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Photo Courtesy – V. V. Krishnan
(http://www.thehindubusinessline.com)
May we put a caption here:
Towards Bleak Future - Riding with a Myopic Driver!
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A wide confusion
has spread. In Business Standard we found, “In sync with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment on climate change, the government
Saturday ramped up budget allocation a whopping sixteen-fold to boost India's
mission to climate change and adaption, even as the overall allocation to the
environment ministry was trimmed by four percent.” And several eminent persons
started thinking that India, de-facto, has a Carbon Tax, as the budget
increased coal-cess from Rs 100 a ton to Rs 200 a ton.
We saw newspapers
devoted to Business and Economy writing story with such statements: “The
government's commitment to control pollution finds explicit expression in the
union budget with Rs.240.30 crore set aside for the cause, which is 148 percent
higher... The secretariat-economic services got Rs.58.85 crore - nearly seven
crore more than what it got in the previous fiscal... total allocation for
environmental protection and monitoring too saw a significant hike of Rs.197.53
crore... ” and only in one place it was mentioned that total allocation for
MoEF was slashed by whopping 18%, almost a fifth! Was that an intentional piece
of misinformation?
Coal, in India,
is cessed like any other minerals and petroleum import is levied almost as
other imports. It is not a conscious carbon-tax. Were it a carbon-tax in real
sense for curbing emission, there would have been converging attempts in
related fields. You cannot dissuade fossil fuel usage by one step and then
promote that by another and declare you are fighting pollution and etcetera negative-externalities in a Pigouvian way. If a part of the coal-cess money goes
to build roadways which by the way have a high life cycle emission footprint,
then it is defeating the purpose. If a little petro-duty is imposed just
because there is a sharp fall in import price, which makes the ultimate cost
per unit still lower than what it was a year or two back, then can it be said
that it was done to discourage pollution?
We can assume
what can happen if coal price moves up by 1-2% in an economy where increasing
burden of energy input price ultimately gets transferred on the shoulders of
the consumers. And if there is a tiny increase in efficiency it gets shadowed
by exponential total consumption increase. Is it not demagogy if we carry
forward our ‘growth’-mania and simultaneously claim we are greening!
Incidentally,
these days, there are some eminent environmentalists who prefer branding things
to attract attention without bothering other probable consequences. Some
popular labels are ‘Dirty Diesel’, ‘Dirty Coal’ and etc. What will they say
when children interpret this as gasoline or petrol is ‘clean energy’, like
solar or wind? And we saw what happened to cities with green coloured auto-rickshaws,
green coloured buses with so called green-fuel CNG or LPG. Is it ecologically
prudent to let them equate a fossil-fuel with the term ‘green’?
Out of total
budget outlay of Rs 17.77 trillion, Environment, Forest & Climate Change
got Rs 16.82 billion, i.e. less than 1%. So the government will spend less than
a percent for the health of nature. This the government will do just basing on
a small ‘fact’ that number of tigers have increased a little bit, so the
forests are ok, even if a lot of doubts were cast on the tiger-count procedure.
Moreover, India has about 30% less forest cover than it should have at the
least. Citizens and industries and the economy as a whole will spend still
lower amount, assuming we agree that maintaining some manicured gardens and
lawns and planting a few trees in the apartment enclaves do not contribute to
nature-care in any substantial way.
Finally, it is
indeed pleasant to hear that government will promote electric cars. But is
India ready to handle still higher amount of Lead and other heavy metals that
are there in car-batteries? Already number of cars and consequently heavy-metal
usage are increasing at a galloping pace. Will just a few more
pollution-measuring instruments suffice?
Published on April 1, 2015, Business Economics
