Independent TD Denis Naughten has said that the agricultural sector is facing the climate change equivalent of the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse which led to a global financial crash.
Addressing the expansion of the Brazilian national herd, Deputy Naughten said: “The idea that we would cull our national herd at a time when Brazil is massively expanding its herd exposes the nonsense of trying to calculate biogenic methane at national rather than international level.
“As a result we are facing the climate equivalent of Lehman Brothers because all we are doing is offshoring emissions to another part of the world where it will cause far greater harm to our planet.
“This is just a mathematical exercise and we all recall a very similar mathematical exercise two decades ago with the US sub-prime mortgage market which led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and had global financial repercussions. On this occasion the long-term repercussions could be far greater”.
