The EU Commission will seek to propose a series of "green crimes" enforceable across the EU and punishable by prison sentences and hefty fines, according to today's Financial Times. The drive by Brussels to apply penalties for ecological crime reflects concerns that some countries treat offences such as pollution and illegal dumping of waste more seriously than others, allowing criminals to exploit loopholes. The proposals are a result of a European Court of Justice ruling in 2005. It sidesteps the historic right of national parliaments to decide what constitutes a crime and how it should be punished. According to the FT report
“The Commission is throwing down the gauntlet to member states,” said Scott Crosby, a Brussels-based criminal lawyer. “They are bringing a taboo subject into the open,” he said, noting there had always been an implicit right for the EU to impose criminal sanctions.
Meanwhile greenhouse gas emission levels have risen steeply for the first time in four years. That rise will see emissions levels at over 25 per cent above 1990 levels, 12 percentage points higher than the Kyoto target. The official response from the Irish government is complacent; the Department of the Environment said the increase was expected, and that the Government would meet its Kyoto commitment through a series of measures, including the purchase of carbon credits to offset domestic emissions. Labour's Joan Burton pointed out yesterday that the minister for Finance "has set aside €270million to pay carbon credit fines but has done little to provide leadership to change the mindset of carbon polluters at an industry or personal level".
Simply buying your way out of political embarrassment is no solution to a long term problem. At this point there is a reasonable consensus within the scientific community that global warming constitutes a serious threat to the world and the sceptics have been seen off. We now have to consider what we are willing to pay or offset to minimise the risk to the planet. This means that hard political decisions have to be taken and we need a real debate about what kind of policies we should adopt.
We can infer from the leaked EPA figures that it's the increase in cars on the road that's responsible for most of the increase. Any response in policy terms to this will have to be realistic enough not to immediately penalise private motorists in advance of building an alternative public transport infrastructure. At the same time the principle of a graduated increase in carbon taxes over time will have to be argued for. It won't be good enough to just argue for better public transport and leave it at that.
Here is yet another issue that could do with an airing during the election campaign. I checked the Green Party's website to see if they had anything interesting on all of this. After all, as one woman said on the Frank Luntz Week in Politics special, "the Greens make you stop and think". It's a pity that their most recent press statement dates from five days ago.
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