Mary Mulvihill

Question: what do Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, ‘eco-nomics’ pundit David McWilliams, and the Nobel Prize committee have in common?

Answer: a growing realisation of the need to factor the environment into the economy.

Lenihan’s budget today will at last introduce a carbon tax and, with it, the principle of ‘the polluter pays’.

US economist Elinor Ostrom shared this year’s economics Nobel prize for her work on ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

And David McWilliams, in his recent TV series, discovered that all the world’s production of ‘stuff’ is taking its toll on the environment.

Interestingly, for a country averse to taxes, there have been few complaints about the forthcoming carbon tax.  Perhaps the recent floods have brought home to people the stark reality that we need to do something fast about climate change and CO2 levels.

There have however been vociferous calls for a car scrappage deal in today’s budget, mostly from the ‘car industry’, which is to say the car sales industry… who, by their own admission, would not get work in any other industry.

Scrappage schemes are often touted as environmental measures, taking polluting old bangers off the road and replacing them with clean, green fuel-efficient ones.

Yes, new cars may be more fuel-efficient than old ones, but the combined energy and environmental costs of manufacturing a new car outweigh those meagre improvements in efficiency.

Perhaps more importantly, producing new cars, and indeed producing new anything, also uses up ever dwindling resources.

Forget peak oil — that’s only the tip of the (fast-melting) iceberg.  We are also running out of lots of other scarce resources. Or, as David McWilliams put it, we are now facing “peak everything”.

Our best estimates suggest that world reserves of indium – used in LCDs and flat screen TVs – could run out by 2017. Platinum, a vital constituent of catalytic converters and fuel cells, could be exhausted by 2020 (so much so that some researchers are already trying to ‘harvest’ the metal from road dust). Hafnium (used in computer chips) could be gone by 2017.  And terbium (used in fluorescent light bulbs) could be all gone as early as 2012. (Figures from ‘Earth Audit’, by David Coen, New Scientist, issue 2605, 2007)

These are rough estimates, and we may discover new sources for some of the rare elements that buy us a few more years. Landfill mining could yet be the next big thing! But eventually, supplies will run out.

Which is why we need to husband our resources sustainably, not waste them for the sake of a few short term jobs. And which brings me to the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

When something belongs in common to everybody, it belongs to nobody.

So, in the old days, with the village common ground:  it was in every farmer’s interest to graze as many of their livestock as possible on the commons, and conversely, it was in nobody’s interest to apply fertiliser.  Result: overgrazed, and undernourished pasture.

More recently, we have seen the same exploitation of fisheries, to the point where some fish stocks are so overfished that they may now be beyond rescue.

And the same is true of our wasteful and unsustainable use of all the world’s resources.

Biology and medicine has a name for such uncontrolled growth at the expense of the surrounding environment. They call it cancer.

Later today we will know the details of the new carbon tax, and whether Brian Lenihan has yielded to calls for a car scrappage scheme.

It would be nice to think he will say No to the car industry.  That instead he’s  going to introduce new measures to sustainably support the car maintenance industry, perhaps even courses to reskill salespeople as mechanics. After all, if anyone knows about the damage that can be done by a poorly controlled financial sector, it’s the Minister for Finance.

But I’m not holding my breath.