"Green" policies are destroying this country

It's pure and utter fantasy to expect that hundreds of thousands of households in this country will take on tens of thousands of euro of personal debt in the next 8 years to meet the Climate Plan's target of 500k retrofits and 1 million EVs on the road. Not going to happen unless there is serious, and I mean serious, subsidies and supports available - not the currently paltry grants. Not many people can afford to take on €30k or more of debt for retrofitting that will take decades to pay back.

So what are you going to do to change that?

I know the COP is corrupted by oil and gas money, and all that stuff, but when our government makes commitments and the EU makes commitments, then it is the job of the voters to hold them to account. Every local, European, by-election, general election between now and we're carbon neutral should be dominated by how we are going to tackle climate change, who is going to pay for it, and how we are going to meet our targets

This is a planetary problem, its going to need drastic action, and this will involve investment funds similar to the Marshall Plan, but on an even bigger scale. Finance for countries to invest in infrastructure, and for families to transition from fossil fuels.

Personally, I think the ECB should be providing extremely low cost, extremely long term finance to Eurozone countries to pay for these changes. And the cost to the individual should subsidized to be close to zero for most medium to low income households, and for medium to high income households, it should be financed by long term very low interest finance.

A 10 year loan for 25k is 300pm/ish from a credit union with 10% APR, well **** that, the ECB should make financial instruments available for families at 0% interest, and over 10-20 years, this would reduce the monthly cost to 100pm, which, for a mid to high earner, is very affordable

Putting the responsibility and the burden on individuals to act WILL NOT WORK. Transitioning to carbon neutral energy needs to be made so easy and painless for individuals that it's more hassle to not do it, than to get it done.

I have an electrical engineer cousin in eirgrid and if you ask him at any point in the last decade, he will say that the grid has become less and less stable the more reliance they have on alternative energy like wind. Naturally the base load has been eroded with less reliable power sources. When the grid fails we will blame eirgrid even though every one of them would tell you they need a higher base load for the last decade. How do you increase the baseload without fossil fuels? You can build interconnections and buy electricity from nuclear or you can produce your own power from nuclear. We will make eirgrid responsible for something they have no control of, a political decision, a fear of nuclear. As we know relying on markets for energy is also relying on geo political sentiment as can be seen with the Nord stream pipeline. The cost of energy is a primary driver for a countries economic output. So we have a plan for insecure expensive energy currently because we are afraid of having a nuclear reactor or three. It is not a moral question since the power we will use will be derived from nuclear anyway via interconnect.

I believe we should should get a 20 year plan in place to bring our first reactor online.

however it will make a massive difference to us.

money savings via the use of less energy and more efficiently.

cleaner air, less pollution, minimal traffic in cities and towns.

we will be in a better position to deal with the effects then if we did nothing.

There's more than one way to reduce energy consumption. Cut back on heat in the house for example, it's unrealistic to expect to go around the whole house in a tee shirt in the winter. People used house coats in the past. Cut back on travel both by car and international. We could do a lot by reducing consumption and saving expenditure into the bargain. As opposed to lashing out tens of thousands on retrofits and fancy new EVs

That article said this

"He said "although things will remain tight and we may have some amber alerts, it will be challenging but manageable" this winter."

He also said our enduring capacity will be coming online in the next few years and this will allow us to increase generation capacity while reducing emissions

yes I agree, without being funded, these commitments are absolutely meaningless. We need serious proper action, not halfassed commitments. So we need to bombard our government with demands that these are properly funded, and they need to bombard the EU with demands that the EU makes finances available

They're making these commitments, instead of letting them get away with breaking them, you should be using that negative energy and channel it towards holding them accountable.

How many TD's have electric cars now? Has anyone done a survey or a simple count from the Dail car park which they are free to use for life?

Mary Robinson is feeling the frustration of the shower of corrupt arseholes trying to derail the summit to protect their own interests

https://twitter.com/skynewsSam/status/1458425470584860678

100% the green movement is being embraced by governments for the tax it brings in.

Considering our total emissions only dropped 3.6% and transport only dropped 15.7% in 2020 when a massive amount of cars were off the road it seems like they arnt really the issue.

the negative energy of always poking holes in everything and never being in favour of anything

If you're a realist, then you know that we need to move entirely away from fossil fuels as soon as we can, so this requires a plan and a roadmap to get everyone to our intended destination

Simply saying 'this is not going to work' is not very constructive

Talking about herself ?

Does someone need to explain the difference between realism and fanaticism for you? Because the Green movement is looking more like a totalitarian ideal rather than one for the betterment of humankind

Electric cars are much less complex to build than ICE cars, there are far fewer moving parts and the complexity is mostly in the software which has marginal cost of production measured in pennies

The Chinese are already building millions of BEVs and ramping up production on cheap efficient family sized cars

Then there's the possibility of retro-fitting existing ICE cars with electric motors and batteries. This might be something that could be used to bridge the gap and plenty of people would love to keep driving around in their luxury Jag but not having to pay the huge road tax and carbon taxes that are only going up. This would require the government to facilitate this via changes to the vehicle registration system and motor tax

Or if you just use a car for short trips around town, you can already convert it to BEV for about 2k if range is not a priority

I have said this in multiple threads, a government scrappage scheme on ICE ENGINES (not cars) so that people can take cars that are otherwise perfectly roadworthy and convert them to BEV for bangernomics money