Trial free public transport with Mayoral Budget, say People Before Profit

In their summary of the “Interim National Energy Balance for 2023” the SEAI claims that “transport is an area where collective action is needed urgently. There has been increased demand and emissions from transport in 2023, with an almost full return to pre-COVID levels of petrol and diesel demand.”

Responding to this claim Ruairí Fahy, People Before Profit candidate for Mayor of Limerick said, “We need to get people out of their cars but to do that people need reliable and available alternatives. Expecting people to be able to make the switch and buy electric cars at a time when the grants for chargers are falling while in-work poverty is rising is an abdication of responsibility and shows a lack of interest in really challenging the domination of cars over our streets.

“Keeping a car on the road is expensive but when people can’t rely on a bus showing up, don’t feel safe cycling or have nowhere safe to lock up their bike if they were to cycle people end up defaulting to cars as they can’t.

“There’s space within the new mayoral budget to trial free public transport and see how many cars we can get off the road. We can increase the rates for large multinationals to run additional bus services around the city during peak commuting times to ensure there’s enough capacity too.

“We need real climate action, and that means providing people with alternatives, not just crushing them with more taxes.”

In the report the “SEAI estimates that emissions from electricity generation were down by 21% in 2023” but that the majority of this reduction was due to a “12-fold increase” of electricity imports from Britain, Northern Ireland and Norway, with these imports accounting for 9.5% of total electricity supply in 2023.

As the emissions from this electricity use are not reported in the country where it is consumed, but where it is generated the majority are due to these emissions being reported in other jurisdictions.

The SEAI also reported record wind generation with 11.7TWh produced, increasing the previous record set in 2020 by 0.1%.

“We’re seeing the effects of climate change all around us now with record rains threatening our food supply. We need more than accounting tricks to tackle the problem. We’re on course to have over a third of our electricity produced for American tech companies by 2026 according to the International Energy Agency and we’re importing more and more of our electricity to feed this demand.

“We need to look at alternatives, we need to start building industries that lower energy use instead of speculative bets on technological solutions saving us. We need to start reducing what’s produced and getting the total hours worked down as it’s been shown to reduce energy consumption. The demand by corporations and investors for constant exponential growth is a threat to us all, we need to change up who our economy serves and put control in the hands of people rather than a small wealthy elite.”