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Opinion: CCAC proposals will create a rural version of the water protests

Independent TD for Laois-Offaly Carol Nolan shares her views on the CCAC’s carbon budgets.  

The recommendations on carbon budgets the Climate Change Advisory Council put forward to the Minister for the Environment, Eamon Ryan, will generate a rural revolution akin to the protests on water charges from 2014-2017.

Rural organisations and farmer representative bodies have reacted with dismay to the content of the carbon budgets and the level of emission cuts being proposed for each of the periods 2021-2025; 2026-2030; 2031-2035.

CCAC’s carbon budgets

The proposed carbon budgets are simply unacceptable. Anyone who has the first clue about the real-world impacts they will generate will fierce resist them.

Every single aspect of Irish life, but, in particular, Irish rural life, will be adversely impacted by the knock-on effects of introducing a punitive and absurd emissions regime that will make it more expensive to produce food, increase the need for imports and put tens of thousands of people out of work.

The costs associated with the carbon tax are already crippling transport sectors, like hauliers. How will this sector survive further year on year increases and additional regulatory burdens?

The CCAC also suggests that a complete removal of coal and peat for residential heating occur between 2020 and 2030.

This is despite the fact that Eamon Ryan, promised us in a press statement on September, that to accommodate those with rights to harvest sod peat, no ban on its burning will be introduced.

This is exactly the kind of creeping criminalisation that I have been warning about for some time.

The plain reality is this. The climate council is helicopter dumping ideological nonsense all across rural Ireland with the full blessing of a complicit and grossly out-of-touch government that does not have the first clue about how hard life is becoming under the green dictatorship.

 

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