We have had our fun. For over a century the West has drained the world of its coal and oil, torn down its forests and clogged its atmosphere for the sake of wealth. No one but the odd recalcitrant Texan even tries to deny this anymore. We might protest that we cannot be held responsible for the ignorance of our predecessors; still, try as we might to repent by reusing plastic bags and powering the occasional speed camera with a solar panel, we cannot change the fact that the cumulative prosperity we have inherited was built on generations of environmental neglect.
We might be tempted to point out that the West’s carbon emissions have levelled off in the past decade, and even begun to decline in a few countries, at least per capita, but our apparent restraint is more likely a result of our tendency to outsource grubby businesses like manufacturing to developing countries that are generally more concerned with putting food on the table than keeping noxious gas out of the air. What’s more, we still manage to put out several times more carbon per head than global workshops like China and India.
Despite the fairly obvious moral imperatives, too often the developed world shirks its environmental duties, arguing that any serious attempt to cut emissions through a carbon tax or large-scale adoption of clean energy sources would bring about instant economic chaos. That this basic assumption is so rarely questioned can only be down to a dearth of political will, though the tendency of environmentalists to portray global warming as an inevitable apocalypse does not exactly help.
Such assumptions do not stand up to much scrutiny. A carbon tax could quite easily be offset by cuts in taxes elsewhere. Managed well, such a move would create an incentive to purchase low-carbon products and fuels without being too much of an impact on the economy’s overall tax burden and unduly aggravating voters. Green fuels may be uncompetitive at the moment, but the cost of solar power halves every few years and so may be cheaper than coal within a decade while the price of fossil fuels can only rise in the long term.
The developed world is in a unique position to take these sorts of steps. Our consumers still provide the bulk of global demand for carbon-producing goods and our universities and companies have most of the knowledge and capital needed to make green energy commercially viable. Only the developed world is in a position to both funnel investment into green technology and create an embryonic market for it through a carbon tax. The developed world should act now. Not just out of moral obligation, but because we can where others cannot.
