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Ireland may not be the most likely candidate to find a solution to climate change but that doesn't mean we don't need to put a strategy in place to deal with environmental challenges.

THERE IS nothing new about the concepts of green or sustainable economic growth. The Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou wrote about these ideas as far back as 1912. His famous example was a factory which belched forth smoke and thereby entailed “social costs” which, he believed, the manufacturer should be forced to bear by paying a special tax. The Pigovian tax, as it became known, was probably the first carbon tax.