US president Donald Trump’s actions in his second term have been so chaotic and contradictory that they have left observers reeling, unable to absorb the shocks in one field before a new wave hits from another.
One consequence is that policy issues of prime importance become far less visible than they should be, though they are among the most urgent challenges our world faces.
This is especially true of the climate emergency. Trump’s appointee to the US Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is recklessly dropping dozens of key climate protection provisions, boasting that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion”.
But so much dust has been raised by drama in other fields that this frightening shift in US policy has gone largely unremarked in many quarters.
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Needless to say, climate change is not a “religion” but a hypothesis overwhelmingly endorsed by the world’s greatest experts in the field. And measures taken to date, from the US across the world, including Ireland, are, far from being excessive, still mostly utterly inadequate to mitigate global heating.
And, as Pope Francis consistently made clear, the price of failure in the rich world is being paid by those in disadvantaged regions.
In Ireland, we consistently fail to meet even the modest targets for carbon emission reduction set by the EU. The 2025 Climate Action Plan, presented to Cabinet recently, offers very little confidence that we are going to close this gap. It is not so much denial of climate change, as in the US, that threatens Ireland’s policy , but indifference, procrastination and misleading short-term calls for action.
One example is Storm Éowyn, exactly the kind of extreme weather event that climate change makes more frequent and often more intense. One might have hoped that it would spark more debate about how we can reduce that frequency and intensity in future. Instead, much of the post-storm reaction was devoted to the removal, often indiscriminate, of trees adjacent to roadsides, and to power lines.
No one can doubt for a moment the danger posed by trees falling on cars, or cutting off power to communities or vulnerable individuals. Some felling is essential. But there remains a bitter irony in responding to storms by reducing the very vegetation whose carbon sequestration capacity makes such weather events likely.
We need more and better planned forestry to cope with climate change; we need fewer grandstanding gestures.
At home and abroad, we must act on science-based evidence on climate, not be distracted by the disinformation now used worldwide to attack the climate agenda.
