Without climate action, we are we are committing our children and grandchildren to a bleak future, according to Senator Pippa Hackett.
She was speaking on the Climate Action Bill in the Seanad, after the bill was passed in Dáil Eireann by 129 votes to 10.
But she added that a just transition is required for those who find themselves affected by the actions required to mitigate climate change.
“In my own area of the Midlands, we have many people whose livelihoods have been linked to peat extraction. For generations, it was the central activity in the area, but now we understand the huge damage such extraction has done to our atmosphere,” she said.
“We also have many whose livelihoods are impacted by flooding. Once upon a time such flooding was a one-hundred-year occurrence. Now it occurs several times a decade. We cannot turn our backs on these lives, these people, these situations.”
Senator Hackett, who is Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, added that farming must work within the ecological limits by which it is bound.
“We are not obliged to feed 40 or 50 million people, but we are obliged to clean our water and our air, protect habitats, and meet our climate targets,” she said.
The objective of the first Common Agricultural Policy, in 1962, to produce cheap food has led to race to the bottom, she said, with ever increasing input costs, decreasing returns, and a natural environment pushed to the brink.
Ends
Read the transcript of the speech I delivered to the Seanad on 25th June during the Second Stage of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021 here.