The debate about whether and how to introduce carbon taxes is about much more than limiting potentially catastrophic damage to the world's environment, suggests Mark Brennock
Its outcome will also measure how much it is possible to impose democratic regulation on business in the globalised economy.
Individual governments have steadily lost their power to bring order to economic activity, being reduced instead to participants in an international competitive tendering process for investment and jobs. The Kyoto process is one attempt by the democratic sphere to seize some power back.
Of course, Ireland has done well out of the competition between nation states to attract mobile international capital. We have done this partly through relying on the fact that our taxation of business is among the lowest in Europe, as is our tax take as a percentage of GDP. We are among the seven EU states which do not have a carbon tax.
Suggestions that these circumstances should be changed prompts claims from business - and Ministers - that it would result in a flight of capital and jobs to countries which tax and regulate business even more lightly than we do.
And these warnings can't lightly be dismissed. Large business has effectively emigrated from the social space which is subject to public democratic control. Companies that wish to pollute, to pay poverty-level wages and to protect their profits from those who would tax them to pay for public programmes can do so with impunity, moving to whatever states allow them to do this.
For, while business has globalised, the democratic institutions that could control it have been confined to the nation state. Nation states, powerless to control business in the public interest, are reduced to the role of serving the interests of business under threat of losing jobs if they don't.
So states will continue to reduce their taxes, cut valued public spending programmes and relax labour laws and environmental regulation in efforts to attract investors to provide jobs for their citizens. Germany has recently joined this contest with vigour, slashing its corporation taxes and forcing through labour market reforms in the face of great union hostility in an effort to revive its economy. Meanwhile, the Government is lobbying the EU to dilute proposed new measures to protect the public and environment from chemicals used by business.
IBEC has said the new regime would be "disastrous" for jobs and could lead multinational companies to remove facilities to other countries where they could continue to use potentially dangerous chemicals without such meddlesome restrictions. The Tánaiste, Ms Harney, appears to agree.
It is in this context of competition for international investment that the snail's pace attempt to introduce a carbon tax should be seen. This is a global attempt - the Kyoto process - to deal with the global problem of environmental damage.
The Kyoto targets for emissions reduction won't have legal effect until 55 per cent of the world's industrialised countries representing 55 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions in 1990 sign up. Once Russia signs up, these conditions will be met.
However, the EU has decided to press ahead anyway, adopting its own targets arising from the Kyoto process. As part of this deal, Ireland agreed to cap the increase in its greenhouse gas emissions at 13 per cent above their 1990 levels in the period 2008-2012. We are already way off target, and if we fail to reach it Ireland faces penalties of up to €1.5 billion. Yet the start date for the proposed carbon tax is only 2005. Some of the State's biggest companies have begun a lobbying campaign against a carbon tax. Ms Harney and Mr McCreevy, while supporting a tax in principle, have taken on board much of the argument put forward by these companies.
IBEC argues it would hamper Irish business' ability to compete internationally. Mr Donal Buckley, head of IBEC's environment unit, suggested this week that Irish business has already achieved maximum levels of environmental efficiency. GDP has grown much faster than energy use and CO2 emissions. Many businesses are so good they can't improve.
The Tánaiste has echoed the IBEC position with the same argument deployed against the proposed new chemical safety regime, and indeed against any tax increases. "I am concerned about anything that can drive up the costs for industry and make us less competitive and put jobs at risk," she said.
However, she also says she has accepted the need for a carbon tax: it is a question of how it is done. She has hinted at a lead-in period to allow businesses to change their behaviour, rather than hitting them with a new tax introduced overnight.
She has also suggested companies involved in "emissions trading" - buying rights to emit greenhouse gases from states or businesses that produce less than they are entitled to - could be exempted. The IBEC argument can be met by ensuring any carbon tax impacts only on dirtier industries to force them to change their ways, while not penalising those industries which have genuinely moved towards cleaner methods of production. More importantly, the EU has the economic strength to counter any move by business to states with less stringent regulation, through refusing to accept imports of products made under environmental regulations considered unacceptable in Europe.
Ultimately, only the strengthening and democratisation of such international political institutions can allow public representatives reclaim some control over their taxation regimes, labour markets and environmental laws.
However, voices on the political right and left - who regularly highlight the powerlessness of states in these areas - also oppose the growth of such institutions as the EU. They argue this will lead to national governments losing sovereignty, rather than seeing it as a means of regaining democratic control.
The British writer and campaigner on global inequality George Monbiot writes in his recent book, The Age of Consent, that the global justice movement "has raised its eyes from the national sphere, in which there is democracy but no choice, to the global sphere, in which there is choice but no democracy." It is surely time for national politicians to do likewise.