"Green" policies are destroying this country

Well it's sometimes cheap and sometimes less so. But here's one way oil is always expensive: externalities. I'm quite happy to drive less, fly less, and buy less useless crap if it means my grandchildren don't face armageddon. Thinking otherwise seems to be a fool's paradise.

We have an economy that was looking at rolling energy blackout if one gas fired station was off-line this Winter where the best Ryan could come up with as a solution was buying nuclear of France. Our manufacturing industries has been chipped away at for years by economies with cheaper energy and lower workers rights. What we now have are multinationals employing close to 300,000 of our workforce that at a minutes notice if they got a better deal elsewhere, would as they have in the past, up and leave without a thought.

Just on your, "This would make sense if oil was cheap". The latest great white hope we are being sold is solar panels. The three worldwide largest suppliers of solar panels are China, India and the US. In Euros the current price of a gallon of petrol in China is 4.02, India 4.64, the US 3.23. In Ireland it is 6.34. Oil is expensive in Ireland for the sole reason we have taxed the hell out of it to "save the planet" unlike some of the largest economies in the world.

For the rest of your post I`m getting heartily sick and tired of this nonsense that by subjecting ourselves to penury we are going to save the planet single handed.

Labour supporters were even more pissed off as Labour were anti water charges until they saw the chance of getting their well padded behinds on Ministerial chairs. Kelly taking over from Hogan of FG and attempting to push it through was the ultimate slap on the face for Labour supporters and has left Labour where they are today politically.

Once again, the externalities of fossil fuels are ignored. Why?

Secondly, I don't think anybody is suggesting we can save the planet on our own. Where is this straw man coming from?

Or one guy goes over and does his best to lift it, and other 7 guys look at him and think, 'what an idiot'.

In economics an externality is an indirect cost or benefit to an uninvolved third party that arises as an effect of another party`s activity.

Where in that with the fuel prices I have posted say worldwide we are all in this together ?

Cheap energy give a economic edge to an economy, so get back to me when the US bans fracking and raises their fuel prices to the same as ours, or when China, (among many others do the same), closes down coal burning power stations rather than opening new plants. China doing so while they are the world leader in supplying solar panels, the supposed silver bullet that will fill the gap here when the wind dies.

Saving the planet is a worthy theory, but if you really want to know how the planet works following the money will show the reality.

What you missed was the price of fuel in Ireland in comparison to other countries. Cheaper energy is an advantage regardless of what industry you are involved in. Our manufacturing industries have been constantly chipped away over the years by countries using cheap energy and poor working conditions and workers rights. What we have now is close to 300,000 employed by multinationals. Basically service industries that if they were offered better terms and cheaper energy would be gone in the morning. Similar to Dell in Limerick, Digital in Galway and Fruit of the Loom in Donegal.

Even as we are where Ryan`s answer to just one gas powered generating station going off line is French nuclear energy when the wind drops. We have some of these multinationals holding a gun to our head over energy guzzling data centre that will provide nothing in the way of employment or anything to the economy, and that is even before we are going to have this supposed 1 million cars that would require charging, heat pumps etc. Don`t be fooling yourself that every country is in this together when it comes to energy sources. There are plenty out there quite happy to get an edge by having cheaper energy. Many of them more than happy to sell us their "green energy" products produced by using cheap energy. That is the economic definition of externality.

Well a lot of Greenies on here are constantly banging the drum of accounting for the fuel used by airlines and large transport forgetting we are an island nation hugely dependent on air travel and shipping, we have already had some major materials inflation due to shipping issues, what do you think is going to happen to our knowledge economy very dependent on skilled emigrants and tourism if air travel sky rockets in price?

We'll be a dead duck, no European workers are going to come here if it'll cost them €500 to fly home to see their family so they'll work remotely and pay their taxes somewhere else because a high Irish salary isn't good enough anymore especially with our climate and rental costs, so we will see the big MNC's keeping their main assets here for corporate tax reasons but with less employment, I can see Croatia taking a lot of our jobs long term once they join the euro next year.

Hyperbole.

I hope so. But I think it's likely. Have you sat down and though about what happens when - for example - billions of people find themselves unable to live in their current homes due to extreme weather and/or famine?

As I said above, I think folks seem to think that global warming just means higher sea levels and windier weather. Those things are not the problem at all, or a very minor part of it.

Two separate points here:

1) You honestly think things will carry on as before? I encourage you to do some reading and thinking. Massive resource wars are just the very tip of the iceberg here.

2) And we will just be machine-gunning desperate familes fleeing uninhabitable places? Really?

Right, so that path leads us to civilisational annihilation.

How about we pioneer zero or low-emission technologies that the developing countries can adopt as they grow? What's the worst-case scenario if we do that? Because we know the worst-case scenario of doing nothing. Complete disaster.

This is really scary sh!t when you think about it. Nobody wants it to be true. But ignoring it will not make it go away.

Hardly any people live in either, as I am sure you are aware. That's because of their very low carrying capacity. What happens when the carrying capacity of the planet plummets in the coming decades due to climate change?

This is like thinking about your own death - it's deeply uncomfortable. But simply not thinking about it is not a rational reaction.