Pour respecter l’accord de Paris, la mise en place d’une fiscalité environnementale est nécessaire et urgente, mais terriblement impopulaire. Comment sortir de cette impasse ?

La France, pays des « gilets jaunes » et des « bonnets rouges », pourrait paradoxalement être la mieux placée pour apporter une solution universellement applicable à ce problème, et en finir avec le choix tragique entre « fin du mois » et « fin du monde ».

Aujourd’hui, les produits qui ont l’impact le plus négatif sur l’environnement sont, bien souvent, les moins chers de leur catégorie. Ainsi, le système actuel donne un avantage concurrentiel aux productions les moins vertueuses. Dans ces conditions, difficile pour le consommateur de résister. Mais si demain, c’était les produits les plus responsables qui bénéficiaient d’un tel avantage ? Si consommer mieux coûtait moins cher ?

L’étiquetage environnemental, simple et efficace

Une fiscalité environnementale bien pensée pourrait devenir le catalyseur de ce réalignement entre l’intérêt personnel – payer moins – et l’intérêt général – préserver la planète. En somme, puisqu’il est si difficile de taxer les produits les plus carbonés, faisons l’inverse : détaxons les produits les plus décarbonés !

Premier volet : instituer un devoir d’information sur les impacts environnementaux pour tout bien ou service mis sur le marché, et généraliser rapidement l’étiquetage environnemental (évalué de A à E), dans le sillage de l’étiquetage envisagé dans le cadre de la loi Climat et résilience en discussion à l’Assemblée nationale.

On pourrait penser qu’il s’agit d’une mesure symbolique. On aurait tort. Une des innovations les plus simples et les plus efficaces pour infléchir les comportements de consommation a été inventée par l’Europe en 1992 : l’étiquetage énergétique. Cette obligation d’information, très simple à déployer, a durablement réorienté l’offre et la demande dans le sens de la sobriété énergétique. Toute l’offre s’est améliorée pour tendre vers la note A, au point qu’il a fallu sans cesse ajouter de nouveaux grades pour discriminer entre les différents « A » ! En 2018, 75 % des lave-vaisselle achetés en France étaient évalués A +++ et A ++, malgré un coût supérieur aux équivalents de catégorie A + ; parallèlement, les modèles les moins..

World Opinions – Le Monde

L’article Pour préserver le climat, « une “éco-détaxe” sera mieux vécue par les citoyens » est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Today is Earth Day, which should provide us with an opportunity to pause and confront the awful predicament humanity faces. We eat microplastics, breathe pollution and watch other life-forms decline to extinction. We face intersecting poverty, health, climate and biodiversity crises. Our global predicament is that consumption by the wealthy is driving us towards planetary disaster, yet billions live in poverty and need to consume more to live well. In this cycle, any version of “success” only hastens catastrophe.

Solving this conundrum requires much more than merely reducing the impact of high-consumption lifestyles. Similarly, if we focus on increasing efficiency this tends to increase resource use: make cars cheaper to run and people drive more. The core of any response that truly rises to this challenge will be interlocking policies that drive society on to an equitable and sustainable path.

Here are four policies that work together to maximise people’s welfare and freedoms, drive essential technological innovation, and allow society to operate within Earth’s limits. At their heart is human dignity coupled with breaking the dynamic of ever-greater production and consumption. Together they could quickly reorient the doomsday machine that is today’s global economy.

The first policy is universal basic income (UBI) whereby a financial payment is made to every citizen, unconditionally, at a level above their subsistence needs. UBI is needed to break the link between work and consumption. Critically, there is a constant awareness that we all need to be ever more productive at work, otherwise someone else will take our job. In response we have all said: I work hard, so I deserve that fancy meal, new gadget or long-haul holiday. Increased consumption is the reward for being ever more productive at work. Indeed, it makes little sense to curb our consumption when we know we will have to be ever more productive at work, regardless of our choices.

Fears that UBI may lead to laziness are unfounded: small-scale trials of UBI show people work hard and are typically more entrepreneurial. Crucially, those UBI recipients had lower anxiety, stress and health problems. UBI allows people to say no to undesirable work, unless it is well-paid enough. People can also say yes to opportunities that often lie out of reach, as they can study or retrain. And clearly there is an immense amount of work to do, from caring for others, to producing what we all need to live well. With UBI we would increasingly choose work that we thought mattered, rather than working ever harder to consume ever more.

The second policy framework is what I call universal shared services – others have argued for universal basic services, but what’s needed must be far beyond basic. Many countries have some of these, from healthcare to education. These are the services everyone needs and their delivery has society-wide effects. Core are health, education, energy, housing and leisure services. Providing these universally lowers financial costs due to economies of scale, and can substantially lower environmental costs. Such universal services make societies more equal and drive them towards more sustainability if two further policies are enacted.

The third policy tackles the climate emergency via legally binding ever-declining carbon budgets. This framework exists in the UK, following the 2008 Climate Change Act. The government must reduce UK carbon emissions to within a carbon budget. These five-year budgets decline to a zero allocation by 2050. This act also created an independent statutory body that analyses data and advises the government on how to achieve each successive carbon budget. The advice results in new legislation for specific sectors and drives technological innovation as the zero emissions long-term destination is clear. As a result the UK is world-leading in reducing carbon emissions.

With political pressure and these smart policy goals, a new sense of the common good could be within reach

The fourth policy uses the same declining budget principle, but tackles material use rather than energy generation. Similarly, declining “plastic use budgets” can set society on a pathway to eliminating plastic pollution. The same principle can tackle metal use to limit the damage from mining. A budget for the total amount of land used to produce the food a country consumes can limit the footprint of agriculture, central to halting biodiversity loss. As with carbon emissions, scientists can now track the production and use of plastic, metal and food. Scientific monitoring and new “declining budget” policies could keep material use within Earth’s limits.

These four policy goals together would drive people’s welfare up and our environmental impacts down. They are not new, nor are they very radical. We already, for example, assure incomes for pensioners in many countries, healthcare is universal in a number of countries, and declining carbon budgets are being used to help drive today’s energy transition.

But how to pay for it? The first response of the powerful to change is to argue that the costs are too great. They rarely are. After two decades of arguments about the high costs of tackling climate change, consultants to big business McKinsey now report that the cost of Europe reaching net zero emissions by 2050 is itself net zero. The investments literally pay for themselves. Revenue-raising options should also help to implement the four policies more cheaply; these could include taxes on rentiers financial transactions, and high energy or material use. Of course, without pressure from popular protest movements and political parties, nothing will change.

Yet systemic thinking on how to respond to global problems is increasing. The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a new seriousness by graphically revealing that there actually is no “outside” of society or the environment. When there’s no such thing as “outside”, the neoliberal mantra of avoiding taxes and regulations to keep wealth to yourself makes less and less sense. With political pressure and smart policies a new universality that breaks with centuries of exploiting people and the environment could be within reach. This is undoubtedly a very tough task, but we can’t afford to fail.

Simon Lewis is professor of global change science at University College London and University of Leeds

theguardian.com

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