"Green" policies are destroying this country

Data centres got notified that they will get one hour notice of power outages due to residential demand over winter. They will be cut off and run on their own generators.

We did the opposite and added more duty.

I know which I'd prefer!

And here's the problem. There are still many people who would rather watch the world burn than suffer a minor inconvenience or have a few less quid in their pocket. And there's enough of them that it wins votes for political parties with no morals.

diminishing! data please?

A mass cull of most of the humans on earth would do more too.

There are plenty of ways to reduce carbon footprint - but isn't the point of doing so because they project that global warming will pose a threat to human life?

Humans have already stopped the next ice age from happening by increasing CO2 concentrations from 280ppm to 413ppm

What nonsense.

We have an EV and a petrol car (7 seater, budget 2k, no EV available) so I'm not anti EV. I just am anti punitive taxes when there's no realistic alternative.

Over €1 of each litre is tax. So of the €1.71 thats at the garage where I bought my lunch today, over €1 goes to the government coffers. For each litre. Who does that target? I'm lucky that we can afford such luxuries as an EV - but other folks only have 2k for one car and thus are punished by these unfair taxes without a viable alternative. Our seven seater is a meagre 2004 VW, it costs nearly €100 to fill it from empty and only does 500km per tank.

I've paid effective income tax of over 30% for the past few years, so this is another 30% tax again!

Where does it stop though? Fuel prices have gone through the roof and are having a major effect on everyday lives, people can't afford to just go out and buy a new electric car on a whim and even those that might have nowhere to charge them because they are totally priced out of housing so what benefit is there to increasing carbon taxes except to punish the poor?

The vast majority of electric cars I see are €60k+ high end luxury items being driven around cities by above average income people who have access to public transport, the people who do the most amount of driving cant afford that and arnt convinced about the real world range of electric cars.

The whole "cars are evil" argument seems to have totally lost any merit considering our total emissions barely dropped last year.

If the Greens talked about ending growth or austerity, they would never get elected and nothing would ever be done about climate change.

The political reality is that the solution to climate change needs to be as painless as possible for people to buy into it. There are ways of doing this but it does involve a restructuring of how wealth is distributed around the world, which at the moment is completely distorted towards a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals

After WW2, the world needed to be rebuilt, we need a mindset similar to the marshall plan, where we need to rebuild the world in a way that is economically and environmentally sustainable

Money is a tool that we need to use to make the world a better place, not just as a mechanism for the 0.001% of the global population to hoover up assets to make themselves feel important

I absolutely understand where you're coming from. We need to put serious pressure on our politicians to help lower income households to transition to sustainable and renewable energy.

This will take investment, a lot of investment, but failing to do that will cost much more in the long run.

Carbon taxes are not supposed to be revenue generating taxes. They should be revenue neutral.

I think we should increase the carbon tax to be 40c a litre, and then calculate how much revenue this will make in the year, and then divide this number by the population of the country, and give that much money back to every household as a grant

back of the envelope- Private cars burn about 4 billion litres of oil per year, €0.40 tax on this would be 1.6 billion euros, 5 million people would be a grant of €320 per man woman and child in Ireland

A family of 5 would get €1600 per year that they could use to either just pay the additional fuel cost, or upgrade their car/insulation etc

People who don't drive private cars at all would get a windfall that they can use to offset their public transport costs, or buy an e-scooter or electric assisted bike or whatever, people who drive the most, would have the greatest incentive to go electric as their fuel bills would increase by the greatest amount.

In the meantime, the extra 40c per litre in tax would make it more attractive for new car purchases to either buy the most efficient Ice car available, or move to BEV.

There are always the hard cases, the family of poor farmers who live on loop head and need to do high mileage because everything is far away from them, but in general, this is how the carbon taxes should be set up. Not to punish or impoverish people, but to make less polluting options more attractive and allow market forces to organically transition away from fossil fuels

The paper's theory is that given the CO2 levels pre-industrialisation were not sufficient to yield a glacial inception, since CO2 levels have risen now post industrialisation, we wont see another glacial cold period until atmospheric CO2 falls well below the average during the Holocene which is substantially lower than current levels.

It plays down significantly the role of Earth's orbit "wobbling", and it also begs the question - if atmospheric CO2 was too high during the last few millenia to trigger an ice age when "conditions were most favourable", there isnt a hope in hell it will ever happen post industrialisation, even if we somehow did manage to achieve true carbon neutrality.

They also blame historical land use for rising CO2 levels over 2 millenia ago - absurd really. Natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions would dwarf any CO2 and GHG effect from farming at a time when total anthropomorphic CO2 emissions were absolutely miniscule.

As with most climate science, it is to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. While ice cores give us the best historical record we can reasonably get, these natural cycles have been going on longer than we can even see evidence of. There are likely other significant factors we dont even know about yet, because we have such a fixation on CO2.

Al Irish cars are over-priced compared with the UK and Europe, regardless of how sporty they are

If anyone was looking at a BMW M3, I would tell them to buy a Porsche Taycan instead, faster, cheaper to run, and won't drop in value like a stone when people realise they can't drive them in cities anymore due to ultra low emissions regulations that are only going to get more and more strict as time goes on.