This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 23rd of November 2023. One of the challenges of tackling a global problem like climate change is that there is no world government to oversee mandatory and equitable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris Agreement does not even mention the main culprit in climate breakdown …
Ireland should support the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 26th of October 2023. We don’t often associate the island of Ireland with world-beating public transport technologies. However, we can boast of some important milestones in the development of railways. The Dún Laoghaire and Kingstown railway, which opened in 1834 and later became the Great Southern …
Investment in railways has potential to help get climate targets on track Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 24th October 2023 The last male northern white rhinoceros died in a zoo in 2018, aged 45. With him vanished all hope of saving the species from extinction. In a desperate attempt to save the northern white, scientists have extracted eggs from the last surviving females that are …
Is it time to establish a right to nature in the Constitution? Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 28th September 2023. On July 20th, 1969, Nasa’s Apollo 11 mission landed on the Moon and, for the first time ever, human beings walked on a celestial body other than the Earth. Neil Armstrong’s words announcing a “giant leap for mankind” resonate today. Before the Moon …
Limits to growth vindicated as Earth faces overshoot and collapse Read More »
[This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 24th of August as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/08/24/emergency-ethics-required-for-our-rapidly-warming-planet/] The dictionary definition of an emergency is an event that is sudden or unexpected that requires fast action in order to avoid harmful results. If governments had acted 30 years ago when climate science was already categorically linking the burning of …
Emergency ethics are required for our rapidly warming planet Read More »
The West’s awake. And angry. At a public meeting organised recently by independent TDs, farmers vented their opposition to the proposed Nature Restoration Law declaring that ‘farmers want to farm, not to participate in agri-environmental schemes’. Such was the hostility towards climate and environmental policies that one farmer was reported as calling for the Minister …
This article first appeared in the Irish Times on 25th May 2023 as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/05/25/climate-action-should-transform-freight-and-logistics-but-are-we-prepared-for-it/ When he is not chastising economists for their obsession with economic growth, President Higgins regularly invokes the work of Zygmunt Bauman, a leading theorist of the 20th century. Bauman is noted for his observation that modernity has fundamentally altered social relations …
Climate action should transform freight and logistics, but are we prepared for it? Read More »
This article appeared in the Irish Times on the 22nd of June 2023 as https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/06/22/we-need-talk-about-climate-politics-mary-lou/ A climate-conscious friend of mine recently shared that what keeps him awake at night is the prospect of a Sinn Féin-led government propped up by rural independent TDs. I can go one better than that. What keeps me awake is …
We need to talk about climate politics, Mary Lou Read More »
This article was published in the Irish Times on the 27th of April 2023 here It might not feel like it yet, but there’s an election in the offing. The first of many shiny newsletters arrived in my letterbox recently. It was an impressive list of small jobs that, taken together, show that my local …
Local climate action plans offer an opportunity for place-based leadership Read More »
This article was published in the Irish Times here under the title “Rapid expansion of solar power capacity gives us grounds to be hopeful” on the 23rd of March 2023. There is hardly ever any good news on the climate front. However, a recent report by the think tank Ember found that the energy price …
@2022 Sadhbh O’Neill
