Once upon a time, two members of a gang were arrested and imprisoned for committing a crime. Interrogated in separate cells with no means of communicating with each other, the prosecutors offered them each a choice to betray each other by testifying that the other committed the crime or to remain silent.
 | These were the possible outcomes of their choice:
Testifying against their fellow gang member offered a prisoner the potential for a greater reward (freedom) than cooperating with the other prisoner (1 year in prison each). However, if both testified against each other, they would both serve the maximum 2-year sentence. |
This is a game theory called the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and it’s been used since the 1950s to show why two individuals might not cooperate even when it’s in their collective interest to do so. It also explains why countries like Ireland refuse to curtail their greenhouse gas emissions as long as they think countries like China, the USA, or Argentina may not reduce theirs. Countries act with “rationale self-interest”, even if the penalty from not acting collectively (climate chaos) is far worse than the cost of action.
This week, a similar dilemma dominated our politics. Bear with me and let’s call Prisoner 1 “Leo” and Prisoner 2 “The Early Birds”….
Leo is stuck in the Dail chamber, potentially facing life after the next election as a back-bencher (or worse) if he doesn’t do something amazing to combat the numerous political parties and independents encroaching on his space. The Early Birds are “people who get up early”, whom Leo claims to represent -aka employed tax payers and voters.
Leo is stuck in the Dail chamber, potentially facing life after the next election as a back-bencher (or worse) if he doesn’t do something amazing to combat the numerous political parties and independents encroaching on his space. The Early Birds are “people who get up early”, whom Leo claims to represent -aka employed tax payers and voters.
Meet Leo (and his fetching socks)
Leo just met with the Government’s esteemed Climate Change Advisory Council who told him one of the best things he could do to address Ireland’s climate commitments was to support a carbon tax. Leo’s also aware that Ireland’s Citizen’s Assembly (100 people representing all of Irish society) recommended that a carbon tax should be one of 13 measures implemented now to address climate change, and they said they were willing to pay more for fossil fuels to play their own role in addressing climate change.
 | Even a modest carbon tax scheduled to increase slowly over time would give businesses and consumers confidence that it makes economic sense to invest in low carbon technologies (like insulation and heat pumps) rather than continue to spend money on increasingly more expensive fossil fuels. Such taxes can be designed so that a portion of revenue goes back to people to alleviate fuel poverty and invest in their household energy retrofit, along with investing the revenue in other emission reducing strategies. And there's nothing to stop Fine Gael from lowering USC while they implement a carbon tax, so people are taxed for consumption, rather than working. |
The Climate Advisory Council explained to Leo how Fine Gael could even win votes by implementing a carbon tax that gave money back to tax payers and encouraged people to reduce their fossil fuel consumption. Leo was buzzing so much after his meeting with the Climate Change Advisory Council he even made a catchy little video afterwards, promising great things to come from Fine Gael with respect to climate action (though his comms team didn’t take too kindly to my efforts to debunk it).
Meet The Early Birds
The Early Birds have become surprisingly climate savvy lately. Now that the economy is up and running again, sustainability has become de rigueur and climate change is firmly back on the media agenda during their morning commutes. Traffic has gotten way worse too, so they’re in their cars even longer each day listening to news radio.
 | As a result, the Early Birds know Ireland is a self-confessed “laggard” in climate action and that the Government will continue to burn coal and extract peat until 2030. Despite Leo’s efforts to “keep the recovery going”, the Early Birds are still not flush with cash... |
While they understand the need for climate action and accept the idea that polluters should pay, the Early Birds resent the idea of any more tax on anything in their lives and feel Leo would be a hypocrite to impose a carbon tax on them as long as Moneypoint and Bord Na Mona keep burning. Leo's neglected to tell them that they'll be paying even more for our EU carbon fines from 2020 onward if we keep heading down this carbon-emitting pathway.
Let’s Play “The Politician’s Dilemma”
| This week, Budget 2019 was upon us. -Instead of the prisoner’s dilemma, it’s a game called the politician’s dilemma where Leo is Santa Claus and the Early Birds are the excited little boys and girls. Paschal is Leo’s friendly elf, here to announce whose naughty or nice, and the Early Birds wish each other “Happy Budget Day” as they head to their breakfast meetings…. A modest carbon tax (less than 3 cent a litre on petrol) is on the table -a lump of coal to many Early Birds who can’t get to work any other way than driving, but a treasure to those who felt would be a true test of Leo’s alleged commitment to addressing climate change. |  |
Here’s how Leo’s Dilemma played out…
If Leo proposed a carbon tax in Budget 2019, Ireland would have moved one small step closer to addressing climate change and doffing the climate laggard hat (+1), but he risked alienating the Early Birds and finding himself on the back bench (or worse) after the next election (-1).
BUT, if Leo scraped the carbon tax (as he did), he’d only alienate a small percentage of environmentalists and economists, who already felt pretty alienated by Leo anyway (+/- 0). Sure, Ireland would maintain its reputation as a “climate laggard” (-1) and Leo would still look like hypocrite for his false bravado on climate leadership. However, scraping the carbon tax would be unlikely to impact how the Early Birds treat him at the next election (+1). Plus, if he throws the farmers a bone and gives them money to add some more beef cows to the herd (and more emissions to our atmosphere), he can recover any lost votes from potentially sore eco-warriors...
Leo's decision to scrap the carbon tax at the 11th hour (and add some additional greenhouse gas emissions via agricultural subsidies) was made purely in rationale self interest to survive another election, just like the Prisoner's Dilemma predicts.
If Leo proposed a carbon tax in Budget 2019, Ireland would have moved one small step closer to addressing climate change and doffing the climate laggard hat (+1), but he risked alienating the Early Birds and finding himself on the back bench (or worse) after the next election (-1).
BUT, if Leo scraped the carbon tax (as he did), he’d only alienate a small percentage of environmentalists and economists, who already felt pretty alienated by Leo anyway (+/- 0). Sure, Ireland would maintain its reputation as a “climate laggard” (-1) and Leo would still look like hypocrite for his false bravado on climate leadership. However, scraping the carbon tax would be unlikely to impact how the Early Birds treat him at the next election (+1). Plus, if he throws the farmers a bone and gives them money to add some more beef cows to the herd (and more emissions to our atmosphere), he can recover any lost votes from potentially sore eco-warriors...
Leo's decision to scrap the carbon tax at the 11th hour (and add some additional greenhouse gas emissions via agricultural subsidies) was made purely in rationale self interest to survive another election, just like the Prisoner's Dilemma predicts.
Let’s call a spade a spade. -Politics is driven by the desire for power, and what happens to the climate or future generations is largely irrelevant unless it provides a political advantage to maintain that power.
Pardon me for my cynicism, but I’m writing this from a week working in Brussels where I’ve watched this week’s climate media frenzy in Ireland from a distance. Between the dramatic urgency of the IPCC’s Special Report trying to keep additional warming under 1.5C to Denis Naughten’s resignation as the country's first Minister for Climate Action, it’s been a weird time to be away, but perhaps the outside perspective gives me clarity about the real motivations for Leo’s behavior.
| I choked up when I heard Prof. John Fitzgerald, ESRI economist and Chair of the Climate Advisory Council, on Newstalk Breakfast after the Budget was announced. Prof. Fitzgerald has argued for nearly 20 years that a carbon tax was a vital part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When asked on Newstalk if he would consider resigning his position since his advice had been ignored by the Government, Prof. Fitzgerald replied “I’ve been an economist with the ESRI for nearly two decades, so I’m used to being ignored”. Someone please explain to me why our Government ignores an esteemed economist they have paid for advice for nearly two decades… |  |
| I was equally upset when I saw Green Party TD Catherine Martin’s tweet in response to the budget. -The Green Party is the only political party who consistently defended the idea of a carbon tax at huge expense to their own “power”. They’ve heeded the advice of experts like Prof. Fitzgerald and Joe Curtain, putting long term societal benefit over short-term ambitions for power, but it hasn’t gotten them anywhere. Santa and his elves have said they're waiting for the advice from the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action to make any changes to carbon tax and that some day far far away there will be an incremental carbon tax established until 2030... |  |
It seems there’s always a reason to wait to address climate change, despite the fact that it’s is more urgent than ever and Leo’s got less than 12 months to prove his climate action ambitions before an election is probably called.
Climate Advisory Council member and economist, Joe Curtain, said it best in this must read twitter thread, summarizing his frustration:
Yesterday was a catastrophic failure of the Irish political and administrative system, and of us, the citizens. If a small wealthy booming country can't adopt the absolute minimum climate measures, even to pretend to care, if this is the world we live in....the world is doomed.
 Photo credit: The Gloss Magazine, September 2018 | Irish politics right now is driven purely by rationale self-interest, and we’re the prisoners caught playing that game with politicians in the lead up to the next election. The only way to change the game is to elect different people who prioritize societal benefits over their own personal ambition to stay in power. Let me know if you find any... Keep fighting the good fight! - Cara |
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