Full coverage: Climate change

The Climate Change Advisory Council is about to publish Ireland’s first carbon budgets, which will set hard limits on greenhouse gas emissions for the next decade. Its chair Marie Donnelly details, step by step, how this overall figure will translate into obligations for individual ministers, businesses and households.

With no momentum to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere is our next best hope of slowing global warming. Yet planting trees is not happening either, which means it is time we put the right price on it.

In a special podcast, Stephen Kinsella, Sinéad O’Sullivan, John Reynolds and Thomas Hubert watch the dust settle on the two climate change reports published last week and discuss ways of meeting the challenge ahead for politics, society and business.

Greenhouse gases, mitigation, emissions, targets... Behind the complexity of the science and the jargon, the policy options to tackle climate change are becoming increasingly clearer. Some industries and companies are suffering, others are benefiting. Since its launch, The Currency has been covering all cases.

The urgent need to stop carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels is nothing new, but farmers and food processors were hoping the different gas released by livestock could be stabilised. The IPCC’s new report shows it must go down too.

Despite abundant knowledge on what needs to be done to stop global warming, it is not happening for the simple reason that nobody wants to do it. Humanity’s next best chance lies in technology.

Carbon Collect is the brainchild of Irish entrepreneurs and former oil executives. It has now secured US government backing to tackle greenhouse gases with its “mechanical trees”.

When he started his low-carbon cement manufacturing company 20 years ago, Donal O’Riain freely admits that the timing was wrong. Now high-profile investors are injecting millions into Ecocem’s promise to fix one of the world’s worst-polluting industries.

Multiple assessments of the Irish economy agree that the long-term issues facing us are intergenerational inequality, firms dealing with technological change, and climate change. Here is how we can tackle them.

From science to soul-searching, the industry is showing signs of a deep shift in addressing its environmental impact. The bad news is that the rest of the world has moved on, and rules are long set for the rest of this decade. The good news is that work taking place now will be useful to tackle the real challenge coming after 2030.