How Climate Hope Dies?
This is the complete original text of a letter submitted to the Editor of the Irish Times on 28th July 2016 (but now with added hyperlinks). A version of this, significantly edited/shortened for publication, appeared in the Irish Times on 30th July 2016.
The Editor, The Irish Times
Sir —
Dr. Gareth P. Keeley rehashs the tired and self-serving trope that Ireland can and should exempt itself from any challenging climate action on the basis that it happens to be a comparatively small country in global terms (Letters, 28th July 2016). This is specious on multiple grounds, but it particularly misses the true significance of our diplomatic “victory” last week, in relation to the EU climate effort sharing proposals to 2030. For of course, it was not just Ireland’s climate action that was at stake: it was the combined ambition of the entire European Union, one of the handful of dominant economic blocks on the planet. And we in Ireland (albeit with other fellow travelers) deliberately contaminated that ambition with special pleading, “flexibilities”, and scientifically barren “offsets”.
This when we know full well that the EU-wide 2030 climate and energy package falls far short of addressing the climate goals so solemnly agreed just last December in Paris. Instead of expending our political capital in working with our EU partners to realise those goals, we chose to export An Béal Bocht — not as a work of satire, but grotesquely re-imagined as a handbook of international diplomacy. And it has already worked. Barely was the ink dry on this European Commission 2030 proposal, than Poland, with one of the least demanding targets, was declaring that it could not “afford” action that might “unduly inconvenience the Polish economy.”
Is this what we are come to, in this year of centenary celebration of our nationhood? Our solidarity with the global poor and oppressed abandoned in the lust for one more quick fix, one more stroke, one more lash at the celtic tiger delusion that just a little more fossil fueled “growth” would finally "lift all boats"?
We are sowing the wind; knowing, in our secret, cynical, hearts, that the reaping of the whirlwind (metaphorical — and literal) will fall to the young, the poor, and the vulnerable, here and across the world.
No, here is no cause for celebration. On the contrary, this is how honest hope dies, drowned in a tidal wave of hypocrisy and cant.
Yours etc.
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
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Professor Barry McMullin,
Executive Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Dublin City University
phone: +353-1-700-5432
web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/
skype: barrymcmullin-dcu.ie
room: L116
For reference, here is the shortened/edited version, as published:
