The climate bill introduced in the Dáil last week sets out a policy architecture which should worry farmers and all citizens in general. The intention, to be revealed in detail later this year, is to impose sector-by-sector emissions targets, to be delivered by each Government department or agency over five year periods, with the overall intention to cut emissions by about half over the next decade and to achieve net zero 30 years hence. Targets are to be assigned at a local as well as national level, with a role even for county councils.

However laudable the urgency infused into Irish climate policy, the proposed mode of pursuing carbon reduction, namely quantitative targets on a sectoral basis, makes no economic sense and has failed in every context in which it has been attempted. Territorial targets without policies to attain them have been a feature of international climate accords since Kyoto in the mid-1990s and today’s urgency reflects the acceptance that 30 years has been wasted, since this approach has failed. Economists have long argued that the only policy that will deliver is the one which makes it costly for consumers to choose high-carbon products and services, whatever their source at home or abroad, and makes it cheaper to pick the low- or zero-carbon alternatives.

Pictured below is the Moscow headquarters of the Soviet Union’s State Planning Commission, more commonly known as Gosplan. The architecture is vaguely reminiscent of the Kildare Street home built for Ireland’s Department of Industry and Commerce in the 1930s.

Gosplan was founded in 1921 and went on to oversee the famous five-year plans associated with Stalin’s push to industrialise the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the top down. Output quotas were established for each sector and region and a vast bureaucratic apparatus established to micro-manage Russia and its satellites. Things did not work out well and Gosplan was closed in 1991, as was the Soviet Union.

The spirit of Gosplan lives on and is enjoying an undeserved revival in Ireland in the cause of climate action. There is no basis for believing that you can simply set quantitative targets, make them binding by law or executive diktat, and assume the objectives will somehow be delivered through bureaucratic oversight. No economic expert, or even amateur student of economic policy in the western world, has ever recommended this approach and it is unfortunate that the energy of climate activism is being squandered.

The influence of the Green party in Government has already yielded some positive change, via the increase of the carbon tax in last October’s budget. There will need to be further increases and ultimately all major economies will need to put a price on carbon emissions commensurate with the damage they cause. Fiddling around with aspirational sector targets, without analysis of costs or prospective carbon reductions, holds extreme perils for the Irish farm sector.

The apparent high share of emissions from Irish agriculture is misleading for two reasons. The first is that most of the output is exported. The associated emissions should be debited to the importing consumers.

The petrol and diesel you burn in your vehicles is not debited to Saudi Arabia, it is quite rightly debited to Ireland and there are high taxes to discourage consumption.

The EU has recently acknowledged that the earth has just one atmosphere and outsourcing high-carbon production to China has no purpose other than making Europe’s figures look better than they are. Because of the unusual treatment of agricultural exports, Ireland’s figures look much worse than they really are (as do China’s). The other main headings of emissions are measured by consumption, not by production.

The second is that biogenic methane emissions from livestock farming may be overestimated. There are experts who believe that methane dissipates more quickly in the atmosphere than carbon and should attract a lower coefficient in the calculations for this reason. This issue, along with many other thorny problems in emissions measurement, is due to be considered afresh by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change later this year.

The stage is already set for a row in Ireland about sectoral emissions controls for the farm sector, including the imposition of herd size limits. The farm organisations should focus on getting the measurements right.

Is it true that emissions from Irish farming are excessive, or that reducing them, once correctly measured, is the least-cost option available?