Bríd Smith Challenges Carbon Tax Plan, Demands Polluter Tax Inquiry

I think it must be difficult to try and balance all the factors that have to be taken into account when pulling together a budget under the sort of system, economic and social and political system that we live in, but no doubt you are doing it, and that is what you do all the time, and you make very clear political decisions about where you target and what you target in terms of revenue raising. I just want to put it into context of the crisis, the three crises that we are facing across the globe. Obviously the pandemic is a massive crisis, climate change is a massive crisis, and as a consequence of those and the failure of the competitive and irresponsible capitalist system that we live under, we have an economic crisis looming large over us. And in those with that trio facing you, you have designed a budget, but one of the things that stands out for me, and I'm saying this mainly as somebody who participated for months and months on end in a special committee that was set up to look at how we deal with climate change. The climate action committee was given resources, people were employed to help us, to advise us, to work with us, to work through all of the modules and stuff that we had to look at. We got experts in from around the world, we got financial experts in, scientists in, we did months and months of work on a climate action plan. And that plan is now being used as cover for what is called a cross-party consensus on how we go forward with climate action. But the main thing coming out of it is the locked in, year on year, for 10 years, increase in carbon taxes. And I know you weren't on that committee, Minister, but certainly those that were will remember the long, long debates we had about this issue. And we never did reach a cross-party consensus on it. Instead, there were a number of us who stood our ground and argued what we think is the obvious, that carbon taxes will not help reduce emissions, will not help reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and they will function as a regressive measure directed at the wrong target. The increase in carbon taxes diverts attention away from the systemic nature of carbon pollution that is rooted in that free market economy and the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations. who continue to profit from their reliance on oil, coal, gas, and the multiple companies who rely on the production of plastic. But what we are doing here is we are asking ordinary people to shoulder the blame for the climate action that has been missing when 71 per cent of all emissions come from 100 global corporations. So, it is not only regressive, it is dangerous, and it ignores the rapid far-reaching and unprecedented transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure, including transport in buildings and industrial systems. So, we are told that the increase in carbon taxes will be ring-fenced and used to implement the plans that are needed around these sort of transitions, including a just transition. But I want to argue that that's exactly what it won't do. Now, in the course of that long, long, tedious debate that I talked about, we pushed very hard that the government would commission a comprehensive inquiry into the extent and nature of fuel poverty across all cohorts of the population, and that the short and medium long term of an increased carbon tax on all cohorts would be considered prior to increasing carbon taxes. We did not get cross-party support for that, but neither was there cross-party support for what is now being done here. A 10-year-on-year increase in carbon taxes without first bringing in the measures that will help people to change their personal behaviour. As Saoirse McHugh put it in the middle of this debate, how can she, living in Achill Island, change her personal behaviour when there are no buses for her to move in and out of the island? She relies on a diesel-driven car. How can she change her behaviour when she can't afford to retrofit a cold old stone cottage that she lives in? The supports are not coming from the state to people who need it most. And that is why yesterday at the Climate Committee, Kevin Anderson denounced increase in carbon taxes as a weapon that was used to punish the wrong people. He used the example of the very, very wealthy in this planet being the biggest consumers and producers of CO2 emissions. He said those who fly more, live in bigger houses, drive faster cars, are the ones we should be going after. But there was one recommendation that we did get cross-party support for, and I want to ask you what has happened to that. If you took that Climate Committee seriously, if any party in this house took it seriously, having spent the resources on employing people, on engaging all these experts from around the globe, here was one priority recommendation that we did manage to get past. This committee recommends that the Department of Finance commission an inquiry into the revenue that could be realised through the introduction of a carbon tax on the profits of corporations and firms directly linked to the production and sale of gas, oil, coal and other fossil fuels. That that inquiry should look at the revenue that could be realised from the imposition of carbon tax on the profits of other corporations and firms linked to the high usage of fossil fuels, including aviation, shipping and plastic production. Has anything happened with that? You are a minister in that department. Are you aware of such a commission of inquiry to look at how we could raise what I believe would be far greater amounts of revenue by taxing the real polluters, not the ordinary people like the woman I mentioned in Ackill or the plethora of people that we deal with in this house who make choices, poor people who make choices between having a hot meal or heating their home? Because they fall outside by a few lousy euro of the threshold that will allow this government to give them fuel allowance. That is everywhere. And Vincent de Paul, who did give evidence to that committee, said that they reckon that the level of fuel poverty across this country of ordinary households is well underestimated. They have done the research. They work on the coal face with the people they have to subsidise. At one stage they talked about having given out about 4 million in subsidies to help people pay their fuel, their electricity and their gas bills and to buy coal and turf and sticks and whatever else they could heat their homes with. And this government chooses to ignore that. You ignore it and you impose those increases which are really going to penalise those who can least afford it. You ignore the priority recommendation that actually points you in the direction of where you can raise the most revenue by going after the big polluters. Not the people who struggle to survive through this winter, who currently, and I just want to raise it here because it needs to be aired, who are currently being penalised by the pay as you go companies, the utility companies. When they got a hundred euro subsidy at the beginning of the lockdown in order to put money into their meter to pay for gas and electricity, that has now been taken back from them at the rate of 60%. So if they top up their pay as you go card by a tenner, they get four euros worth of heat and energy back. And that's happening everywhere. Any TD in this house knows it. If you have a community that depends on that sort of way of paying for your utility bill, that indicates people who live hand to mouth, who struggle to pay their bills week by week, mainly on social protection, but also on low pay, on pensioners, etc. And this has been ignored by the government. Those companies should be brought in immediately and told to stop it. And indeed, any subsidy that is given to anybody during this and future lockdowns, I believe there will be more lockdowns because of the refusal to recognise a zero COVID strategy. But any subsidies that are given should not be in an unmerciful, vulgar way taken back from people who can least afford it at that rate. And something should be done to intervene on it straight away. But I just want to really say that the idea that there's cross party consensus for the raising of carbon taxes on ordinary people is absolutely false. There is not. In fact, we have the largest opposition party here who are also opposed to it. It isn't just the left and the socialists who are opposed to it. It is also Sinn Féin and other independents in opposition. So you can't just ignore what we're screaming at you, but you're choosing to do it with this bill because you're locking it in for 10 years without any other single measure of reducing CO2 emissions being taken. In fact, as we speak, we are currently dealing at least two or three times a week with scrutiny on the climate bill that they want to push through before Christmas, which will give us the governance structure around which we deal with climate action. And guess what one of those things say? It says the minister must have regard to 25 separate conditions before a single climate action is implemented. And among them is the specific and special nature of the herd in this country. And among them is the level of competition and the healthiness of the competition within the economy at the time. You cannot have 25 competing interests and at the same time say that you are taking the action necessary to bring us in line with Paris to bring down our CO2 emissions because you're not. All you're doing is punishing the most vulnerable and increasing the burden on those who are least responsible for this disgraceful condition we're in. And as the planet hurtles towards more droughts, more runaway fires, more floods, more starvation, mostly imposed on the poorest people in the planet, including the poor in this country who pay highest for floods etc. and damage to their homes, we have no solution to it except to go after those people again and let the profits of the fossil fuel aviation shipping industries run rampant when they choose. We're barking up the wrong tree, but we're not only just doing it in this bill, we're locking it in to do it for the next nine years after this. It's utterly outrageous, disgraceful and completely the wrong way to go about dealing with CO2 emissions. To impact ... No of course facts are there ... ... ...