The Green Elephant in the Polling Booth

Recent weeks have seen Fine Gael and Labour publish policies on a range of issues, while the Government’s NDP will more or less serve as Fianna Fail’s election manifesto. Although the pollsters have yet to conduct in-depth issue surveys in advance of the election, it seems a fair bet that health, education and lifestyle issues (of which transport is a major one) will be at or near the top of any list of voter concerns, and to that extent Fine Gael and Labour have called it right. So has Fianna Fail, since – taken together – the Budget and the NDP promise substantial allocations to all these issues.

But, to judge at least from media coverage of the three biggest parties’ platforms, they all seem to be ignoring the green elephant in the polling booth: climate change. Given the strong showing by the Greens in today’s Irish Times/MRBI poll, and the likely impact of today’s report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, party strategists may want to re-think their approach.

They could start by taking a look at a survey conducted on behalf of the Financial Times last November in Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain.

86 % believe that humans are contributing to climate change
45 % believe it will be a threat to themselves and their families within their lifetimes
68 % would either ’strongly’ or ’somewhat’ support restrictions on their behaviour in order to reduce the threat.
85 % believe that governments should spend more on renewable energy.

There is no reason to believe that the Irish responses would be much different. So what have the main parties got to offer the Irish electorate when it comes to climate change?

There is not one mention of climate change on the FF website – although, in fairness, there are few policies of any kind on the site. However, FF’s record in government does not give one much hope for the future. They continue to throw money – most recently €270 million – at buying carbon credits while failing to attack the root causes of climate change. The National Climate Change Strategy is not so much a considered national response to climate change as a series of measures designed to meet Kyoto and EU targets (which may themselves be inadequate), and is thus reactive rather than proactive (and also, in some respects, aspirational rather than specific).

What the government has singularly failed to do is implement measures which would modify energy-inefficient behaviour. The most obvious example of this was the Budget fudge on SUVs – rather than going ahead and linking VRT to energy efficiency, they announced a consultation period which will effectively mean that voters will feel no pain until after the election.

Yet the Government is well aware of the issues. In a rare moment of frankness, Minister Dick Roche has admitted (when publishing Ireland’s Progress Towards Environmental Sustainability this week) that the increase in road transport and vehicle numbers is sustaining emissions of nitrogen oxide, despite reduced emissions from individual vehicles – tantamount to an admission that we are not on course to meet international targets. Not that we needed the Department of the Environment to tell us that: Germanwatch, a European NGO monitoring climate change, produced a comparative report last November to coincide with the Nairobi summit. Their Climate Change Performance Index – which is based on data sets from the International Energy Agency, and analyses trends in emission as well as emission volumes, while also including an assessment of climate policies – showed Ireland in a lowly 33rd place, just below Turkey, Italy and Estonia.

Fine Gael measures up rather better than Fianna Fail: last year they published Energy for the Future, outlining a €500 million renewable and sustainable energy plan up to 2010. Although short on specifics (the document is replete with terms like ‘move towards’, ‘significant shift’, ‘meaningful increase’ etc.), it does identify the issues, referencing European best practice when proposing solutions. In particular, the focus on recovering energy from landfill gas and wastewater is welcome. It is probably not the party’s fault that this plan received scant attention in the media, always on the lookout for sexy rather than informative stories. However, Fine Gael has done little to inform the electorate of its energy policy: biofuels just don’t play as well on billboards as crime statistics. Or so the thinking goes.

The Labour Party has yet to produce a comprehensive set of policies on climate change or renewables, although individual spokespeople have been quite effective at holding the Government to account on these issues in the Dail. Hopefully Eamon Gilmore and Tommy Broughan are working on this issue.

If the parties are convinced that climate change is an issue of voter concern, the run-up to the General Election may see some welcome debate on the issue – and the parties may start developing and fine-tuning policies on climate change and renewable energy. That, of course, depends on how voters respond during the next few weeks when the polling companies start focussing on issues as well as party ratings. And on whether the parties are prepared to propose some tough measures in advance of an election.