One group surely delighted with Charlie McCreevy at the moment must be Ireland's SUV drivers, writes Mary Raftery
The owners of these monstrous polluters rapidly taking over our city streets have been saved from having to pay more for their gas-guzzling activities by the Minister for Finance's scrapping of the proposed carbon tax.
SUVs (sports utility vehicles, or big 4X4 jeeps) are one of the more obscene manifestations of new wealth in Ireland. Sales have increased enormously over the past few years (up 35 per cent this year alone), with uncertainty over rising fuel prices providing no deterrent. Most new SUV drivers are not in rural areas, where they might need the extra height and power for off-road driving. The largest growth in sales is in fact to city dwellers, particularly in Dublin, making the SUV the latest, and supremely redundant, status symbol for the middle classes.
Vehicle emissions are identified as one of the major causes of the greenhouses gases currently changing our climate. Carbon-dioxide (CO2) is the most significant of these, and how much is released into the atmosphere depends on the amount of fuel used. With their huge petrol consumption (as high as 24 litres per 100km in some cases), SUVs are increasingly being targeted internationally as an important contributor to global warming. Studies have indicated that they emit up to four times more CO2 than ordinary cars. As a result, several European countries are planning action against SUVs, including banning them from city areas.
France and Sweden are leading the way, and there have even been moves in the US, particularly California, to penalise those who insist on pumping such vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, is particularly determined. Calling SUV owners "complete idiots", he said earlier this year that 4x4 vehicles were totally unnecessary and bad for London.
In a world becoming more concerned at the effects of climate change, one might imagine that people would now think twice before buying these enormous CO2-spewing vehicles. But not the Dublin middle classes. It seems keeping up with the Jones family is still far more important than the environment.
And why not, when you have the Minister for Finance on your side?
The most effective way of altering polluting and profligate behaviour is to penalise it. The now defunct carbon tax was to apply across the board, from industry and agriculture to transport and domestic fuel use. Bodies such as the ESRI and the OECD were of the view that a carbon tax in Ireland was necessary in order to alter behaviour throughout society, and so limit the growing damage to our environment. Even the Department of Finance's tax strategy group stated that taxation "represents the least cost and most efficient method of achieving the required reduction in emissions on an economy wide basis, and it is already widely used across the EU and elsewhere in the OECD specifically to target greenhouse gas emissions".
Business interests, however, have been intensively lobbying the Government against such a tax since it was proposed by Charlie McCreevy in his 2002 budget speech. He embarked on a consultation process and received 117 submissions.
One of the reasons he gave last week for abolishing the carbon tax was that a majority of these submissions opposed the measure. While this is technically accurate, the exact figure given by himself earlier this year in the Dáil was that 51 per cent were in opposition, hardly an overwhelmingly negative response.
Also last week, the Government was peddling the line that the carbon tax would have meant only a tiny reduction in our CO2 emissions of half a million tonnes, about 5 per cent of our total target. However, figures again given in the Dáil by Minister McCreevy (March 2004) do not support this. With the generally accepted tax level of €20 per tonne of CO2, the reduction in emissions would have in fact amounted to more than two millions tonnes, bringing us much closer to our stated commitment to reduce emissions under the Kyoto protocol.
The ESRI has repeatedly pointed out that a carbon tax need not have a negative effect either on households or on competitiveness in industry. It argues that the money raised should be used to offset any hardship caused and also encourage the development of low-pollution alternatives. The experience of Denmark, which has had such a tax for well over a decade with no negative economic impact and a substantial reduction of 9 per cent in greenhouse gas emission, supports the contention that if carefully applied, a carbon tax would ultimately benefit the Irish economy rather than harm it.
But that is to take the long-term view. Who knows what government will be in power by the time Ireland has to start paying out multi-billion euro fines for exceeding the CO2 emission levels we have agreed to under Kyoto.
That's likely to be someone else's problem, certainly not Charlie McCreevy's. The motto is live now, guzzle your gas, spew out the fumes, and roll on the SUVs.