World leaders need to fly to attend the COP climate conference in person, Eamon Ryan has argued.
The 30th annual meeting of world leaders to discuss the looming climate catastrophe has often been criticised as hypocritical.
While the world’s wealthy and powerful fly in, often on private jets, they then spend the next few days discussing the sacrifices that ordinary people must make to reduce their carbon footprint.
Aviation remains one of the most carbon intensive activities on the planet, accounting for an estimated 2.5% of global emissions - despite the fact 90% of the world’s population do not fly in a single year.
On Moncrieff, former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan said it is still vital that world leaders jet out to Brazil to attend the conference.
“There’s a valid question about the carbon footprint of all of us who are engaged in climate change work as to why do you have to fly,” he said.
“The reason is because it is often in those personal relations where you are spending many, many days with people - not just hours - that you build up an ability to try and get an agreement.
“It does require to be in person; it is a far from perfect process.
“It lacks transparency, it is a real difficulty that there is so much travel involved.”
Engineers climbing a wind turbine. Picture by: Alamy.com. While Mr Ryan conceded that the conference has a high carbon footprint, he argued that a remote COP would be less effective.
“People say to me about the carbon footprint, someone the other day talked about the carbon handprint,” he said.
“The handprint of effecting change and sometimes in that, you do need to meet in person.
“It is in those relations that you are going to get a deal.”
A golden eagle in Donegal. Picture by: Alamy.com. While emissions in Ireland have fallen in recent years, concern has been raised that they are not dropping fast enough.
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council has urged the Government to splurge more of the budget surplus on green infrastructure in order to avoid “severe” EU fines for missing carbon targets.
“In energy, we’ll meet our targets for this first five year period,” Mr Ryan predicted.
“We are making progress; I mean, our emissions per person in the last 25 years have roughly halved.
“We need to give people that sense of possibility, we are right to sometimes criticise ourselves but actually the average Irish person’s emissions halved in the last 25 years.
“And we’re a lot wealthier than we were 25 years ago; so it’s not as if we’ve had to punish ourselves to do that.”
Mr Ryan concluded that while “not enough” has been done so far, he is “convinced” it will be done in the end.
Main image: Split of Eamon Ryan and a private jet. Picture by: Alamy and Rolling News.ie.
