Posts Tagged: Environment

UL / irelandin2050 — No Comments
7
Nov 09

The Future Sound of Dublin: Dublin in 2050

Liffey Sunset a la Nokia - Dublin, Ireland
Image by féileacán via Flickr

Published in The Dubliner.

Not changed utterly. Things will change in Dublin, but they will not change utterly. Dublin in 1970 was similar to Dublin in 2009, and Dublin in 2050 will be outwardly similar. The intervening days between today and 2050 – about 15,000 of them – offer us the opportunity to make things better for the children who will succeed us.

Grey is the new black By the year 2050, one in four workers will be over 65, and one in ten will be over 80. That’s right, I said “workers.” You will be working into your 70s and 80s; advances in healthcare and an increasing retirement age mean many of us will work 40, 50, perhaps even 60 years of our lives. So Dublin will be a grey city, with older people much more visible on the streets. Our golden years will be golden, and as culture and fashion move to accommodate the preferences of this large demographic, it’s going to be hip to be older.

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irelandin2050 — No Comments
5
Oct 09

What’s in store for our futures

Published in the Sunday Independent. and on the 2050 blog.

THE decisions you take in the coming days, weeks and years will affect the choices that your children will be able to make when they become adults and take up the reins of Irish society in the coming decades. So the answers you give to the question of what kind of Ireland you want to see are important. How you behave today, and what you expect of tomorrow, affects your tomorrows as an individual. So it is with Ireland as a nation.

Ireland’s recent economic misfortune has blinded us to the long-term threats and opportunities our society faces. We must place these issues in their proper context for this reason: however bad today’s troubles are, and they are very serious, they are just an episode — they will pass.

What kind of Ireland are we likely to see? More jobs and more opportunities for new businesses will open up to us if we change the way we educate our children. The world does not need the gifted list-learners the Leaving Certificate produces; it needs original minds capable of producing new ideas within a supportive business culture that allows them to prosper (and fail) easily. New ideas that lead to new businesses and new products create new, high-wage jobs which will enrich the nation.

Ireland’s farmers will have to change the way they do business. Climate change will force a substitution of the crops they can produce profitably, and this will change the composition of Irish agriculture, and the type of livelihoods the farmers will be able to make from their land.

Ireland’s power needs will only grow as our economy matures and develops. Solar, wind, wave, and other types of renewable energies probably won’t be advanced enough to allow a smooth transition from the fossil fuels we use today, especially in industry and agriculture. A nuclear option should be considered until the renewable power resources are advanced enough to take the increased load of electricity generation we’ll need to have by 2050.

The family as the primary unit within Irish society won’t change that much.

But we will see spikes in the divorce rate as the influence of the Catholic Church wanes further.

There will still be very poor people in Ireland in 40 years. The pace of development, however swift, does not allow everyone’s living standards to increase at the same pace.

Expect taxes and prices to go up over the next 40 years for basic goods, but wages may not keep pace. So those who are born to the middle classes today may find themselves at a much lower level than they envisaged.

Older people will have the financial and political clout to get what they want from a competitive marketplace and a government that needs the majority of older voters on its side. Fashion and culture will change to service the tastes and whims of a richer, older population. Older workers will demand, and receive, their due from the market place. The future’s bright for them.

UL — No Comments
10
Nov 08

Ireland’s CO2 Emissions, 1998-2006

Take a look at the data below, which comes from this recently released CO2 emissions report by the CSO. (You can get the data I used to make the chart here).

I’ve taken the largest emitters of CO2 by sector, and graphed them. The data pull out an interesting story. We see a mitigation of the levels of CO2 being pumped into the air my mining and manufacturing, and an increase in the levels of CO2 being emitted by residential areas. Overall, I have to say, though this picture looks bleak, and Ireland’s environmental record is dismal, to say the least, it could have been worse. The overall trend is upward, sadly, and projected to increase further.

I certainly was expecting increased levels of CO2 over the last 5 years above these numbers. Does anyone have a CO2 emissions data series for Ireland going back, say, to the 1970′s?

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General / Rants / irelandin2050 — 1 Comment
28
Sep 08

A Nuclear Ireland?

Gerard posts on an issue I’ve been working on for something else—the need for a growing economy to provide itself with power without burning fossil fuels. Even together, solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, and other greener technologies aren’t yet up to the task of  supplying Ireland’s needs, as the government’s 2007 white paper has shown. As James Lovelock has controversially written, in the short to medium term, say 25 years or so, nuclear power is the only option for advanced economies to grow without fossil fuels. 

Let me elaborate.

Ireland has repeatedly rejected the construction of a nuclear power plant, for a host of reasons, most of them irrational, take this for example, or factually incorrect, see this, or just twaddle, see this. 

I think if the benefits of nuclear power were put to the Irish people in a consistent and intelligent way, they would respond with a different answer. 

The benefits of nuclear power are cheap, reliable energy which is independent of fossil fuel usage and, as we’ve seen, price changes. Not only does nuclear power have negligible CO2 (global warming) emissions, but Western nuclear power has never killed a member of the public or had any measurable impact on public health, miles of column inches to the contrary. France is the shining example of the benefits of nuclear power—78% of French electricity is generated using nuclear fuel.

The costs of nuclear power are, in this order, high level waste disposal, risk of proliferation, severe accidents, and terrorism. Obviously, Ireland would not be subject to most of these risks as it is a (largely) neutral country. 

Running out of uranium isn’t really an issue either: there are approximately 14,750,000 tonnes of the stuff on Earth. Last year we used close to 67,000 tonnes of this. With type four fast breeder reactor technology, we’d have practically unlimited energy resources into the 22nd century [2]. 

Right now, our CO2 emission are 24% higher than our 1990 level. Our Kyoto protocol agreement is for 13% increases, and our energy needs are set to increase by 25% by 2015 [1]. So this is not a problem which will go away, as this ESRI report shows. Ireland is contributing to climate change in much the same way as India and China, albeit on a smaller scale. 

Pollution is the price of development. 

It’s fair to say nuclear power isn’t the solution, but there is no solution in the medium term without it, as we transition away from fossil fuel power solutions. Those electric cars won’t charge themselves. 

I’m not a fan of nuclear power, but there are ways to buy this power from abroad. As Gerard reports, a 25bn pound investment in nuclear power will take place in the UK in the next 10 years, thanks to a recent takeover. This power will need buyers. If it is priced properly, Ireland might be in a position to purchase the benefits of nuclear power without incurring many of its costs. 

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