Carbon tax

There are hundreds of wildfires burning in both Russia and Portugal. These are the consequences of a record-breaking heat wave that hit Europe this year.

The wildfires in Russia abetted a long drought. The drought and the fires have combined to ruin about a third of the grains exporting country crop this year. In response, Moscow banned since last week any grains exports until next year.

Since Russia is among the world’s biggest grains producer, the ban should reflect in market prices this week. The world’s buffer stock of wheat, rice and other grains thinned considerably in the face of drought and floods. Expect speculative pricing to happen over the coming weeks.

While the parched Russians are frying in temperatures of 39⁰C, record rainfall has been falling to the south. In Pakistan, about 20 million people have been displaced by incredible flooding along the Indus river. The floods wiped out half a million tons of pre-positioned grains. They were stored by relief agencies in areas never imagined to be flood-prone.

Unless food aid is immediately brought in, a major humanitarian disaster could be in the offing. As of the last weekend, very little aid has been delivered.

There is widespread flooding in China as well as northern Europe. In China, the number of displaced people could run up to the millions. Things could turn for the worse. The monsoon has just begun.

We have not been spared the harshness of the weather. Last year, tropical storm Ondoy submerged most of the metropolitan area. Then a serious drought plagued us, nearly drying up Angat Dam — the main water store for the national capital region as well as our Central Luzon rice bowl.

Late last week, flashfloods hit Zamboanga. Over the next few weeks, we will wait anxiously for the typhoons meteorologists say will be aggravated by the La Nina cycle.

All the weather abnormalities we have been seeing is attributed to climate change. The evidence in mounting that rising carbon emissions arising from human activities, both industrial and agricultural, explain the changes in the climate. Over the last five decades, the mean temperature for each decade has been rising.

There have been severe winters during this period, to be sure. But the summers have become hotter. There have been relatively cooler years, but the comparatively hotter years outnumber the cool ones.

Year after year, the volume of carbon emissions rises. As agriculture strips away more of the forests that impound millions of tons of carbon, the greenhouse effect worsens. The past few weeks alone, for instance, blocks of ice larger than Manhattan island have broken off the Greenland ice sheet. If that continues, sea levels will rise faster than we earlier calculated.

Scientists tell us that the Amazon rainforest produces about a third of the world’s oxygen. Population pressure, however, has increased slash-and-burn farming that threatens the rainforest and the millions of endogenous species that inhabit them.

The rainforests of Indonesia are the second most important source of oxygen for the world. Slash-and-burn farming there has produced a smoke cloud that affects Singapore and Malaysia. In addition, hundreds of thousands of hectares of pit bogs are being drained to make way for large plantations. These bogs impound millions of tons of carbon that are subsequently released to the atmosphere.

Much has been said about the “inconvenient truth” of climate change. But little has actually been done.

Sure, we now carry cotton bags when we market to reduce the use of plastic bags. More and more people opt to use smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. There are more windmills and solar panels to provide renewable energy for our modern lifestyles. All such efforts assuage us. But the net effect on rising carbon emissions has been negligible.

As millions more conscientiously bring their cotton bags to shop, millions more vehicles are added to the world’s roads each year. As we introduce more and more energy-efficient light bulbs to an increasingly urbanized population, more and more power plants using oil or coal are added every year.

In our own little economy, we will need to quickly build a dozen or so power plants over the next few years to avert a power shortage. Since we have renounced nuclear power, nearly all these plants will use fossil fuels — even as we all know demand will soon outstrip supply of fossil fuels over the next decade.

We can no longer rely on token gestures aimed at mitigating climate change. At the rate we are going, the Antarctic might melt away before we actually begin reversing the greenhouse effects of the carbon we emit.

The “inconvenient truth” now requires taking inconvenient steps to confront it. Nobel laureate Jeffrey Sachs, who now advises the UN secretary-general, has proposed a truly inconvenient tool to wield against the challenge posed by climate change.

We will make no progress in the battle against climate change, says Sachs, if people can freely emit carbon without penalty. He proposes that all governments now introduce a “carbon tax” on all activities that result in carbon emissions. That will create greater market impetus to either shift to renewable energy or to at least reduce the carbon footprint enterprises or private citizens make.

If we charge a road-users tax on people who use the roads, a sin tax on people who consume unhealthy products and every sort of property taxes on people who own land, why not impose a tax on carbon footprints? The revenue from such a tax will provide enough money for really meaningful public investments in reversing climate change. Let’s give this idea some serious thought.