The report of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action marks a sea-change in Irish policy making and signals nothing less than a revolution in Ireland’s development model. Though, as virtually all approaches to climate action are, it is structured around the sectoral challenges of reducing emissions in agriculture, transport, energy, buildings, yet the document is effectively an initial effort to map what a low-carbon development model would require. More than the various measures proposed to reduce emissions – many of them long overdue but still with weaknesses and omissions – by far the most significant recommendations are the precise,

After a long absence I’m back blogging. The absence was caused by technical problems with my website which it has taken some time to resolve but here I now am, live and eager to get back to commenting on and analysing the momentous events shaping our contemporary world. As always, I welcome comments and vigorous debate, though I hope we can avoid the vitriol, personal insults, assertions that have no empirical basis and posturing that unfortunately mar public debate today. I hope over the coming months to look at the huge challenges that are facing humanity at this turning point

The UK election gave us a night of electoral drama so unique for its unpredictability and upending of deeply held assumptions that it is impossible to find anything comparable. This truly was ‘new politics’, not in the Irish sense of a political cliché to hide paralysis, but in the sense of people, particularly the young, galvanised by a vision that things could be different and defying the carefully crafted regime of the privileged. It is difficult to remember a political leader so vilified and insulted by a large swathe of his country’s media, so demonised and dismissed not just by

So, the French have shown again that politics really matters and has become the space where different visions of the future are being fought out. And, while the centrist candidate, Emmanuel Macron now appears certain to be France’s next president, the first round of the 2017 presidential election has already brought massive changes. As we have seen elsewhere, voters are decisively rejecting long-established mainstream parties and giving support both to new parties and, in increasing numbers, to parties on the extreme right and left. France has now demonstrated these tendencies more strongly than has any other country. Neither of the

The publication of Ireland’s first draft national mitigation plan as mandated by the Climate Action and Low-Carbon Development Act of 2015 may in time be seen as the Irish state’s first attempt seriously to face the enormous challenges of decarbonising our economy by 2050 as we are now legally obliged to do under the 2015 Act. Yet, it shows the state has a very long way to go in finding responses adequate to the challenges. Examining Ireland’s record on facing the challenges of climate change since the early 1990s, what leaps out again and again is the complete failure of