"Green" policies are destroying this country

That level of change has to occur. As I have said elsewhere, the first thing I would do is ban the building of all houses outside of existing metropolitan areas, town and village hinterlands. The time of having a house six miles up a boreen has to be over.

The Boards.ie Thanos wants to wipe out 2/3rds of the Irish population with a click of his fingers....

Look, everyone counts their own sins as worth half of the sins of others (not in religious way)

Not everyone is so small minded and anti action on climate change, there are lots of people who live in the cities and the countryside who recognise that we need to act to prevent climate change, but there are a small percentage of people who are just selfish and ignorant and only care about themselves.

The farmer will look at the fellah in a city sitting in traffic burning fuel, while he will leave a tractor idling in a field for a half an hour going nowhere, the farmer will look at the person in the city throwing a cigarette butt on the ground, while he's polluting the groundwater with runoff from his nitrate fertiliser, the farmer claims to be green, while clearing acres of woodland to make space for a few cows (or to sell them as sites to the other rural dwellers who live in one off mansions in the countryside)

You can be guaranteed that the self righteous 'rural' people of Ireland will be the ones who block the new Grid infrastructure at every single opportunity because it offends their eyes to look at a pylon on or near 'their land', meanwhile city dwellers in apartments have to just put up with all kinds of development and inconveniences that nobody ever asks them about, and they never get a say in any of it because they don't own anything

Not suggesting the majority living in high density environments, but the Irish pattern of ribbon development and one-off housing is not sustainable. Clustered housing close to village and town facilities is the way forward.

true, but you can see we re currently defaulting, we re not taking these matters seriously, we re currently experiencing a slow row back on planned public transport infrastructure, a default towards the private sector to provide our critical needs, including households, none of this will truly work!

The point of the carbon tax is not to generate revenue, but to change behaviour and to make lower carbon energy more competitive

Of course, the carbon tax, accompanied with subsidies for fossil fuels is just stupid. instead of campaigning against carbon taxes, we should be campaigning against subsidised fossil fuels.

Phase out the fuel allowances and pay for these people to change to an electric heating system with better insulation

Where are all these people who are opposed to the green party raising taxes when fossil fuel industry worldwide is subsidised by 10 million euros a minute

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/energy-and-resources/fossil-fuel-industry-gets-subsidies-of-9-5m-a-minute-imf-study-1.4692682

I have produced the budget statements where the various Ministers stated what the carbon tax is being used for. You obviously believe the Ministers were lying. It is now over to you to prove that they were.

As far as I can see, the revenue from carbon tax was never great enough to cover the costs of the uses it was to be put to, so the Ministers were telling the truth.

It took the Dutch 40 years and massive investment in transport to change behaviours. Dutch cycling infrastructure is light years ahead of even the best cycling infrastructure being proposed in Ireland. Much of Irish cycling infrastructure comprises a painted line at the side of the road - that's not going to incentivise many people out of their cars.

Rail transport infrastructure in the Netherlands again is light years ahead of Ireland - there's 2,300km of electrified rail in the Netherlands, in Ireland we have 53km 🤣 or 2.3% of what they have. The Dublin Transport study published yesterday recognises that by aiming to have just 11.5% of journeys done in the GDA by cycling by 2042 while 50% of journeys will still be by car in 2042. With ambition like that people will just stay in their cars.

electricity can be rationed between households - those without electricity can run their car on flintstone power

Yup, a carbon tax to change behaviours is absolutely useless without viable and, critically, affordable alternatives. Otherwise it's just a revenue raising measure. Increasing carbon taxes while expecting people to take out huge debt to retrofit their homes is absolutely indicative of a government who have lost complete understanding of the real world.

You need to get out of the city a bit more often, let me give you an example.

If I build a new house in the field beside me what difference does that make to anything?

The road is there and has to be maintained so another house makes no difference,

The ESB poles are there, water connection from the local water scheme, your have to install your own sewage system, so why would anyone want to stop this happen is beyond me, but I have come to the conclusion that its pure jealousy al lot of the time, why would anyone want to rear kids in a dirty city when the can do it the clean country air.

You're wrong there. In the absence of alternatives, carbon taxes result in rationing behaviour, and force a ranking of priorities.

For the purpose of debate, I'm going to assume that was a genuine post and that that you're interested in answers to those questions.

Carbon taxes are designed to start out low, and increase over time. The whole point is that they are not a big burden at the start, but people making long term decisions will factor in the cost of increasing fuel bills when choosing between polluting vs less polluting options

If you're unable to afford to renovate your house now because of a couple of hundred quid worth of carbon taxes you're currently paying, then TBH, you're in bigger trouble than you think.

If your gas boiler is about to pack up after reaching the end of it's life span, you are incentivised to choose a high efficiency gas boiler, instead of the cheaper more inefficient one

As heating costs go up, You might be prompted to grasp the low hanging fruit in keeping your house warmer, install thermostatic radiator valves, fix the draughty window that you've been meaning to fix for ages, you might get the old lagging jacket replaced etc

If you are planning on changing your car, you might buy one that has better fuel economy out of the options you can afford.

Carbon taxes are not just consumer taxes, they also affect producers and businesses. If I am making a widget generating my own power from rooftop solar and transporting them on electric vehicles, my competitor making the same widget using fossil fuels is charged a couple of percent of carbon tax on top of the other costs of production. The greener producer can either charge a lower rate, or grow their business faster and out compete the less sustainable business

if two identical products are on a shelf, one of them is more expensive because they are less carbon efficient, then you're likely to buy the cheaper one. this incentivises consumers to prefer greener

To take an extreme example, Tesla generated most of their profits in recent years by selling excess carbon credits under the cap and trade scheme. This is a cost to polluting industry, and a revenue stream to Tesla.

Cap and trade and carbon credits are intended to ramp up over time, to reward early adopters, and increase the incentives to change to late adopters. The cost benefit is, that it costs more to be an early adopter as the technology is new and expensive, but those costs are offset by the incentives, but by the time the incentives are phased out, and the dis-incentives are ramped up (increasing carbon taxes, lower carbon credits), the technology is mature, and price competitive with the old technology thereby it's a no brainer that they should move naturally to the lower carbon technology.

We have a roadmap to get to a sustainable global economic system, we just need to avoid these tools from being corrupted so badly that the roadmap is completely hijacked (some corruption is inevitable btw, so while they should be investigated as best we can, the existence of corruption does not necessarily invalidate the entre proposal)