Carbon Tax Increase

State enforced poverty on the way

Leo Varadkar has said that in the next budget the carbon tax will have to increase to meet our climate change obligations. At the same time, he said that there would be increases in social welfare expenditure further contributing to our unsustainable government spending and debt bubble.

The carbon tax rate is currently €20 per tonne, the Unelected Citizen's Assembly have called for it to be raised to € 70. It will lead to an increase in heating and motor costs at a time when electricity bills have also increased and are among the highest in Europe, hitting the poor the most. In essence, this is the Irish government enforcing poverty on the Irish people through constant meddling in the energy market with taxes and levies, in defiance of the Irish Constitution which states that :

The State pledges itself to safeguard with especial care the economic interests of the weaker sections of the community, and, where necessary, to contribute to the support of the infirm, the widow, the orphan, and the aged. Varadkar says he will implement "complimentary measures" for those worst effected by the carbon tax. A case of the government trying to solve problems that itself has created, at the expense of the taxpayer, of course.

At the same time, they are hypocritically backing the push from big corporations for power guzzling data centres which ESB Networks recently said would lead to a significant surge in demand for electricity generation :

"over the past five years new users - largely data centres - have used capacity on the network that historically would have catered for 30 years load growth. To put it in context, the current load in Dublin is around 1,200MW with potentially more than 1,000MW of data centre requirements to be connected".

The Grange Castle area in West Dublin has seen a raft of applications for data centres. To power them, at least two gas power stations are planned for Grange Castle and Clondalkin which will drastically increase emissions.

The Climate Change Advisory Group which includes economist John Fitzgerald of ESRI claim we need to reduce emissions by 1 million tonnes of carbon per year.  This is impossible with the planned data centres in the pipeline. 

Last year, total CO2 emissions from power stations in Dublin were 2.1 million tonnes (EPA). Using the above ESB figures, this means that an extra 1,000MW of data centres would lead to additional emissions of 1.8 million tonnes. The current generation fleet in Dublin is all gas powered, and it is assumed that the new generators would also be gas powered (one of the planned generators in West Dublin has said they will convert to biogas in 5 years - lets see, why not commence with biogas and save conversion costs?). 

So everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room and acting like a carbon tax will have an impact on our emissions, when in fact a limit on the number of data centres would have the most significant impact on reducing emissions. Our government somehow manages to worship at the alter of multinationals and genuflect to the climate god at the same time.

There are currently no politcal parties that I know of who oppose the carbon tax. Surely a great political opportunity to be had.




From the Sunday Times: 
• https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/dublins-big-data-centres-devour-all-the-power-tbq3xdfh2

If We Really Care about Sustainability Then Lets Look at our Debt

by Owen Martin




Ireland's debt burden is understated by standard GDP comparisons. Using adjusted Gross National Income (GNI*), which adjusts GDP for the impact of foreign multinationals who book their large non Irish profits here, our debt burden remains high at 111% for 2017. Our government still runs up deficits each year adding to this debt. Government spending is still out of control. 

Ireland's unemployment rate in 2012 was 16%, it is now at 6%, a fall of 62%. Yet, social welfare payments (excluding pensions) have only fallen by €2 billion, from € 14.5bn to € 12.5bn, a fall of just 14%.  How can this be justified?

Our EU contribution has doubled since 2012 to €2.6bn. Our already bloated health sector, one of the most well funded in Europe, has had an increase of €1 billion in it's budget. The funding for housing has more than doubled to €3.3 billion. Superannuation and retired allowances have increased by €50m to €570m. Foreign Aid spending has increased by €40 million to €500m.  Spending on public broadcasting has also increased, now reaching € 255 million.

This level of debt and spending is clearly unsustainable and allows us basically to consume resources beyond our means - the very definition of unsustainability. Yet many politicians from all sides want to increase spending and debt further, whether it's hikes in public sector pay or bringing in more migrants who require public housing and medical services.  

This should be target number one on the list for groups like the Citizen's Assembly. But of course it doesn't even feature in climate change discussions as climate policy is just another justification for more spending, more taxation and more debt. 





1) https://whereyourmoneygoes.gov.ie/en/ 

2) Unemployment rate was 5.8% in may 2018. population increased by about 4% since 2011, according to CSO.

Meteorologist Slams Citizen's Assembly for Lacking in Scientific Impartiality

Professor Ray Bates Urges Prudence on Climate Change

Ray Bates, once head of research at Met Eireann and a former senior scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre, has urged the Government to pursue a prudent climate change mitigation strategy "consistent with safeguarding our economy" and has warned that "we could go seriously wrong if we continue with measures that may do incalculable damage to Ireland's economy and the well-being of its people".  He has criticized the Citizen's Assembly body, whose primary recommendation is that climate change be placed at the centre of policy making in Ireland, for "lacking in scientific impartiality".

The Bill under discussion and the recommendation of the Citizen's Assembly are based on a view that we are indeed in a climate emergency . They will involve costly unilateral actions by Ireland going far beyond anything we are required to do under our EU obligations. Given this, it is astonishing that more public debate has not taken place regarding the underlying assumptions.

Having attended the Assembly as an observer he found "the scientific talks given, to varying degrees, to be lacking in scientific impartiality. Rather they appeared to me to be tailored to promote the political goal embodied in the wording of the Assembly's assigned topic. Some examples :"  

•  Global warming predictions from the climate models were presented without the appropriate caveats regarding the models' reliability and their tuning to give a climate sensitivity lying in an anticipated acceptable range.

•  One researcher spoke of the dangers of increased flooding without making any reference to a 2017 article on which he himself was a co-author, which found that over the past 80 years, "the number of significant trends in major flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately the number expected due to chance alone. Changes over time in the occurance of major floods were dominated by multidecadal variability rather than by long term trends.

•  Another researcher stated that El Nino causes a change of only 0.1C in global average temperature, thereby denying the fact that it was El Nino, not greenhouse gases, that caused the 0.5C spike in global warming peaking in February 2016.

He also believes that recent media headlines suggesting that climate change was the cause of more weather extremes was "misleading, but feeding into recent developments in climate politics."

While acknowledging that climate change is happening and that greenhouse gases do indeed have a warming effect, Bates makes the point that the available evidence does not indicate that a climate emergency is looming :

Does the observed record of global warming indicate a climate emergency ? The most important index to examine in this regard is the global sea surface temperature. Ocean temperatures are free from the effects of urbanisation and land use changes that limit the reliability of land temperatures. The increase in the global average sea surface temperature from it's temporary peak around the middle of the last century to its present value is quite small: the difference between the 1936-1950 average and the 2000-2014 average is only 0.36C.  

Neither our recent unusual weather events nor the general progress of global warming provide sufficient evidence of a climate emergency to justify the costly unilateral climate measures that are now under way in this country.

The full article was published in the Sunday Business Post and can be found here.

One thing I have noticed with the Citizen's Assembly is that there is zero recognition of the fact that we have already installed 3,000MW of wind energy, roughly the equivalent of the capacity of seven or eight power stations, yet the Irish climate continues to be extreme i.e. wind energy has had zero impact on the climate yet they insist on more such measures to be introduced immediately rather than exercising prudence and basing policy on robust analysis as Professor Bates advocates.