"Green" policies are destroying this country

The real issue with heat pumps is that electricity costs 4x what coal does (and to a lesser extent all other fossil fuels), and only produces a COP of 3x which still makes it more expensive than burning coal. Hard figures to argue against if your on a tight budget.

The reason they are setting a minimum BER target of B2 is because this is the point when the cost penalty of heat pumps becomes manageble.

For many a solution such as wood pellet is a far better solution

Any farmer not farming with 170kg N/ha now in mind, and hoping for an extension to derogation is foolish. The 220 won't be retained either unless the new EU commission after the next elections is focused in a different way, but I wouldn't expect it to be much different. Though they are rowing back on some animal welfare targets for fear of driving food prices up.

The big problem with the reduction from 250 to 220 is twofold. First, the changes being put in place over the last few years haven't been given time to see if they are working or not, plus any nitrates found in water are automatically given to dairy and the dairy industry takes the hit, despite tillage being more prone to N leaching depending on how the tillage enterprise is managed. Dairy, and in particular derogation dairy farmers have a huge raft of actions to comply with which haven't been given the time to see if they are working or not. Secondly, the timeframe for the reduction to 220 is very short (4 months). The indications were that it would be reduced, but the timeframe was expected to be longer. What's happened now is that leases were signed, animals in calf, etc from previously are now a pain point. A derogation farmer needs to either export slurry (double previous amounts as the N content has been reduced), get more land (thus driving land prices bananas) or reduce stock. The latter here then means a flood of cows going to head for slaughter in the next few months, in-calf heifers being sold below value to offload (assuming buyers can be found) and valuable heifer calves that were destined for dairy being fattened and slaughtered on a beef enterprise, again moving between the 2 for below value. This then has a knock on effect of impacting beef enterprises (glut of cheaper beef in the market) and tillage (being out priced for land by dairy). The financial hit in the next 4 months to dairy on top of already collapsed milk price is going to be nasty. Any change such as this should be given more than 4 months to implement. i think that 's a fair ask.

In the timescale that you're claiming to be worried about, the length of time it takes to repay national dept, millions of acres of Irish land will become inundated with sea water, coastal cities towns villiages, beaches, roads, infrastructure will be washed away if we do nothing to mitigate climate change now

With the antarctic ice sheet being less stable than initially thought, we could be on the worst case scenario trajectories with .5 of a metre sea level rise in the next few decades, leading to over 1.5 metres by 2100, and continuing at that that trajectory, between 3-5 metres of additional warming in the next century...

Doing nothing to stop climate change guarantees incessant sea level increases for hundreds of years, with the consequences getting worse and worse as time goes on.

Thats one way of looking at it, (if you are determined to completely distort the facts)

This is an agreement that Ireland won't cut off gas to NI if the UK doesn't cut off gas to the Republic.

It's a perfectly sensible bi-lateral agreement and does absolutely nothing to stop us from proceeding with our plans to reduce our reliance on gas, and doesn't require any white elephant infrastructure that locks into contracts to feed a LNG supply

The rich are famously a good role model for how the rest of us should use our resources.....

Oh, sh1t, I forgot to pay the parking metre on my billion euro super yacht

People 'building on flood plains' and river deltas doesn't disprove that those places are gonna be the first places to flood in the coming decades.

The fact that governments all around the world are ridiculously short sighted, and prone to going along with developments for short term gain is exactly why we're in the mess we're in today

What choices did he make other than just to continue with more of the same leaving us ever more dependent on gas from the U.K. as the Corrib field becomes depleted. ?

That`s not going to improve our energy security. Something for which Ryan`s own commissioned and paid for energy security review told him a LNG terminal was necessary.

I think a lot of people dip in and out of forums like this who have more immediate or longterm worries in their lives than climate change, or how some of the insanity being proposed is going to effect their lives, especially financially.

If there is one thing greens will not divulge it is financial costs of their proposed insane measures yet are not so shy about making often exaggerated claims on costs and timelines on any proposals that does not suit their agenda.

Personally I do not believe they should be given free range to spout that type of rhetoric attempting to influence others unchallenged

So many things wrong with those statements.

• The Shannon LNG proposal was to not use LNG from fracked sources. To imply all LNG is from fracked sources is wrong.
• Fracking is a standard Green bogeyman, a bit like GMO "frankenfoods" back in the 90s. Green Luddite thinking regularly gets fixated on point-in-time issues with no revisions ever to allow for technology evolution. Fracking environmental standards are not a fixed thing. Modern fracked wells recycle their waste water, are surrounded by completely sealed rubber berms, have new standards for well casings and liners, use high resolution seismic to look for possible connections from the fracked strata to groundwater. I've no idea why Irish Greens think they have a role in setting the policy of the US EPA -- you know, the people likely to be most concerned about what's going on in their country.
• As usual with Greenies, there are massive double standards. Geothermal is one of the poster children of renewable energy. All geothermal wells are fracked. To be sure, they don't use the same chemicals as oil and gas fracking, but deeper ones use the same slickwater / polymer additives to prevent well bore furring. Geothermal fracking produces wastewater and hazardous waste. It comes with the same subsidence and earth tremor issues as O&G fracking. "Dissolved solids discharged from geothermal systems include sulfur, chlorides, silica compounds, vanadium, arsenic, mercury, nickel and other toxic heavy metals" (source: US Fish and Wildlife Service). All energy production involves trade-offs. Greens mount insidious campaigns against the forms they don't like and lie about the ones they do. Intelligent people should not let them away with it.
• All fossil fuel transportation incurs additional energy and emissions costs. Pipeline gas is cheaper and more efficient on those counts than LNG. That is absolutely correct, and our pipeline from Moffat is very welcome. However, we have no gas storage beyond line pack and no diversity of supply. The ability to store gas seasonally is a mainstay of energy security around the world. It's a bit of a headscratcher why Ireland thinks it's special in this regard, especially when the EU has been telling it as much for years.
• Yes, Ryan is correct to sign contracts with the UK. That doesn't mean he's not also a swivel-eyed zealot who makes terrible decisions about our energy supply. Examples: failing to evaluate LNG and indigenous resources on sensible grounds, creating a terrible market climate for gas generators and now having severe problems ensuring security of electricity supply, trying to lock us into technologies that either don't exist or are uncertain to be commercialised, endangering our energy future through insanely optimistic utopian thinking, refusing to come clean on the costs involved. The man is a serious danger to our society.

You ARE joking!!!!!

This is the standard confusion the greenies make between 1) anthropogenic and natural variation, and 2) local and global mitigation measures.

Firstly, if "Dublin and Cork [are] both cities acutely vulnerable to even small sea level rises" then you better start evacuating right now. Sea level has been consistently rising by 25 cm per century for the last 7,000 years (and greatly more before that). The idea that we would be wiped out by an additional 25 cm represents extraordinary levels of doom mongering. Kinda hard to understand how Dublin has survived the last thousand years, though, or at least the last 300 if you prefer to count from when the Liffey embankment was built and the current city levels cast in stone.

Secondly, perhaps you can answer how many millimetres of sea level rise will be averted if Ireland spends 150 billion on energy infrastructure. Seeing as nobody on here ever answers that question, I'll do so as usual. It's zero. Climate change is global. Mitigation measures have to be global. The current suggestion is to spend $4 trillion annually on the effort, about 5% of global GDP. Personally I'd like to wait to see everyone else step up to the plate with their 5% before we commit to something that, on its own, will have exactly zero impact on climate mitigation. And even then I'd want it spent on something less hare brained than current Green policies.

Well that's a bit of a generalisation don't you think?

Are you saying that all of the science around climate change is wrong?

Oh, if you think we can reverse the impact of previous decisions you're wrong. We're absolutely locked in for a fair bit of warming. Those bad decisions in the past, they've already fu.cked us. We are now in a position where if we continue to make more bad decisions, we're just piling more and more consequences onto our future selves and our children.

The scientific consensus has been clear for decades. The governments of the world were actually on the right track at the start, taking action and making provisions for a carbon neutral energy system. Then the Oil industry got involved and corrupted everything (many of those politicians were pretty easy to corrupt)

The RCP 8.5 scenario refers to emission concentrations and it's assumed that human emissions will eventually start to fall and plateau. Unfortunately human emissions are only part of the picture. Tipping points are not accounted for in the RCP scenarios and it's likely that some tipping points will be triggered within our current emissions pathway, and possible that those may in turn cascade and trigger more tipping points.

RCP 8.5 predicts 4.5c by 2100. I don't want 2100 to be the end of history, so we need to look at temperature increases beyond 2100 which is where 7c of warming came from...

Whether it's 7c or 4c it's all much the same (very very bad for humanity)

The hothouse earth paper in PNAS supports everything I have said