"Green" policies are destroying this country

She's a sincere concerned young person - and the fact that you can't see that show your real character.

this is 2022

Al Gore's film was released 16 years ago, and I have never even watched it.

Charlie your a clown.

'Doom mongers' who happen to be more supported by the science than the 'warmists' who you seem to be rolling behind?

We're almost guaranteed to reach 2c of climate change even if we reach all of our targets,

If we delay reaching those targets by building more Fossil fuel infrastructure, we're locking ourselves into 3c of warming

Every 1/10 of a degree we warm increases the risk of triggering more positive feedbacks which can cause runaway climate change

I have followed the science in some considerable detail for over a decade at this stage. There have been some adjustments to the understanding of climate change over that time - refinements based on better data - but really I have seen nothing that disproves the basic premise that the earth is warming at a steady rate and this is unprecedented in 10's of thousands of years of data.

The word is not skeptic - it is denier. A skeptic is capable of assimilating evidence.

The IPCC is the basis of any predictions I would quote - which is based upon the collected work of thousands of climate scientists. Their predictions have not significantly changed since their first report back in the 1990's. The same predictions were been made by scientists back in the 1970's - but with less data so the predictions were more general. These prediction were also been made by scientists working for the policy divisions of companies such as Exon and Shell.

The reality of man made global warming and climate change has been well know for over 50years at this stage. The first modelled predictions of the degree of warming to expect are remarkably accurate to the data which is now been demonstrated by the datasets today.

Scrambling again attempting to cover you again got it wrong on with your "All nuclear plants ever built" I see.

We hear a lot of this about timelines and budgets from greens on issues that do not fit the ideology, but when asked the same for their pet projects there is never a timeline for completion or even a vague budget. Why is that ?

For people so picky about there accuracy from others, I would have thought they would have both in great detail.

Seeing as you brought it up !`m a qualified civil engineer. Admittedly I didn`t remain in the profession long as I found a more lucrative and stable way of making a living, but that does not mean I have forgotten everything I learned of which the most basic was that design is based on worst case scenario and even then includes a safety factor added. That also applies to design on counter balance.

On your third point, nuclear would do the same, even at a higher percentage and a higher degree of dependability.

On your fourth, no hand-waving away. There is not even a suggestion of storage capacity being able to handle the shortfalls we have seen three times this year for extended periods anytime soon if ever.

Five hasn`t much going for it other than wishful thinking and six we keep being told about, but when we had 42% from renewables we were the 4th most expensive in Europe for electricity which does not make for a great selling point.

"getting to 80% renewable electricity saves a load of ghgs and helps us to reduce our climate impacts which is our target for 2030"

Ireland getting to 80% renewable electricity will reduce our climate impact by 0.0°C.

"Storage absolutely will be a huge part of the future grid. You are simply handwaving this away."

More Green unobtainium that's not going to happen. What technology will the storage be based on, and how much of it will we have by 2030, 2040, 2050?

"Ireland will become an exporter of energy when conditions are favourable. This will more than offset the rare times when we need to import energy."

Who's this "Ireland"? You do realise that wind capacity is built by private money and auctioned at eye-watering prices which are locked in for a decade or more. The latest government RESS 2 auction in May purchased 414 MW of new wind from 14 proposed onshore wind farms at an average of €97.87 per megawatt hour. It's up 32% compared to the RESS 1 auction in 2020. I thought this stuff was supposed to be getting cheaper? That is over twice the average wholesale price of electricity in 2019. (2020 was lower than that due to reduced demand, 2021 was higher due to the natural gas price spike -- neither are representative).

When we talk about the gas being produced in Corrib we're told that the money is made by evil corporations and sold at market prices. But when we talk about wind power, suddenly it's being produced by some mythical "Ireland"? If "Ireland" has dozens of gigawatts of excess capacity simple market dynamics tell you that it will be worth essentially zero on the day ahead market, not to mention that we will have nothing remotely approaching that capacity on interconnectors. When "Ireland" needs to import energy, it will be at market price (but the "Ireland" that you're talking about -- Big Wind -- won't be paying for it). Where's this "offset" supposed to be coming from?

"The marginal cost of production for renewables is almost zero, there is no fuel required, and the infrastructure is already there, so this opens up entirely new markets in grid servicing and most domestic users will top up their batteries with cheap off peak power thereby making the entire grid more efficient."

Uh, no. The grid infrastructure isn't there. We have to pay for that on top of the cost of the wind capacity. Plus we have to pay for the cost of backup generation. Simple arithmetic tells you that paying multiple times for the same power will cost you multiple times as much. And storage infrastructure isn't there and never will be.

If I'm wrong about this, show me the plan with actual figures and not just a load of Green "hopium" where they forget to tell you how this is going to kill the economy.