It was never going to be easy for Ireland to fulfil its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on Climate change.
Now, six years after the Government signed up to cap the increase in our greenhouse gas emissions at 13 per cent above their 1990 levels in the period 2008-12, it is abundantly clear we will fail.
Figures show our emissions are 25 per cent higher and, with no firm measures taken to reduce them, Ireland faces the prospect of having to pay penalties for this failure, estimated at €300 million a year. By deciding not to impose carbon taxes from next January, the Government has simply postponed the evil day.
It would appear the Department of Finance has calculated that it will be cheaper in the long-term to buy our way out of the problem by paying the penalties. And with fuel prices set to follow the recent rise in the price of crude oil, Ministers feared a public backlash against any move to impose carbon taxes.
But even though a levy of €7.50 per tonne might have achieved a cut of less than a million tonnes in CO2 emissions, it would have been an important "signal" that we need to move away from burning fossil fuels to more environmentally acceptable alternatives, such as wind power.
The Government has already flunked it on Moneypoint. The huge coal-fired power station on the Shannon estuary might have been converted to run on natural gas, as envisaged by the National Climate Change Strategy, published in 2000, but it will now continue belching out five million tonnes of CO2 annually until 2025 at the earliest.
All the ESB's multi-million euro investment will do is to reduce emissions of harmful sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides so that the power plant can remain in operation after 2008, when an EU directive kicks in. Fears about leaving ourselves too reliant on future imports of gas from Russia and Algeria stymied any conversion.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector are the fastest growing contributor to Ireland's divergence from its Kyoto target.
But the Government has committed itself to investing at least €6.5 billion in motorways and other major roads, with the inevitable result that emissions from traffic will continue to increase over time.
It is ironic, then, that one of the fears Ministers had about the imposition of carbon taxes was that it would aggravate motorists, in particular.
As a direct result of the policies pursued by the FF-PD coalition since 1997, which favours roads over public transport by a ratio of 4 to 1, we are hugely reinforcing car dependency.
The Government has also been under intense pressure from IBEC not to proceed with carbon taxes. The employers' body argued that they were no longer necessary because of the rise in oil prices and the additional costs this will impose on energy-intensive industries, as well as electricity generation.
But there can be no doubt that the willingness of Ministers to line up with the industrial lobby is both shameful and cowardly.
One way or another, however, we will have to pay a price for moving towards a more environmentally sustainable energy regime. It is only a question of when.
And Kyoto is just a start. Much bigger cuts in fossil fuel use are likely to be required after 2012 if the world is to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
But that's obviously not something Ministers need to concern themselves with now, when they have a profligate public to placate.
