consumption zero and a personal responsibility and a better and more healthy natural environment doing the secretration, all part of the upsides of addressing climate change. As well, of course, of splitting out the light spectrum, doing solar film and doing all the exciting things that the electricity industry is going to have to do because we're going to be in a digital world which will be electric and therefore require that electric power to be the backbone of our economies going forward. So keep a personal diary, remember why unilateralism matters and then think through one's own moral responsibilities for that personal transition. Thank you very much.