Power To The People - Bring Renewable Energy Into Public Ownership
Éirígí For A New Republic today launches a new Power To The People campaign calling for the renewable energy sector to be taken into public ownership and for the state to rapidly develop sufficient wind, solar and other renewable energy capacity to ensure the transition to a low carbon economy by 2030.
The campaign launch comes a day after the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that the Twenty-Six Counties overshot its greenhouse emissions target by a massive five million tonnes in 2018.
Over the course of the last twenty years the political establishment has effectively privatised the energy generation sector. With the notable exception of the renewable energy assets controlled by the ESB, all of the renewable energy that is currently being generated in the Twenty-Six Counties is controlled by private corporations. And as the renewable sector expands in the coming years, the grip of the private energy companies will tighten even further.
These corporations stand to make billions of euros of profit from a rapidly expanding renewable energy sector that is based upon the harvesting of Irish natural resources in the form of wind and solar energy. And in the future they will be perfectly positioned to generate similar profits from Ireland’s oceans as the technology to convert waves and tides into electricity reaches maturity.
These profits, will of course, be generated off the backs of Irish workers that will be paying a premium for electricity that is generated using natural resources that actually belongs to those workers and the wider nation collectively.
The fact that the political establishment has handed over Ireland’s wind, solar and other sources of natural renewable energy to the private sector should come as no surprise to anyone. The gombeens did precisely the same thing with Ireland’s fossil fuel when they handed the Barryroe Oil Field and Kinsale, Seven Heads, Ballycotton and Corrib Gas Fields to the private sector.
Éirígí activists were heavily involved in the campaign to stop Shell taking control of the Corrib Gas Field.
With the Power To The People campaign Éirígí hopes to kick-start a national conversation about how Ireland makes the necessary rapid transition away from fossil fuels and about who controls and profits from the new renewable energy network.
For our part we in Éirígí assert that the people of Ireland have an inalienable right to the ownership of all of Ireland’s natural resources including the wind, solar, waves and tides. And that the people of Ireland should collectively benefit from all wealth that accrues from those natural resources.
We reject the notion that the private sector will deliver a low carbon economy by 2030. The pressing need to reach a low carbon economy by that deadline cannot be left to the whims of corporate boardrooms and bankers who evaluate all actions on the basis of profit alone.
The state must recognise the existential threat that climate change represents and move with speed and determination to directly develop a major national network of wind, solar and other renewable facilities by 2030.
Creating such a network would not only dramatically lower carbon output, but also provide the country with a degree of energy independence that it has historically been denied.
With control of electricity generation, the state will also be able to control the price that citizens pay for it. In that scenario the state could provide citizens with low cost green electricity to ease their transition away from fossil-fuel based transport, heating and cooking. The ‘carrot’ of low cost electricity is far more likely to achieve the desired result than the isolated use of the ‘stick’ of a carbon tax.
You can read more about the Power To The People campaign here. And if your ready to help build support for a new energy future you can volunteer by completing the Contact Us form here.