CARBON TAX MUST RISE IN FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE THREAT

THEY say obstacles are seen as challenges for winners and excuses for losers. Traditionally, budgets are also judged through the prism of winning and losing. But deciding precisely who wins and who loses is within the gift of an increasingly narrower circle. In the context of climate change we are all condemned to being losers without draconian action.

Unfortunately, the greater good seldom features when pitted against narrow political expediency or economic preferment.

The parking of a significant increase in our carbon taxes speaks to the priority of protecting rural party interests as a key prerogative of a Government whose principal aim is securing its power base.

Such a limited perspective circumscribes long-term decisions, favouring the shortterm election cycle while obscuring the bigger picture.

Unless we raise our carbon taxes dramatically, we will turn nothing around in the context of meeting our global commitments.

The latest climate change report frighteningly and forcefully hammers home a bitter truth that the immediate consequences are far graver than previously thought.

Leading climatologists insist that we are courting catastrophe with a heightened risk to the planet before 2040.

The landmark report zones in on the fading likelihood of our containing global warming to a 1.5C degree increase on pre-industrial levels.

Avoiding disaster now demands transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent”, the UN report states.

It starkly spells out how we have barely a dozen years to contain global warming at a maximum of 1.5C degrees.

After this point, even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people in the regions of the world least able to cope, and more importantly, least responsible for the imminent disaster that may be visited on them.

America may be out, but significantly China and India are still on board the Paris Agreement, which is still paramount.

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, has appealed to leaders around the globe to wake up to the “fierce urgency of the now”.

While Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, has appealed for collective endeavour and collective accountability before it is too late.

She is right. Time is up for procrastination. To paraphrase John F Kennedy: “If not now, when; if not us, then who?”

Time is up for procrastination. To paraphrase Kennedy: ‘If not now, when; if not us, then who?’