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,…
Category: Blog
Welcome back/Fáilte thar n-ais…
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 in our history on this planet: clearly the two very different challenges of climate change and of artificial intelligence/robotisation are pushing human civilisation to the limit. At this very time, we are entering an era in which politics seems to be fragmenting into a new volatility and irrationality, making coherent action to address these challenges seemingly impossible. Yet, there are signs of hope – in the mobilisation of citizens after a time of widespread quiescence, in the breaking open of the iron cage of neoliberalism and elite rule that has characterised the period since the 1980s, and in the ways that climate change is forcing us to look anew at our destructive relationships with the natural world on which we depend.
So, perhaps more than every before in human history, everything is to play for and the nature of the future facing us is in our hands to shape. I will be developing my ideas around how we work to shape that future and the sort of future we can shape if we mobilise to do so. As I write a new book, drawing on the insights of Karl Polanyi addressing the need to transform market society in this era of climate change, I’ll be testing out ideas and proposing analyses of the possibilities for agency amid the structural constraints and opportunities of the present. Come on the journey with me…. Beidh mé ag feitheamh ort.
Now ‘new politics’ really does mean something
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…
France moves into a new political space
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…
Ireland’s mitigation planning: where are the big ideas?
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…