The answer to climate change lies in doing ordinary things better

Ireland is the only EU country where transport has the biggest energy use. Alternative thinking is required, writes Conor Skehan

‘What about the carbon footprint of streaming Netflix?’

CARBON tax is one of the most talkedabout measures of the Budget. What will it achieve? Carbon tax will do nothing to address our biggest energy challenge — transport — unless we act quickly and imaginatively to address the issue.

Ireland is the only country in the EU where transport has the biggest energy use. Not only the biggest, but also the only sector where use is continuing to increase. Industry, commerce, services and homes have all decoupled growth from energy use. Investment in renewables makes almost no impact on transport energy.

Taxation is usually for behaviour modification, making a change to a desired alternative set of actions. But ‘alternatives’ does not mean shovelling more money into alternative energy. We have already invested nearly €5.5bn in wind energy, an energy source bedevilled with problems of needing massive hidden subsidies and poor availability of energy. After all the spending in 2017, wind energy only contributed slightly more energy than peat in Ireland.

Believing the imposition of a carbon tax alone will reduce energy consumption in transport is naive at best or magical thinking at worst.

“To the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail,” is an old truism describing how blinkered each specialisation can be in their search for solutions.

Two sets of hammer-wielders appear to dominate the debate about energy in Ireland.

The first of these are the energy idealists who are often anti-car and pro-renewable energy. Energy policy has become embroiled in politics and ideologies which are deeply anti-car. Transport is our biggest energy challenge. Successfully addressing this challenge requires working with cars, accommodating them and making their use more energy-efficient and more effective at helping people to live their lives. Punishing people for car use will not work. Furthermore, one of the fundamental flaws of the carbon tax is the assumption that increasing price will always reduce use. While this is partially true for many products, it is not universally applicable. Punitive taxation on cigarettes has some effect on consumption but more basic needs, such as transport and heating, have been shown to be little affected by price increases. What they do cause is hardship for the poorest, and are often a significant catalyst of anger towards policy-makers.

The second are the energy engineers who design our energy systems. Making policies and plans for energy is immensely complex, with the result that the important decisions are made by a relatively small number of expert people. These ultimately reach for solutions which revolve around a combination of technological fixes and abstract calculations about pricing and subsidies to pay for these solutions.

Energy idealists show little interest in helping cars, and energy engineers continue to emphasise the need to spend on new electrical generation and transmission projects. Nobody is addressing the journeys we make, to work, to school, to shops. These are the cause of the problem and addressing these issues is far more likely to address the challenge than any tech fix.

There is a need for a third point of view — one that works with and for cars, commuters, shoppers and the school run — by addressing the consumption of energy instead of generation. Who represents this group?

By framing this as a transportation problem, instead of an energy problem, we can see a whole range of new solutions, ideally with improvements which make life easier and cheaper, by incentives for inexpensive initiatives such as: ÷ Car-pooling, which is actively invested in throughout the world; Carpool lanes [HOVL High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes] are used in many countries, either as stand-alone routes or being allowed shared access to bus lanes; ÷ Incentives for ride-share such as subsidised access to park-and-ride facilities or even exemptions from certain tolls; ÷ School traffic planning, involving parents using social media to arrange rotas for the school run; ÷ Local shopping delivery drop-off stations with chillers for food and room for bulky deliveries; ÷ Better, safer local off-road connection to shops, schools and bus stops. (Imagine if a whole housing estate was energy rated to reflect it’s connectivity?)

While we need to continue to invest heavily in public transport in urban areas we also need to spend on improving private transport: ÷ We need to build park-andrides near transport hubs; ÷ We need to build more bridges, tunnels and lanes to accommodate more mobility in larger, denser settlements. It is a myth that density reduces the need for travel; ÷ We need to invest at least €1bn a year in better urban transport management and the same again in new projects. This would be the equivalent spend to most OECD countries; ÷ We need supports for local shopping delivery systems.

If these seem expensive, it is important to remember we raise more than €5bn a year in motor-related taxes. It is only fair to re-invest this in making travel cheaper and faster.

We need to change our approach if we want to improve our energy performance. Proposals on energy are excessively dominated by the energy production sector. Carbon taxes rightly recognise that we need to address behaviour, not technology.

The cheapest and fastest way to improve behaviour is awareness-raising, coupled with financial incentives. In the transport sector this can be quickly achieved with a scheme to promote car-pooling and ride-sharing. In the medium to long term, increased subsidies and spending on public transport will yield the best results, while long-term improvements in land-use planning will greatly reduce the ultimate cause of journeys.

Changing behaviour means a lot of our assumptions need to be re-examined with fresh eyes. Everyone is asking us to think about the carbon footprint of eating meat, but what about the carbon footprint of online activity such as streaming Netflix? This generates 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. And as for the energy needed to make 15 million cups of tea a day? Without milk, it consumes half a million tonnes of CO2 every year, more emissions than a few large power plants.

The biggest wins are to do ordinary stuff better, usually by having new answers to old questions: how and where we get our kids to school, how we make a cup of tea or how and where we do our shopping or go to work.

Belief in the alternative energy unicorns will not solve these problems. It is time to take these debates back to basics and not penalise the poorest because we can’t tackle our biggest challenges in a more realistic way.

‘We need to improve private as well as public transport’