A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

July 24th 2012

The Humble Carbon Tax: The Simplest Answer To Our Problems?

‘Taxes’. It’s a word that tends to strike fear and hatred in many peoples hearts and minds, instilling thoughts of slashed income earnings, costly purchases and the downfall of many a society. When we see it plastered over the news headlines and atop papers, we instantly think that once again, our governments are stepping up their efforts to screw us over financially by taking our rightfully earned money and wasting it away on projet that us as the taxpayers never see the light of.

Tax however is something us in the developed economic world have to deal with, it’s a power we cannot afford to ignore (excuse the pun). Without income tax and VAT, our nations would be without the cash to make our lives as good as they are, and they are good, even if economic downturn and suffering seem so rife at the moment. It’s never so much the idea of the tax itself that angers us, but the level we have to deal with, and its no surprise that us Westerner experience some of the highest in the world. Then again, we also experience the best living standards globally, so it can’t be all that bad can it?

This is why it’s high time the developed world took a long hard look in the mirror (and wallet) and began seriously considering what has become known as the ‘carbon tax’. The concept has been around for decades, and has only grown in potential since its inception. Unfortunately, it has yet to latch firmly onto daily life, always sitting in the background as a mere point for consideration than an actual solution. This stance is well overdue in its updating, and now more than ever, the carbon tax could be the answer to so many of our problems.

In effect, a carbon tax places a price, usually called the ‘social cost of carbon’, on a single ton of CO2, taking into account estimated disadvantages to health, population, the economy and the environment, with a round figure calculated at the end. Once this value has been obtained, the government will then charge any polluter, small or large, for each ton of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, an element we know all too well as a highly damaging pollutant.

This encourages polluters to do many wonderful things, ranging from innovating greener technology, to reducing dirty practices, switching fuel and ultimately curbing climate change. At the same time, a massive stream of revenue is provided to the government which can be directly reinvested back into renewables and cleaner industries. I’ll get to the side-benefits later, but for now, that’s enough to know that carbon taxing has the potential to actually make a solid difference, both to the planet and our wallets.

Billionaires Around The World & Environmentally Well-Behaved Nations - Fun With Maps

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I thought I’d share these simple but incredibly neat and telling maps of a couple of key factors of our modern global society and its foibles, not only to show you how fun it actually can be playing with maps and programs like GIS (geographical information systems) to produce such beauties, but how useful they are in teaching us about the world in a concise way.

I can assure you this love is not just because I’m currently a geographer…that has nothing to do with it.

The first of the maps that graced my presence today was the one you see above. It shows, in graded colours, how every country in the world has changed in regards to its Environmental Performance Index, a very clever way of showing whether a country has done good, or done bad. Basically, those in the red and orange fall into the latter category, such as Russia or South Africa, whilst the greens portray the golden apples.

It’s explained in the original study that this dark red smear over Russia is most likely down to the poor air quality, child health, forest felling and fish depletion, all of which are comfortable failing miserably, as is the case in those under the orange banner. On the other hand, us Europeans, a good portion of SE Asia and N America all appear to be greatly increasing their EPI, suggesting advances in all things environmental and green (forgive the pun), and that all is just lovely.

Of course, this map doesn’t take into account certain aspects of the entire sustainable debate, so I would hope it doesn’t get taken at face-value as a solid advocate for halting low-carbon investment and the like because the UK is ‘green’ on the scale.

This could easily be skewed in some part by the phenomenon of carbon leakage, in which developed nations offset their carbon emissions by simply relocating industry and dirty manufacturing in lesser developed nations, not only lowering their overall score, as seen by the orange and red, but at the same time raising the originators. However, this is unlikely to impact the criteria used in this map by too bigger a degree, as other factors will balance it. What I feel is important to take from this map, is that the world is actually making a pretty fine attempt at improving itself, even if sometimes it seems we’re surrounded by absolute fools.

This next one is particularly nice, and just one of a large set I urge you to check out on the subject of billionaires. Here we see the spread of billionaires depending upon where they currently reside, which is why the maps have been ballooned and shrunk in such an odd way.

To no surprise, the US dominates the map, with China and Russia alongside, whilst the rest of Europe sits with roughly the same amount of wallet-busting aficionados in the background; even Brazil has quite a sizeable impact on the global presence of money.

What is pretty astounding to me, even though it is again not too surprising, is the complete absence of Africa and many Middle East nations, pushed entirely out of the picture by their neighbourly states, demonstrating just how little of the world’s big money ever finds it way there.

I think a nice addition would be some sort of flow diagram or separate map showing how this money moves around, where it goes and whether the money is first generated in those nations not represented on this map, before being whisked away into the bank accounts somewhere in the US or Moscow.

One last note; if you combined the earnings of each and every one of these single people’s wallets, and shared this value over the global population, how much do you think each person would receive? Little, a lot, or just plain stupid and move on to the next subject?

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/04/27/for-better-or-for-worse-a-decade-of-global-environmental-performance-trends-examined/

http://gislounge.com/geography-of-billionaires-mapping-nationalities-and-residency/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gislounge+%28GIS+Lounge%29

Posted at 10:13am and tagged with: GIS, map, geography, money, billionaires, africa, US, europe, environment, EPI, russia, depletion, sustainable, developed, western,.

April 25th 2012

Should Climate Change Be Elevated To A Human Rights Issue?

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I read an article recently written by Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (via the Guardian) in which he outlined how the issue of climate change, and the myriad critical, human-related problems associated with it, should be brought up to the status of a human rights issue - by damaging our climate and endangering our societies, we are actively ignoring a basic human right. Well that’s the premise at least.

As we all know, climate change, whether it be natural or man-made, or more than likely a complex combination of both, is directly affecting every human on the globe and is a severe problem we are in desperate need of fixing.

The advent of multiple climate conventions and meetings of world powers began decades ago and still continues on today, but they’re becoming more and more like a session in the House of Commons or a high-school debate than a truly successful stage for solving the issues. Each nation leader has their own opinion and they’re not afraid to shout it loudly to the rest of the world, most of the time in contention with almost everyone else in the room.

We are quick to finger those developed and rapidly developing states which act almost to stagger climate decisions, such as Canada, the US or China to name a few, but in all reality, it’s the whole crowd. As De Schutter suggests in his article, “does this mean that democracy has failed, and must be sacrificed for authoritarian solutions?”. While it may seem that our democratic way of debating and considering things has done little to affect response to climate change, I feel it is still a premature idea to condemn the process altogether just yet.

The idea of branding the climate issue as a human rights issue thus stems from this, as these rights are global, powerful and upheld by almost every country on the planet, although there is plenty of scope for local tweaks and bending of the rules for evil. However, in a broad sense, De Schutter believes it will bring about a hyper-democratic approach, as climate change affects all those other human rights in which so many depend upon - water, food, electricity, sanitation and development.