Investment in railways has potential to help get climate targets on track

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 …

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Emergency ethics are required for our rapidly warming planet

[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 …

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The new land wars

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 …

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Climate action should transform freight and logistics, but are we prepared for it?

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 …

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We need to talk about climate politics, Mary Lou

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 …

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Rays of hope

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 …

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