Climate change - 4X4 tax has no impact on emissions

IMPOSING a tax increase that might just pay for two or three tankfuls of petrol on the owner of a €100,000 4X4 is not the kind of vigorous reform needed to force real change in our carbon emissions figures.

If the road tax increase went hand-in-hand with a new VRT regime, one that imposed a significant deterrent on someone thinking of buying a three-litre SUV to ferry two small children two miles to school it might have more credibility.

Leaked details of the December 5 Budget suggest that Finance Minister Brian Cowen has approved proposals from Environment Minister John Gormley to increase road tax on vehicles with engines over two litres.

However, those same leaks indicate that any change in VRT aimed at making gas guzzlers more expensive on garage forecourts will be minimal and will not be imposed until a much later date.

So, it’s an insignificant gesture then, one without even a sliver of the steel needed to curb our carbon emissions by curtailing the unnecessary use of large SUVs. There are many legitimate uses for a large 4x4 but being used as mom’s school run taxi is not one of them.

Arguments on this issue, advanced vigorously by the Green Party, gain momentum when you realise that such impositions, indeed far more severe ones, are inevitable.

The only question that remains is when.

The reality is that, as a society and as individuals, we have a long way to go to even get to the starting line in the race to modify our habits to try to slow the destruction of the environment all around us.

Maybe some of us still think we’re talking about pandas and whales rather than our drinking water and the very air that we breathe and our capacity to grow enough food to sustain the world’s rapidly expanding population.

If we insist on continuing as if the alarm bells have not been ringing loudly for quite a number of years then the report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), which is to be published in Spain on Saturday, might paint a picture grim enough to convince us to change our wasteful ways.

Though some of the scientists involved in the preparation of the report say that it has been modified for political purposes — that some of the starker findings have been watered down — it contains a series of grim warnings. One is that almost one-third of the world’s species will face extinction if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. The IPCC report also predicts that if temperatures rise by more that 2C — expected before 2050 — 20% of the world’s population will face a great risk of drought.

The report has been prepared by a panel of 2,500 climate change scientists which won the Nobel peace prize earlier this year, along with former US vice president Al Gore.

The scientists say that it is possible to halt global warming if the world’s greenhouse gas emissions start to decline before 2015 — just seven years away. This prospect is highly unlikely as emissions are predicted to rise by up to 90% by 2030, according to the UN report.

In the face of such daunting statistics and the huge increases in demand brought about by the Chinese and Indian economies in recent years you might well wonder what impact curtailing a few thousand SUVs in Ireland can have on world climate.

The answer, on the whole scale of things, has to be not a lot, but that is not even close to the point. The point is that we can only control our own response to the growing crisis and, in the face of all the evidence available, we cannot condone let alone support such flagrant misuse of the world’s scarce resources.