Fianna Fáil Ardfheis:Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has unveiled a series of pledges to cut the Republic's carbon dioxide emissions, but has insisted that incineration must be used to produce electricity from waste.
Responding to Opposition criticism, he said he was not going to be lectured to about environmental policy by parties "who think things up by the day". He was opening the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis at Citywest near Dublin.
Acknowledging that global warming poses a serious challenge for Ireland, Mr Ahern said economic growth would not be cut so that the Republic could meet United Nations Kyoto targets. "I want to be very clear on this - we reject the idea that we must reduce economic growth to meet our responsibilities on carbon emissions," he told several hundred Fianna Fáil delegates.
Promising that the Government would take the lead in changing behaviour, Mr Ahern said every State department and agency would have to produce an annual report on its carbon emissions. "Every organisation within the public service will also be required to specify targets for reducing carbon emissions and for reducing, reusing and recycling waste," he said.
Future air travel by Government ministers and officials, though "an essential part" of carrying out their duties, will be offset by the planting of "urban forests" in towns and cities.
State departments and agencies will also have to find ways of cutting carbon emissions from their transport fleets: "This will apply to everything from delivery vans to ministerial cars," Mr Ahern told Fianna Fáil delegates.
Equally, all public bodies will immediately stop buying wasteful monofilament electric light bulbs, and switch gradually to more expensive, but more efficient, CFL bulbs. This, he said, could save more than 5 per cent of the electricity bill for State bodies, though the Government is not, for now, to follow Australia's lead by banning the sale of monofilament bulbs.
However, he said incineration was necessary to "generate energy from waste as happens in the most environmentally-progressive EU member states such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.
"Ireland still sends 65 per cent of its waste into landfills, compared with just 7 per cent in Denmark, even though Ireland has managed to reach an EU-ordered target of recycling 35 per cent of domestic and industrial waste. Only [ by incineration] will we be able to say that the present planned-for landfill capacity will be the last," he said, despite the opposition in many constituencies to plans for incinerators. "If we do not create energy from waste which cannot be recycled, we will continue to bury our problems in the ground. We will continue to use up valuable land which should be kept for agriculture or nature conservation. "Continuing to dump our waste into landfill means we don't take our climate change commitments seriously. Landfill should always be the last resort," he told delegates in his opening address.
"Those parties who refuse to acknowledge this fact may think that they are sticking to high-minded principles. They are not. Instead they are passing our problems on as a legacy for future generations to deal with," he said.
European Union leaders earlier this month pledged during the Brussels summit to cut carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2020, substantially ahead of the Government's own previously-set target of 20 per cent.
Public and political opinion in the United States, which has not signed up to the UN Kyoto Treaty, is shifting its attitude to the threat posed by industrialisation to the earth's climate. "We will rise to the challenge. We will lead Ireland forward. Already we have shown what can be done. Over the past 15 years our economy expanded by over 150 per cent while our emissions increased by only 25 per cent," he said.
The Government's priority over the past 10 years in office, he claimed, had been to try to break the automatic link between economic growth and environmental damage.
