Our politicians and media — and increasingly the public — have an obsession with CO₂ emissions. I contend this is a pathologically ignored factor in our housing crisis — in two ways:

I’m not going to try to tackle the scientific arguments related to human-caused CO₂ emissions and their impact on temperature and climate in this article; but obviously it’s a question of fundamental importance, so I might try to do so in future.

As part of the drive to ‘curb CO₂ emissions’, policy makers — at a national and county level — are promoting ‘sustainable travel patterns’. Ultimately, this is a euphemism for less travel — or, more specifically, less private transport. The rationale, basically, is: the less fossil-fuel burning vehicles on the road, and the less distance they travel, the less CO₂ emissions.

‘But what does this have to do with housing?’ you may be wondering. The answer is that the (purported) need for ‘sustainable travel patterns’ is one of the main guiding factors in all land-use and zoning decisions — at least in County Waterford.^[1] In other words, the question ‘How far do we need to drive to get anywhere (to work, to a store, to a social event, etc.)?’ is being used a foremost criterion in fundamental decisions about where we are allowed to build, live and settle.

As I mentioned in a previous article, the Waterford City & County Coucil has identified specific ‘settlement nodes’ throughout the city and county. Any building outside of these pre-defined and relatively small areas is more-or-less ‘out of the question’. As a result, the vast majority of land in the County is ‘off limits’. Officially, some of these ‘off-limits’ areas are zoned for ‘agricultural use’; but in reality a lot of this land is not being put to any productive use or genuine service to humanity. Even if the farmer or land-owner in question was happy to sell it to a prospective home-builder, the County Council wouldn’t allow the building to proceed — because it is outside one of their pre-defined ‘settlement nodes’; or because — being in a somewhat ‘remote’ area — it would undermine their mantra of ‘sustainable travel patterns’, etc.

In summary, there is essentially — with occasional or rare exception — a moratorium on home-building in our county — at least outside the already-populated areas or specifically pre-defined areas of very small size. And, one of the main justifications for this is the goal of ‘reducing our CO₂ emissions’.

But suppose, for argument’s sake, that you managed to find a site. You still need to actually build the house. Enter the ‘green lobby’ with their CO₂ meters again — because don’t forget: you’re not only causing CO₂ emissions when you drive your fossil-fuel-powered vehicle, but also when you try to heat your home.

Various nosy-parkers and busybodies in the policy-making sphere insist, for this reason, that newly-built houses exclude traditional sources of space-heating such as fires, stoves and gas heaters. In their stead — in place of tried, tested and relatively cheap solutions — builders must not only meet stricter criteria on insulation, but also embrace ‘high-tech’ heating solutions such as geothermal energy. These choices might entail significantly higher costs, which are ultimately passed on to the home-owner.

Again, this situation, strangely enough, has arisen due to the dogma surrounding ‘CO₂ emissions’ and their influence on ‘climate change’. Most people are just meekly accepting this dogma; people who express skepticism or criticism might be ostracized of brow-beaten; a quiet word might be shared behind closed doors that they have been reading too many ‘conspiracy theories’. (After all, how could scientists be wrong about a question of such fundamental importance? And don’t we see the evidence for man-made climate change in increasingly strange weather events? Etc.)

Farmers, unsurprisingly, have long-running feuds and disagreements with the Green lobby. The latter are, after all, demanding that farmers radically overhaul their systems and livelihoods — how they raise livestock (to the increasingly limited extent that they are even allowed to do so), etc. So farmers are one of the few demographics (perhaps the only one) that we hear challenging the Green lobby on mainstream media.

But this ‘challenge’ to the ‘Green lobby’ is fundamentally inadequate in two ways. Firstly, the farming organisations are generally only representing and defending their own interests and livelihoods when they contest the new environmental policies and regulations; they are not particularly interested in or concerned with the welfare of non-farmers — i.e. the vast majority of the Irish population (who, as this article is hopefully demonstrating, are also being grossly disenfranchised by these policies).

Secondly, even though they might contest the finer points of various environmental legislation, they don’t challenge the underlying dogma which forms the actual basis for such legislation in the first place. In other words, they meekly and without question accept ‘catastrophic, irreversible climate change’ caused by manmade ‘CO₂ emissions’ as given, as a ‘fact’. And their public statements on these issues are typically prefaced by insipid and face-saving comments such as ‘I’m not a climate-denier by any means, but …​’.

No disrespect to farmers, but this is ultimately pathetic. They need articulate representatives who are unafraid to not only examine the fundamental scientific questions (e.g. are human-caused CO₂ emissions really causing irreversible and dangerous climate change), but also then publicly challenge the global-warming doomsayers. Farmers and their organisations aside, we also need such representatives for the Irish general public.