MEPs have rejected the main concession Ireland secured from the European commission last year on climate change targets, putting the country on course to pay millions of euros for non-compliance after 2020.
The decision by the European Parliament’s environment committee, which is likely to be approved by the full parliament in the coming weeks, would require Ireland to pay for its failure to achieve EU emissions targets by purchasing emissions allowances from other EU countries which are exceeding their targets.
The price other countries will charge Ireland is not yet clear, but assuming a price of €20 per tonne of CO2 in 2020, in line with the price of tradable CO2 allowances used by industry, Ireland could have to pay €130m in 2021, with further payments due in subsequent years. This is based on a shortfall of 6.5m tonnes of CO2 in 2021 and no use of other loop-holes, such as planting trees, which carry their own investment cost.
Last year Denis Naughten and Michael Creed, the environment and agriculture ministers respectively, successfully lobbied the commission to give Ireland a clean start in 2021 when the next round of EU climate targets begins, ignoring the country’s failure to reduce emissions in the years up to 2020 and side-stepping non-compliance payments.
Ireland will not achieve its binding EU target of a 20% reduction in non-industrial emissions relative to 2005 levels by 2020, as a fall in emissions of just 6% is expected. The commission’s proposal would have given Ireland an extra decade to comply.
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MEPs rejected this concession on Tuesday, deciding that in 2021 and following years, the 2020 targets must continue to apply. Austria, Belgium, Denmark and Luxembourg are also at risk of falling short of their 2020 targets, but Ireland will have by far the biggest shortfall.
A new climate law setting out how the EU will implement the Paris climate agreement will be finalised later this year in talks between the European Parliament and member states, who will agree their negotiating position in October. Germany has proposed the same amendment as that adopted by MEPs and has the support of other countries.
Femke de Jong, EU policy director of independent watchdog Carbon Market Watch, said: “Ireland is very much against all the ambitious proposals that have been put forward by Germany and others. It seems they are not even talking to Germany because they are so upset about this idea of the 2020 target being the starting point.”
Joseph Curtin, a senior research fellow at the Institute of International and European Affairs, said the commission’s proposal already required huge reforms in the buildings and transport sectors by 2030, given that the government has said agricultural emissions will at best stabilise. They are currently growing.
“What we’ve had in Ireland over the past five years is the sense that we’ve had a bad deal from Brussels so we don’t need to do anything,” said Curtin. “If the starting point is changed again, it will put Ireland in such an invidious, disadvantageous position that it would negatively affect the capacity to get things done.”
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Eamon Ryan, the leader of the Green Party, said non-compliance payments would have huge fiscal consequences.
“Ireland is seen as a climate laggard,” he said. “You increasingly hear Poland and Ireland mentioned in the same breath as the least ambitious countries in Europe on climate. That is hugely damaging to our reputation, and behind the recent lack of flexibility that has been shown.”
@valerie_flynn