Trinity has an expansive number of illustrious alumni. From authors to athletes, scientists to sociologists, many disciplines are represented among the list of notable people who have studied here. And now, Luke Gibbons deserves to be added to this list.
Gibbons, an Irish Research Council-funded Trinity student in the final year of his PhD, was named on the list of “Top 30 Under 30 Environmental Educators in the World 2024” by the North American Environmental Association.
Gibbons’s work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining law (the subject of his PhD), corporations, and environmental research. He discussed how he came to this mix of topics, stating that, “During secondary school I was involved in the Green Schools committee, and that’s where my first interest in the environment came from…When I went to university, I always kind of wanted to do law.” In the course of his law degree at Trinity, “you could study, say, environmental law…and so I did that, and then during the module you had to do…an extended essay, which I did on corporate environmental crime. So that’s where my interest in the intersection between companies and the environment came.” After a law Master’s at the University of Oxford (during which Gibbons gained “a background more heavy in the environment that I didn’t have necessarily in my undergraduate studies”), he came back to Trinity for his doctorate. He said that, in his previous academic studies, “there wasn’t much emphasis on the intersection between both [corporate law and climate change/environment], and how do we hold companies accountable for their environmental harms and wrongs”. So he proposed a PhD topic to fix that lack of information on their intersections. His research looks at whether “Irish law [can] be interpreted in a way, as it stands, to hold company directors to account for the environmental wrongs that their companies commit.” And, while this currently requires some creative arguing and interpretations, he hopes that his PhD work “will shed light on this and creates a change going forward.”
Gibbons’s experience is not limited to Ireland. When he went to Harvard on a Fulbright in the United States, he was able to interact with American politicians about the environment. “When I am meeting with politicians,” stated Gibbons, “particularly in the U.S. and even in Ireland,” he tries to send his message using a story. Currently, his narrative is this: “as parents, or as parents of the earth…this is our planet that we have at the moment, but it’s their future. So it’s childrens’ future, and that’s kind of like my line at the moment…this is the world we know, but we want this world to continue for our future generations going forward.” He added that “the majority of American politicians I have met have been very receptive to that.”
Often, the dominant emotions people have towards the climate crisis might be fear, despair, and nihilism due to feeling like we as individuals are powerless. Gibbons described how he addresses this elephant in the room by putting forth three questions to his audience: “The first is, ‘must we change?’ The second is ‘can we change?,’ and the third is ‘will we change?’ And the ‘must’ part of that is the doom and gloom.” During the “must” section of the discussion, he lays out the statistics: the number of people who’ve died from heat over the past few years, how much of the earth is projected to be uninhabitable soon, and the alarming acceleration rate of it all. He is also aware of different motivators. “The climate crisis cost insurance companies three trillion in the last decade, when the previous decade was 600 million. And if we don’t want to listen to the science, then listen to the money. Because sometimes, money talks to people more than science does.”
He has a ready answer for the “can” question. “I always say, yes, we can, because the solutions are there already.” The example he gives is about wind energy, which “is the number one source of energy in five countries…and can produce 40 times the energy the world needs.” Here, again, he notes the relationship to the economy, stating that “last year alone, there was 14 million new jobs created in renewables. It’s an economic opportunity as well as an environmental opportunity.” Asking the second question can clear some of the “doom and gloom” people associate with the climate crisis, showing that change is certainly possible. The third question builds on the two before. “That’s where I talk about this politics of climate change in the sense that the political power of the fossil fuel industry is so strong that the COP of Nations, both last time and the one coming up, are in petrostates…That’s because the fossil fuel industry has such a political mandate.”
The theme of holding fossil fuel companies accountable is, rightfully, a recurring theme throughout our conversation. “I say, you know, we’ve answered that we must, we’ve answered that we can, and now the question that really needs to be answered is ‘will we change?’ And my strong belief is that that change comes from addressing this mandate that fossil fuel companies have, and the current control they have over policy and political decisions.” Gibbons also voiced his opinions on views about the climate costs of farming and how environmental policies often treat farmers. Describing himself as “very much an advocate for the farming community” given his ties to Mayo, he stated that, “even policies from Europe that say they’re helping farmers, such as the Common Agricultural Policy [CAP], it really does not give them the money that they need to change.” Instead of focusing this much on farmers, to their detriment, he says “we should place it [the burden] on fossil fuel companies, because they contribute 80% of the emissions…Sometimes I think we just try and villainize farmers because we feel like they’ll push over and change because they don’t have the means to challenge the situation.”
Gibbons sums up his views of what needs to change using a metaphor: “When the human body has an infection, you treat the source of the infection, you don’t just treat the periphery. And the source of the infection on the world at the moment is fossil fuel companies and the emissions that they emit. And it doesn’t make sense if we don’t start to act on that immediately and directly.”
