Seminar: "Can politics cope with hard limits on societal metabolism?", by Barry McMullin

Barry McMullin, Professor at the School of Electronic Engineering of the Dublin City University will visit ICTA-UAB to give a seminar.

Seminar: "Can politics cope with hard limits on societal metabolism? Forcing a reckoning with the physics of climate disruption: the Irish experiment"

Speaker: Barry McMullin, Professor at the School of Electronic Engineering of the Dublin City University 

Date: Thursday, May 11th 2023
Time: 12h
Venue: Sala Antoni Rosell (Z/022 - Z/023)

In July 2021, following long-running campaigning by Irish civil society groups,  Ireland enacted a new domestic climate law. This created a statutory framework for the adoption of rolling "carbon budgets": voluntary limits on total domestic GHG emissions over successive 5-year periods, starting (retrospectively) from 2021. These were constrained to be prepared in a manner "consistent" with the Paris Agreement temperature goal. Quantitative levels for the first budget programme (2021-2035) were developed by the independent Irish Climate Change Advisory Council. These were subsequently adopted, without change, by the Irish parliament, and came into formal effect in April 2022. The law now imposes ongoing obligations on whatever governments may be in power to perform their functions "in a manner consistent with" these carbon budgets, "in so far as practicable".

The budgets represent significantly more stringent limits than any that have previously existed in domestic policy. Unsurprisingly, there is already a clear tension, if not outright conflict, between the tacit, pre-existing, political consensus to pursue indefinite growth in economic activity, and measures that would be necessary to credibly comply with even the first carbon budget. As yet, however, the Irish political (and media) system appears to be proceeding in a mode of implicatory denial: not acknowledging even the existence of such a tension. In this presentation we will critically review the status and prospects for this evolving attempt at using an enduring statutory framework to force a meaningful reckoning between previously hegemonic socio-political views and the harsh physical realities of global climate disruption.