Car fuel taxes approved - what about flight?

Once again I am reacting upon an article by SvD, which by the way happens to be my primary source of news. However, the subscription is coming to an end soon, and we have decided to take the opportunity to switch from printed news-paper and go entirely online...

Anyway - an interesting article a couple of days ago was about the nations reduction strategies. It was written prior to the national climate commitees meeting, scheduled for today, with the aim of national climate objectives and targets formulation. The opposition parties have agreed that 40% reduction of climate gases have to be realized until the year 2020 in order to avoid global average temperature increase to exceed 2 degrees. The comments from politicians reflect wide and different opinions on the purposes and also the approaches to achieve this reduction. Some view Sweden as a isolated nation and that we need to focus on the daily economic activities that are coupled to emission of climate gases and reduce them. Others are more focused on the European level, and Mr. Anders Wijkman, honoured guest at Think Globally Radio, considers that formulations have to be as international profiled as possible.

And very true so. In fact, the climate gas emissions coupled to the production of the products that are pumped into Sweden, for instance, every year, from emerging markets such as China and India, are bigger than the exports from Sweden, making emissions caused by Swedish consumers "invinsible" but nevertheless globally common. They have to be international, because simply switching to products produced by countries that are more environmentally/climate friendly also need to take into consideration on all lost job incomes of huge amounts of employees that are installed to keep the Wests consumption-oriented economy running. The have to be international because introduction and training of green-technology or clean-teach to emerging markets need to go along with joint formulations of alternative jobs descriptions within a global low-carbon, renewable energy, product-recycling sustainable economy. They have to be international , because they are not carried out by single nations, but in an agreed, co-operative and proactive international arena where every nation plays an important part.

Now, the article finishes off with one interesting conclusion after years of political debate - all of the political parties in Sweden today agree that the fuel tax for cars have to increase as one of many climate objectives. I think we really have to see the history to learn fast here; what about flight taxes? Do we really have the time to wait until something radical will happen? Until we realize that taxes are the only sensible solution? The European Union has a great responsibility to start introducing fast-connecting railways between major European cities along with introduction of approriate environmental taxes for flights. This co-operation needs to be fulfilled. Both because the European Union is demographically exemplary for such railway systems, because it has to take proactive action in order to assist the rest of the world in the sustainable transformation, and because of global environmental and social equity; flying around the world is carried out by some small precentage of the world population (rich people) while it affects the major part of the worlds poor.

/Jimmy