Environmentalists have heaped scorn on Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, after he said the climate crisis could have benefits such as warmer winters, lower heating bills and fewer deaths.
Some called the comments silly and weird, others branded them irresponsible.
The taoiseach made the comments in Dublin last week at the launch of an upbeat progress report on the government’s climate action plan.
“One thing we definitely face as a result of climate change is a warmer winter. We’re already experiencing warmer winters and that actually means using less energy because it’s warmer and people need less heating and it also means fewer deaths as a result of cold weather,” he said.
“It’s interesting that when you do look at those things there is a ledger, and there are benefits and there are downsides. The downsides outweigh the benefits, but we need to be aware of them too.”
Irish Doctors for the Environment, an advocacy group, wrote to Varadkar on Monday saying the climate crisis had an “overwhelmingly negative effect on human health”. It asked him to retract and “address the errors” in his speech.
Other environmental campaigners expressed anger and disbelief.
“That the taoiseach would make these comments while delivering a progress report on his government’s climate action plan exposes the extent to which that plan is a surface level response to a multi-faceted crisis, the scale of which they fail to comprehend,” said the Green party.
“Millions are dying or being displaced right now. That will rise to hundreds of millions if the complacency of governments around the world continues. Our milder winters are punctuated by cold snaps that threaten our most vulnerable, including the thousands of people now homeless.”
Oisín Coghlan, the director of Friends of the Earth Ireland, acknowledged Ireland could benefit in a narrow way but said the climate emergency’s wider impacts on the country and the rest of the world were overwhelmingly negative.
Cara Augustenborg, an environmental scientist at University College Dublin, echoed that view, saying the few lives that might be spared from winter-related deaths paled in comparison to wider suffering.
Extinction Rebellion Ireland called the comments shocking. “It’s time for civil disobedience,” the group said.
The spat came as climate experts warned that a catastrophic storm during high tide will flood thousands of homes, businesses and landmark buildings in Dublin in the coming decades.
Peter Thorne, a lead author on the fifth assessment report of the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, said Ireland had so far been able to “dodge a bullet” because storms have struck during low tides.
Ireland is one of the EU’s worst carbon emission offenders and faces fines of more than €250m (£216m) for missing 2020 targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adopting renewable energy.
The government unveiled an ambitious plan in June that outlined measures to curb emissions and set a path for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In recent days the singer Cher and the actor Mark Ruffalo have added their voices to a campaign to stop Ireland becoming an entry point for fracked US gas.