The recent Stern report sample of forceful way the devastating effects of the Earth heating. It is not possible to be continued expanding the application of a tax world-wide scale to which contaminates. No longer one is if we can do something against the heating of the planet, but of if we can occur the luxury of not doing anything.
The British government has published the most complete study of the costs and the economic risks of the heating of the planet and the measures that could reduce the gas discharges that cause the effect conservatory.
The report, directed by sir Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, emphasizes that no longer it is if we can do something against the heating of the planet, but of if we can occur the luxury of not doing anything.
The report proposes a program whose cost would be equivalent to only 1% of the annual consumption, but would avoid to the world risk costs five greater times. The costs of the heating of the planet in him exposed are greater than in previous studies, because the tests in increase that consider the process of heating of the planet is extremely complex and nonlinear, with the nondespicable possibility that much more it advances quickly and their amplitude is much greater of which had thought before.
In fact, it can that that study underestimates the costs: for example, the climatic change can cause a greater variability of the weather, a possible disappearance or an important change of direction of the current of the Gulf and an increase of the diseases.
When I participated in 1995 in the Intergubernamental Group de Expertos on the Climatic Change –el scientific group that periodically evaluates the scientific datas on the heating of planet –, were overwhelming tests that the concentration in the gas atmosphere which they cause the conservatory effect had experienced a marked increase from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the human activity had contributed to it to a great extent, which would have deep effects in the climate and the levels of the sea. But they were few who saw, for example, that the fusion of the ice cap of the Arctic was as fast as now it seems to be it.
Even so, there are some who say that, as we are not safe of how it will be the climatic change, we must do little or nothing. For me, the uncertainty must make us act today more resolutely. The heating of the planet is one of those cases little common in that the scientific community feels more fear of which it can be happening, that the population in general. The scientists have glimpsed what the future he can reserve to us.
As he indicates the Stern report, the poor men are, as usual, most vulnerable. One third part of Bangladesh will be submerged at the end of this century. The Maldivas and a great number of States insulares of the Pacific will disappear: our Atlantis of century XXI.
For an economist, the problem is evident: the contaminating ones are not paying the complete cost of the damage that they cause. The advanced countries could not want to cause to damage some to Bangladesh and the islands that will disappear, but no war could be more devastating.
This problem on world-wide scale with a tax decided globally could be approached, which does not mean an increase in the total fiscality, but simply a substitution in each one of the countries of the present taxes by a tax to the contamination (by carbon dioxide). It has sense much more to burden the harmful thing, like the contamination, that the positive, as the saving and the work.
Although president George W. Bush says that he believes in the markets, in this case has requested voluntary measures, but he has sense much more to resort to the force of the markets –la of the incentives — that to depend on the good will, mainly in the case of the oil companies that they consider his only objective obtaining the maximum benefit, independently of the cost that represents for others.
He has said himself that Exxon has been financing supposed groups of experts to undermine the confidence in the scientific datas on the heating of the planet, in the same way that the tabaquera industry financed “investigations” to put in prohibition the validity of the statistical conclusions that they showed to the entailment between tobacco and cancer.
The good news is that there are many forms in which greater incentives could reduce the emissions. Partly, eliminating the myriads of subventions of the inefficient uses. In the United States the ethanol coming from the maize is subsidized and it is burdened coming from the sugar; hidden in the tax regime there are thousands of million dollars of subventions to the industries of petroleum and the gas.
Most important it is than the signals represented by the prices that show the true social costs of the energy coming from fossil fuels will foment the innovation and the conservation. Small changes in the habits, when reproducing them hundreds of million people, can involve an enormous difference. For example, the simple change of the color of the tile roofs in warm climates so that they reflect the light of the sun or the plantation of trees around the houses can cause important savings of energy used for the conditioned air.
We only have a planet and we must conserve it like a treasure. The heating of the planet is a risk that we cannot allow the luxury us to continue not knowing. www.ecoportal.net