Environmental issues have never been paramount in the majority of voters’ minds. Sure, if pressed people would accept that the environment and its long-term sustainability was important but other policy areas such as transport, policing, immigration and so on feature far higher when voters rank the importance of policy issues. But there are signs of change both domestically and internationally. The time when environmental issues were the preserve of The Green party is over. The polling organization MORI has consistently found that the environment is seen as one of the key issues in British politics culminating in 2001 with 33 percent of voters believing it to be the number one issue facing Britain’s future. The subsequent war on terror has dampened peoples interest as more pressing issues are seen to have come to light, but the fact that The Green party won on average two percent more votes in the last local elections indicate that it is still a central issue.
The growth in environmental awareness has also been reflected on an international level with the formation of the Kyoto protocol. The agreement requires signatory nations to limit their greenhouse gas emissions according to the individual level set for each respective country. But instead of simply setting static limits on emissions levels, countries are permitted to use a trading system to help meet their emission targets. For example if a country goes over its emissions targets it can buy emissions permits from other countries that are under their targets, thus compensating for their polluting discrepancies. Hypothetically this means large polluters will have to negotiate with small polluters to buy emissions quotas whilst on the upside small polluters can profit from their lack of pollution.
The Kyoto agreement, significantly still unsigned by the US, however, is a drop in the ocean when it comes to providing a complete answer to the problems of escalating climate change. The US is still the worlds largest polluter and the fact that its President George Bush continues to rebuff calls to sign the Kyoto protocol mean that the agreement, the most progressive multi-state move on sustainability to date, still only has a peripheral effect on global emissions levels. And the chances of a Bush administration changing its mind on this issue look small. A recent memo sent by the US Republican party, uncovered by the Observer, tells all the party’s press secretaries to say that global warming has not been proved, that air quality is ‘getting better’, that the world’s forests are ‘spreading, not deadening’ and that the ‘world’s water is cleaner and reaching more people’.
On the plus side, this blinkered view seems to be on the wane. Russia is the latest state to agree to ratify the Kyoto agreement, which already has the support of all the EU member states. Furthermore, in the business community even leading oil company executives are starting to accept the concerns of environmentalists. The most noticeable case in point is that of Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell. In a recent interview with the Guardian Mr Oxburgh said we ‘urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and store them underground rather than letting them escape into the atmosphere.’ This may or may not be the answer to curbing the effects of carbon dioxide emissions but accepting that there is a problem is at least a first step. In the financial sector, Bank of America has also recently expressed concern over the state of our environment and has committed to the Kyoto protocol, putting ‘targets and timelines in place’ to reduce greenhouse gas emissions throughout Bank of America’s chain of activities. The company’s CEO, Ken Lewis, said ‘the health of our environment has a very real effect on the health of our local and regional economies and, therefore, on the health of our company’.
So are these myriad of well meaning statements, pledges, and protocols enough to help turn the world away from a path toward environmental ruin? Well the answer seems to be yes and no. The annoying thing about environmental politics is that it is inescapably internationalist. It is all very well formulating national policy on carbon emissions reduction but if your foreign neighbours are not doing the same then your efforts are somewhat futile. That is why proposals such as that of Kyoto or pledges by multinationals such as Bank of America and Shell are all important.
To properly tackle issues of sustainability international consensus must be forged in regards to policy. Fractured policy implementation will at best bring small improvements rather than real change. The continued insistence by states, most notably the US, to treat environmental issues within a realpolitik framework renders the international communities seven year’s work on sustainability under the Kyoto agreement all but useless. In other words the Kyoto protocol has opened the door for a collective approach to environmental policy but highlighted how difficult it is to get everyone through it.
Closer to home there are more positive signs. Ken Livingstone’s implementation of the congestion charge is primarily a traffic cutting measure, but the charge is also effectively a micro sized version of the Kyoto protocol’s aim of forcing pollution into the market. The charge sends a message to polluters, in this case car-drivers, that if you want to pollute that’s fine, but from now on you’ll have to pay for it. In the case of Kyoto simply replace car-drivers with big business and there you go.
This marketisation of pollution is no panacea, but it has possibilities. Tools such as user fees and incentives have great potential. Giving people a financial instead of a moral choice to make when buying, say, an aerosol, or a fridge will make environmental decisions far more pertinent. The congestion charge in London is already showing results. The fact that drivers in London now face a £5 charge for the privilege to drive on its roads has meant that the capitals pollution level is already down by 30 percent. On the other side of the coin the fact that the price of bus travel has come down has meant that numbers using public transport have markedly risen.
Opening up pollution to the market makes it an expensive business, whilst more environmentally friendly activities such as bus travel become more appealing thus driving demand. The end result is that sustainable products and services will become cheaper whilst environmentally harmful ones are slowly priced out of the market. The state still has a central role to play, forcing up the price of environmentally harmful products, services, and activities through taxation whilst initially subsidising cleaner ones. The active role of the state in pricing a harmful product out of the market is not without precedent. The government has been highly successful in reducing the number of people smoking by following a path of high cigarette taxation and a zealous advertising campaign. There is nothing to say that such an approach wouldn’t work on unnecessary car travel or the use of non-biodegradable products.
The overall problem is that people and for that matter businesses and nation states don’t like being charged for something, which isn’t immediately accountable. According to BBC research we are roughly one hundred years away from seeing significant affects of global warming, polluters need to learn that they are being charged for harming the future not the present environment. Long-termism is not something commonly associated with a market system, but sustainability is not such an alien concept here. Bond traders often buy bonds that aren’t due to mature for 99 years. However, they don’t expect to sell them in 99 years. But they know that as long as the issuer of the bond remains solvent they will be able to sell that bond on. For the environmentalist it is paramount that this attitude is past over to the issue of pollution. By paying an inflated price for an environmentally harmful product or service now, an economic actor is securing the long-term solvency of the environment. The role for national governments and multinational organizations is to prove and justify the need for individuals, big business, and nation states, to pay for the right to pollute. This is far from an easy task but if the statements by Ron Oxburgh and Ken Lewis are anything to go by then there is no reason why it can’t be done.