The Green Party does not have a problem with other politicians stealing “the clothes of the Greens” and potentially making it more difficult for them in the next General Election, according to its Minister of State Ossian Smyth.
“I’m happy to see it. I don’t want only five per cent of people doing things for the environment. There has been a mind-shift in the public and environmental stuff has to happen,” said Mr Smyth, who has responsibility for communications and the circular economy and is a Green TD for Dún Laoghaire.
He admitted, however, that elections were difficult for small parties in coalitions and the party knew this going into government. “We knew we could protect ourselves better in opposition but this is the most meaningful job I’ve ever had and I’m going to keep doing it,” he said.
The world had shifted, he said; after 20 years the climate change message had been hammered home and businesses had moved on from greenwashing. People were thinking strategically and acknowledging “we could get into trouble if we continue to tie ourselves to fossil fuels – the old anti-environment economy.”
Opening the Environment Ireland conference in Croke Park on Thursday, Mr Smyth said his Circular Economy Bill was not opposed by any of the major parties when it was introduced in 2022; the same was true of the Nature Restoration Law, which also got through the European Parliament because of the backing of all Irish MEPs.
“More and more people understand circularity – reuse, not throwing things away and not buying things with built-in obsolescence,” he noted.
The coffee-cup levy and the deposit-and-return scheme (DRS) for aluminium cans and plastic (PET) bottles would be rolled out in coming months. Currently, there are one billion cans and plastic bottles used in Ireland and potentially 500 million disposable coffee cups every year.
“I expect our deposit-and-return scheme to return around 90 per cent of that would-be waste,” said Smith.
The Minister hoped it could be adopted on an all-island basis to avoid the risk of cross-Border fraud.
Mr Smyth said he was also keen to introduce measures to deal with disposable vapes; adding that he believed the EU would soon follow suit with a Europe-wide DRS and ban on disposable vapes.
Patrick Child, deputy director in DG Environment within the European Commission, said the key element of the European Green Deal was its joining-up the challenges of the crises of climate, biodiversity loss and pollution. “By the end of 2024, we will have laid the ground for systemic changes and we need to make progress as quickly as we can on the circular economy, nature protection and zero pollution.”
With 70 per cent of European soil in a poor state, Mr Collins said a new soil directive would bring particular benefits for Irish farmers by ensuring increased yields and reduced fertiliser use while increasing incomes.
Research director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy Antoine Oger said global efforts to reduce emissions were short of required. On nature and agriculture, there were ambitious sustainability policies in place but not reconciled with the perceived impact of environmental regulations on the income of farmers and other land managers.
Projected losses for green policymakers in next year’s European elections put in doubt strong environmental regulations to be adopted by EU institutions, he said. Member states, however, had the political and legal instruments such as the EU Climate Law and a global biodiversity framework in place to push on to 2030. “Now is the time for implementation,” Mr Oger added.
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Most EU internal decarbonisation efforts may be offset through carbon leakage in other parts of the world, he said. While the EU was a global leader in the sustainable development goals (SDGs), it generated “negative spillover” to other countries. “This is because we outsource production outside of the EU for products that are consumed in the EU and currently there is no legal framework to embed the SDGs into EU or national policies,” Mr Oger said.
“Our economic model remains committed to the vision of material use and environmental footprint decoupling from GDP growth, which may not be feasible in the time left to remain within planetary boundaries,” he warned.
It was also essential to unlock and redeploy trillions of dollars by rapidly shifting finance flows globally to meet global investment needs to lower carbon emissions and for climate-resilient development.
