Bríd Smith on carbon budgets: warns against tech reliance

Yeah, thank you and thanks all the witnesses for coming and for giving us a very interesting session today. I found today's discussion much more about the urgency of the situation that we're facing than the discussion yesterday, although I wasn't able to participate because I am in the campus now today, Chair. But I just want to thank you for doing that. But I don't criticise the committee for the lack of the sense of urgency yesterday. I think it's the framework under which they are acting, which is the problem. And I think it's an even deeper problem when you think about the fact that we have a Green Party minister and if we can't get it right now, we could be facing the second half of our carbon budgets without that commitment from a minister. So it's really important that this committee acts to get it right. And I take all of the contributions very, very seriously. I think it gives us a lot of food for thought. There's a couple of questions that I'd like to expand on. One is, and maybe Professor Anderson can answer this, is the extent to which the carbon budgets depend on future technologies, carbon capture and storage. And what do you think of that? Because my understanding is that the development of future technologies isn't anywhere near where it could help in terms of dealing with these budgets. The second question is, I don't know who can answer it, but on the omission of aviation and shipping, I mean, somebody said it's unclear. I think it was Professor McMullen said it's unclear why they left aviation and shipping out. But my question really is, is that unusual for a country to do that? Or is that part of what they do or is it an avoidance? Because I think it's quite shocking given the role Irish aviation plays in the whole European outfit that it was left out of the budgets. Somebody mentioned equity within countries. And this is all, of course, to do with just transition and that most people don't, most emissions don't come from most people. And I think that's a very, very important point for us to keep in mind. And that would, for me, relate to the question of transport and how there's a very high dependency on private car ownership in this country, because we've got an appalling public transport infrastructure. That's beyond two minutes, but go ahead and finish your question. I'll just wind up, Chair, just despite the COVID restrictions, that public transport should be an absolute priority for us. And the very last question is to Professor Sweeney. You mentioned the 2.4 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel industry. I think most people would be quite shocked to learn that figure. And could you explain to us how that breaks down? Very quickly, I don't want a big mathematical thing, but just how we subsidise the fossil fuel industry to that size. Thanks very much. Thank you, Deputy. So there's a question on future technologies. Who wants to take that one? The reliance on future technologies, Professor Anderson? Yeah, I'm happy to discuss that. I'll try and keep this as simple as possible. There are a number of technologies we're relying on here. Some of them, you mentioned this one, the CCS, carbon capture and storage. Now, the standard interpretation of that is you use that with fossil fuels. So you burn coal, oil or gas, but usually thinking about gas in modern power stations. And when you burn it, you capture the carbon dioxide afterwards, and then you bury the carbon dioxide under the ground somewhere. And that technology is part of carbon capture and storage. And in that way, you don't have any, in theory, you don't have any releases to the atmosphere. You can also do it by splitting the gas up into methane, into oxygen and hydrogen beforehand. And, you know, you can do it. So there are different ways of doing this. But one of the concerns there is the full lifecycle emissions. And a lot of people who work on this don't look at the full lifecycle. There's a really good report paper in 2017 that met a study that looks at these for different technologies. And actually, the emissions from carbon capture and storage on power stations are still very high, the lifecycle emissions. So if you're interested, about 150 to 300 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt hour. Just to give a feel for that, renewables and nuclear are about 5 to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. Coal on its own is about 900, gas on its own about 450, and carbon capture and storage about 150 to 300. So it's still very, very high emissions. So I think it's inappropriate for energy. It cannot deliver at the lifecycle level. But of course, the oil industry loves it. Fossil fuel companies love it because it means you can carry on producing fossil fuels. And academics, if they're paid by fossil fuel companies, merrily tell you how wonderful it is. But it can be used on cement. Cement produces about 4% of the, well, 8% of all emissions globally are from cement. 4% are what's called process emissions, the chemical process. And you could use CCS to remove that. And there's some work going on with that at the moment. The other technologies I think a lot of people think about here are things called negative emission technologies. These are technologies that are either very small pilot schemes. There's one recently in Iceland that people have been aware of. Or they're just still ideas. And these are technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the future. The primary option that's considered here in almost all the models is actually you burn biomass. You grow lots of trees or other forms of biomass. And you burn it. As it grows, it sucks the CO2 out through photosynthesis. You then burn it to get some energy and you bury the CO2 again. It's incredibly inefficient. You require levels in the models somewhere between two to three times the size of India planted out to do this. So, again, it allows wealthy countries to carry on business as usual under this guise that there'll be this technology in the future that our children will apply. But increasingly, people from an ecological perspective, from a sort of land rights perspective and from a simple technology perspective say this is not the right way forward. So there are other technologies like direct air capture, which is when you use a chemical process to suck CO2 out of the air using a catalyst and then bury the CO2. But that requires lots of energy, ideally low carbon, zero carbon, renewable energy, which we don't have at the moment. So all of these things effectively are relying on technologies in the future which may or may not work to different levels. The problem in the models and in all the assumptions that we make pretty much is the level of these uptakes. Just to give a feel for it, in almost all the models, the level of reduction of CO2 from the atmosphere is roughly equivalent to the net reduction by global photosynthesis today. So all of global photosynthesis for all the plants around the planet. That's roughly what we think in the models we'll have from these technologies that do not exist other than at pilot scale. So it's not as if it's a small adjustment. It's an industry that's roughly the same size as the current oil and gas industry. And this doesn't exist. And that's fine if it's one out of 10 models. But when it's in 99 out of 100 models, it's become a systemic bias that allows us to have a nice world in politics today because we're passing the burden on to future generations. So it's absolutely huge. Quickly on aviation, aviation and shipping are not included within the submissions from every country to the UNFCCC annually, except as a memo. And that is international aviation and shipping. And that's because in the Kyoto agreement in 1997, there was an agreement that they were international emissions and should be the responsibility of the International Maritime Organization for shipping and ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Authority for Organization, rather for aviation. But both of those organizations have fundamentally failed to grapple with emissions from their sectors. And so the EU, for instance, has included aviation shipping, aviation rather, in its emissions trading scheme, certainly within EU flights. And there's been some discussion about international ones there. And the EU is also threatening to include shipping in the emissions trading scheme as well. So that's why aviation shipping has not been included. But increasingly, countries like the UK, for instance, the Committee on Climate Change has said we should include it because IMO and ICAO have not done their job. And it's the responsibility of the governments now to do that. Thank you, Professor. There was questions there on transport equity and fossil fuel subsidies. Which of our witnesses wants to come in on those? I can tackle the fossil fuel subsidies area. Thank you, Deputy Smith. The CSO estimate fossil fuel subsidies largely on the basis of revenue foregone. And they use a benchmark as a kind of a standard as to what the average person pays an excise tax on petrol for driving private cars. And on that basis, they estimate, for example, that the revenue foregone on jet kerosene was 634 million euros per year. The revenue foregone on auto diesel, because diesel is taxed slightly less than petrol, was 400 million per year. And there's also a rate which is very much lower for diesel, green diesel for agriculture, forestry and fishing, which is effectively a subsidy. And there's also a VAT refund on auto diesel, which amounts to about 281 million a year. Those are kind of revenue foregone issues. And I would also, of course, stress that there is a strong case for some subsidies, such as the heating allowance for winter, which is currently allowed. I think that's a very legitimate, what you might call efficient subsidy. And I would hate to see that being reduced as well. There's also, I think, an issue in terms of things that we don't tax. And I've been very surprised, I can't find any other EU country which does not tax nitrogen fertilisers. I believe we're the only country in Europe which does not tax nitrogen fertilisers. That itself is something which would have a very significant effect on making more efficient use of fertilisers, which currently we know are a strong driver of greenhouse gas emissions and a strong driver of what's going wrong with our lakes and rivers in Ireland as well. So those are the kind of areas where there is scope. Now, if you had an extra 2.4 billion a year, I'm sure you can think of many ways you could spend it to ease the transition to the post-carbon society. I think that would be a good start to make. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. And there was a question on transport equity, I think, Deputy Summitt, wasn't there? Yeah, if anybody wants to take that. It's just in relation to what Professor Anderson said about most people don't create most emissions and how we deal with that. Because, you know, we've talked about it at this committee, but I think that's something we could move to even in COVID times and start planning for proper, frequent and ultimately free public transport across this tiny little island. Yeah, just on that, if you look at the emissions across different income groups, there are certain areas where the emissions differences aren't so great. So housing, for instance, they're often called Lorenz curves. So housing is a good example because poorer people often live in much more inefficient, often rented homes. So they're very inefficient and hard to heat. So actually they have quite high energy use in poorer homes. And so often their emissions are not that much less than the average or a slightly wealthier home. So there's not a huge difference there. That's because, of course, they're living in poor quality houses. And if you go to transport, there is a huge difference between wealthy and poorer people and even average people in our society. So in some areas of society, there are massive differences in emissions and other areas there are less differences. But in transport particularly, it is dominated by people who fly a lot, drive larger cars, drive further. And then we sort of say, well, it's not very good because the poor people are driving around in inefficient cars. But they don't drive very far. So there's very clear distinctions in income groups for how far people drive, what vehicles they drive. And also, of course, they're flying as well. So there's a big difference in emissions and transport, but less so from housing. That's right at thewww. . . . .