Passing the buck for pollution
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Developing countries should take active measures to head off the impact of developed countries' intensified attempts to shift the cost of their historical carbon emissions to developing countries.
In a move designed to make developing nations pay the price for the treatment of their own carbon dioxide emissions, the Unites States, Japan and European nations have proposed a carbon tax on commodities coming into their territories.
On Nov 19, 2008, the European Parliament and the European Commission adopted a bill, including international airlines into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme System (EU ETS) and announced that the bill would take effect on Jan 1, 2012. According to an estimate made by the International Air Transport Association, the European bill, if put in place, will result in an additional 2.4 billion-euro ($3.46 billion) cost for global airlines.
Under the new system China would have to pay about 740 million yuan ($113 million).
This carbon tax is a new form of economic hegemony. The costs and benefits brought by global carbon emissions have long been unevenly distributed between developed and developing nations.
It is extremely unfair to use developed countries' carbon emission standards to measure the volumes of carbon emissions in developing nations and it ignores the large-volume of carbon emissions produced by the highly industrialized countries during their development.
Statistics show that developed nations are responsible for 80 percent of global carbon emissions since 1950. After enjoying a high-polluting and high-energy consumption stage, developed countries are now in a cleaner and less-polluting post-industrialized stage. In comparison, emerging nations such as China, Russia and India are still in the early or middle stage of their industrialization and still rely on heavy industries for their economic growth.
The formation of a global structure of labor division that favors developed nations has accelerated the transfer of global low-end industries, especially the high-polluting and high-emissions manufacturing sector, to developing nations and has enabled developed countries to shift some of their carbon emissions to developing countries. Statistics indicate that as a result of this shift, as much as 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions are passed on to China every year, 20 percent of the its total volume of carbon emissions.
