Last month, I was invited to a meeting of the Joint Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy as part of their deliverations on the carbon budgets recommended by the Climate Change Advisory Council last December.

I will not go into the full details of what was proposed, but I led, or co-authored, several key analyses that critically informed the public, academic and parliamentary debate:

• My opening statement (PDF link). A recording and transcript of the session is here.
• Moriarty & Daly Policy Brief - Basing Ireland’s carbon budgets on temperature neutrality would undermine obligations under the Paris Agreement
• Environmental Research Letters paper (Duffy et al., 2025) showing that a national “temperature neutrality” approach effectively grandfathers high methane emissions in rich livestock-exporting countries, undermines global equity, and is inconsistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C goal (link). The paper got significant media attention, including making the front page of the Irish Times.
• I wrote my Irish Times column for September on the topic of temperature neutrality and GWP/* (here)
• I also led the energy systems anaysis which underpinned thescenarios used by the CCAC in budget proposals. (link to final report)

On October 7th, the Committee finalised its report. The report acknowledges the controversy over the CCAC’s reinterpretation of the climate neutrality goal as “no additional warming” and recommends that the proposed budgets be re-evaluated in light of a robust interpretation of climate neutrality, the EU’s 2040 target, and crucially, Ireland’s obligations under Article 2 of the Paris Agreement, including both the temperature goals and the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities”.

This is now with the Minister and government. If he accepts the recommendations of the JOC, the process for setting Ireland’s third and fourth carbon budgets will be delayed, but it will openly reviewed and hopefully establish a robust process for determining what precisely “climate neutrality” means in Ireland - which is, astonishingly, not defined.