Ambiguous stance of Coalition party leaders labelled as “an abandonment of climate movement by Coalition”
People Before Profit’s spokesperson on Climate, Bríd Smith TD has attacked what she described as a “concerted and well organised campaign to have an LNG built in Ireland,” a move she says flies in the face of science, the climate crisis and our commitments under the Paris Treaty.
The TD will raise the issue today with the Taoiseach in the Dáil following comments from the head of a US company pushing to build an LNG on the Shannon. New Fortress Energy’s CEO Wes Eden has written to three party leaders urging support for the project.
The TD will say: “The coalition, despite the formal position in the Program for Government have allowed ambiguity and ambivalence to enter the debate on LNGs and this is clearly been used by the projects backers both inside and outside the Dáil.
“Most disgracefully recent statements by the Green Party leader threw the door wide open to them. It is no accident that New Fortress Energy are distributing material which quotes the three leaders in order to back up their case. We know that the fossil fuel industry globally is using the war in Ukraine to push more and more expansion of oil and gas projects- projects that will mean the end of any hope of limiting temperature increases to under 1.5 or even 2 degrees.”
The TD claims Eden’s recent statements are a part of the global push to profit from the war by the fossil fuel industry.
She will say: “We need to hear this government say resolutely that new fossil fuel infrastructure is incompatible with Paris or with a world that limits temperature increases. That means legislating now and it also means that the climate movement should begin now saying that An Bord Pleannala cannot allow this project to proceed as the states climate commitments must outweigh the rights of oil and gas pushers like New Fortress Energy. There is a better use of the Shannon region as a hub for renewable energy in the coming years and not as a new store of fossil fuels.”
