Net Zero – Northern Ireland’s Secret Weapon

David Morrow is a public policy graduate from Belfast who used to work at Stormont. He is writing in a personal capacity.

So you’ve passed legally binding climate legislation – what next?

It’s probably a bit early in the life cycle of national climate targets for government ministers to be producing self-help books – in most cases, this decade is the first time that we’re actually going to see politicians being responsible for meeting targets that they’ve set. In the era of carbon budgets, the marks come back every five years – and even where the five-year budgets haven’t been set, 2030 isn’t far away.

When future academics look to compare governments that took drastically different approaches to meeting ambitious climate targets, they’ll look no further than the island of Ireland.

The major climate legislation in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is very similar, largely because Northern Ireland basically copied what the South did a few years later. They’re both aiming for net-zero by 2050, they both have hugely ambitious 2030 targets, and they both require the setting of five-year carbon budget periods.

Yet when it comes to the respective governmental approaches to implementing the targets, the difference couldn’t be starker.

In Ireland, a government with the Green Party at its core makes serious, detailed plans that they update on a regular basis. Not only that, but they have budget surpluses that most countries would kill for, so comparatively they have plenty of money to throw at the transition.

In Northern Ireland? Well, we’ve passed the climate legislation, then haven’t bothered with the governing part since then. And of course, there’s absolutely no money – there’s not enough money to teach kids to cycle at school, never mind any ambitious new schemes. Just pass the legislation and hope the civil servants will work it out on a shoe-string and without any significant decision-making powers – sure it’ll be grand.

We’re not at 2030 yet, so we don’t know how this emissions reduction race on the island will end, but on the face of it if you were a betting person you’d know where the smart money would be.

And yet we have some early indications coming out of the South, and they’re not promising.

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency assessed Ireland’s progress on meeting its climates targets. It reported that they were way off. Ireland is on track to reduce emissions by 29% by 2030 compared to a target of 51%, and that’s assuming that they’re going to do everything they say they’re going to do between now and 2030 (hmm…).

So with all that is seemingly in their favour, why is the South missing its targets so badly? There are multiple factors, but I’ll tell you what makes it harder at the margins: economic growth. The South’s economy is booming – people are driving more, they’re consuming more, and ultimately, they’re emitting more. And those tech companies do wonders for GDP and employment, but goodness they need a lot of electricity. Politicians hate to talk about demand reduction when it comes to climate change, but without it you have to completely decarbonise your growing emissions, and that really isn’t easy.

And this is what puts NI in such a strong position in our small island’s race to zero. If economic growth is bad for the climate, then Greta Thunberg should join the DUP. Just Stop Oil protestors should be wearing Jeffrey Donaldson masks when they spill paint everywhere. Stormont is the world’s greenest government. What other government has done less to promote economic growth, maybe outside of governments at war, in the past few years?

Northern Ireland is still going to miss its climate targets of course – the UK’s Climate Change Committee was clear from the outset that the targets NI set itself were totally unachievable (but sure, what do the scientists know?….). Civil servants in NI are about to publish carbon budget plans to get us close to a 48% emission reduction by 2030, which will be an absolute hoot and make Alice in Wonderland look like non-fiction.

And while the point on the importance of demand reduction is serious, in another sense of course I’m being facetious. To actually meet climate change targets, a stalled economy is obviously not going to cut it as a plan – that will require lots of proactive, important, exciting, and difficult political decisions. But in the short-term, whether a re-established Stormont would have the political ability to do any of that is at the least an open question.

They say that doing something is better than nothing. On climate, Stormont is doing its level best to prove otherwise.