Just imagine running a business where you didn’t have to pay half your staff and you got half of your raw materials for free. Well for some businesses, this isn’t far from the truth.
Our economic system doesn’t account for most of the costs of natural resources and ecosystem services. They are considered external to the economy. Businesses that use a lot of these natural resources and ecosystem services get a real competitive advantage over businesses that don’t.
It’s often said that you don’t value something that you get for free. If natural resources are free or very cheap then there’s little incentive to use them sparingly or to look after the environment so that the services that we take for granted will keep coming. Perhaps we only really value them when they come under threat and we realise that perhaps we can’t take them for granted after all.
But there is no free lunch. We all end up paying for the consequences of excessive use and abuse of natural systems, such as the earth’s atmosphere, oceans and fresh water reserves.
The state of the Murray-Darling system, the widespread plague of salinity and climate change are all examples of the collective abuse of natural systems because the consequences are not the responsibility of any single person or corporation. The resources are “common property”. All across the world, natural resources that belong to no-one but belong to everyone are being abused. It’s called the “tragedy of the commons”, a term first coined in 1968 by ecologist, Garrett Hardin.
While much can be done through education and regulation, many people and corporations will only make significant changes to their behaviour if it affects their hip pocket or their bottom line. So addressing many environmental and resource issues requires that our economic system place a value on the natural capital that we all own. Those who consume natural resources or degrade the environment must pay and so have a financial incentive to not only act responsibly but to seek better ways of doing business.
People are cautious about new environmental taxes because they believe that the price of everything will go up. But we already pay some resource taxes such as fuel excise. If fuel excise was less then we’d surely use more fuel and the tax revenue would have to be made up somewhere else. Similar taxes should be used to properly value other natural resources and environmental services while allowing other taxes to be removed.
This was originally published in the Fraser Coast Chronicle on 17 April 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment