should items from high polluting countries such as America ,china and India be heavily taxed to force them to?

Question

be eco-friendly

Answer 1

It is not very practical for one nation to tax another, unless what you are calling for is a World Government ... remember that most of the nations in the UN are not democratic, not eco-friendly.

A more practical solution is a selective buying campaign ... a boycott of products and services made by companies, and in nations, hostile to the environment and to other important values.

Answer 2

I wouldn't put a tax on products just because they are from a high polluting country.

Though a carbon tax based on how much CO2 is released would be a very good idea (and is among the best ways to deal with global warming). The reason that we have a problem with global warming is that it doesn't cost any money to dump CO2 into the atmosphere while the effects of that dumping are bad so if we simply made those who do dump CO2 pay for the effects of it then we could very quickly discourage such activity.

An energy tax would be an extremely bad idea though because energy consumption is not the problem (though a certain university drop-out has been able to fool some people into thinking it is).

Answer 3

No. You are right to associate cost/taxes with economic behavior but a country level tax is too broad to get you the behavior you want. Not to mention that it is completely unworkable and that there is nobody that could actually impose and collect this tax.

The problem is that the world economy is built on the premise of privatizing profits and socializing costs. Pollution, in it's broadest sense, is a cost that the world bears and that the polluting company can generally ignore. The way to reduce pollution is to privatize these costs, i.e. make the company pay these costs.

Privatizing costs would mean that every time a company made a product, they would be paying the true costs (cost of materials plus the cost of environmental impact). The trade off is that this would substantially raise the cost of almost all goods in the world economy and subsequently reduce consumption.

Privatizing costs is really an unworkable idea because it would be very expensive, extremely complicated, and terribly disruptive. The more workable approach is to pick a really big and easily measured item and privatize that cost. The concept of a CO2 tax is a great example. My favorite proposal is an energy tax because it not only hits on green house gases but forces a number of other positive benefits.

At the end of the day, economic behavior is defined by the rules of the game. The current set of rules can be boiled down to the concept, "privatize profits and socialize costs". We have to be willing to live with the pain of changing the rules and then chart a path to make it happen. Only by changing the rules can you change the behavior.

Answer 4

This is a very complicated question. For example America tends to use cleaner technologies than China but still contributes more to global warming and pollution because it consumes so much and 90% of it unnecessarily. So what the world needs is less consumption, cleaner technologies and fewer people. By these means we would reduce pollution, global warming and resource (for example fossil fuels and clean water) depletion. Higher taxes on consumption (particularly of fuel) could be very helpful providing the revenue was spent on eco-friendly projects and relieving poverty. But such measures are not easy to construct and need public support. The general public must put pressure on their politicians and set an example by adopting low consumption lifestyles (sell the car etc.). Such lifestyles will become the norm as fossil fuels run out but you will find it easier to make a start now and so achieve a smooth transition.

To return to your question the person most responsible for the pollution is the person who buys the product, not the person that produces it. You can reduce your impact on pollution, global warming and resource depletion by buying fewer products and choosing carefully who you buy from, taking account of transport as well as production costs to the environment etc.

Answer 5

Taxed by whom? Do you mean taxed by countries that import them? Wouldn't this be against the rules of the WTO? Any country that established such a tax on products from any of these other countries would be subject to punitive duties on their own exports. Is that what you want?

Answer 6

I think the companies who put out the hogh polution should be taxed to help families get the full health insurence they cant afford because they are always to sick to go to work because
of the polutions and of the poor children and the animals that cant do any thing to help themselves but it is not just the companies fault we as consumers keep buying there products the more we buy the more they make and the more pollution that goes on how about us as consumers get out our granny and great granny cook books and learn to make our own and better products.

Answer 7

i imagine u . s . will stay as a superpower for a lengthy time period, yet there has been a verbal replace about secession for the state of Texas. If Texas receives seceded from the U. S., the honour of the U. S. will be lengthy gone continuously. How can China be the subsequent superpower if human rights are being abused there? when you're speaking about "monetary" superpower, it extremely is wise. difficult to foretell who might want to be the subsequent international's superpower, yet there is someone down there attempting to ax a tree. that is Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ETA, and different terrorist communities. they seem to be some type of a sparkling ailment that stops a rustic from coming up as a superpower. i imagine there'll be no superpower after u . s ., and those terrorist communities favor to be eradicated previously we see yet another superpower.

Answer 8

I think we should all understand that eco-logic and eco-friendship is not a matter of money. It is a matter of eco-training, a matter of culture, of quality of life.

Taxes can make people consider pollution as their right if they can afford it, how sad … this is not eco-friendly at all.

Answer 9

Who will tax them? One country can't levy a tax on another. Fines perhaps, but they wll get crooked lawyers to weasel them out of it.

(edit) hey caffeine jag, you are talking out your a**. There is no correlation between a larger economy and more efficient use of resources. On the contrary, richer countries tend to waste more.

It astonishes me how many intelligent answers below have been TD. Some people are so deluded.

Answer 10

Only if you want to totally destroy the world economy.

There is a couple of basic flaws in your argument. First, while the US emits a lot of carbon, they are the most productive and efficient in using the resources. Second, that the richer a country is the cleaner they tend to keep their environment. Poor countries do not have that luxury.