THE POVERTY MAKERS : THE IMF and CHRISTINE LAGARDE The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is calling for higher energy taxes to offset the external effects of energy use such as environmental degradation, higher food prices (and of course) the threat of climate change. If adopted, these policies of increasing energy prices through higher taxes, the IMF and Christine Lagarde would be condemning hundreds of millions of the poorest people in the world to poverty, and condemning tens of millions more to an early death. And by increasing poverty, theyd also cause enormous damage to the environment. Indira Gandhi was right when she said poverty is the worst form of pollution. The clueless Lagarde fails to realise that if you increase the price of energy, you force the poor to resort to burning charcoal, twigs and dung inside their homes for cooking and heating - and according to the World Health Organisation, this causes millions of deaths every year from indoor air pollution. And in an editorial, Investors Business Daily warns of the dangers of giving more power to the economically & environmentally clueless bureaucrats from the IMF ........... Central planners have never gotten the price of anything right, and their hope to accurately set the price of fossil fuels will have the same result. They will muddle the market, and their errors will be mostly felt by consumers paying artificially high prices. (The clueless) IMF director Christine Lagarde said Thursday that higher taxes on fossil fuels are needed because a degraded environment leads to a degraded economy. Reality is the other way around. When an economy is degraded, the environment follows. Theres no better example, as weve noted many times, than the difference between the former East and West Germanys. The socialist regime in the east left behind an environment so dirty that Westerners were shocked at how befouled and filthy it was. Nor was the damage limited to East Germany. The conditions in Soviet satellite nations of Eastern Europe were even more appalling. Economist Thomas DiLorenzo wrote in March 1992 as the Soviet Union was dissolving that Jeffrey Leonard of the World Wildlife Fund concluded that pollution was part and parcel of the system that molested the people (of Eastern Europe) in their daily lives. The lesson here is that a clean environment has to be paid for, and a poor or sluggish economy — which is the certain outcome of higher taxes — cant do that. If the IMF cant grasp this basic fact, the U.S. needs to review whether such an economically clueless organization deserves our support. And the clueless Lagarde would do well to educate herself about the case study of China, as Bjorn Lomborg notes; It is also important to point out that while outdoor air pollution in China has definitely increased since 1990, THE OVERALL IMPACT OF AIR POLLUTION HAS DECLINED. This is because indoor air pollution is often wrongly ignored. Indoor air pollution comes from burning charcoal, twigs and dung inside the house, which creates terrible pollution and kills more than 1 million people in China each year. Overall, the worlds largest study conducted by the World Health Organization estimates that for China, deaths from outdoor air pollution have increased from 900,000 to 1.2 million a year from 1990 to 2010. But decreasing poverty has allowed many more to avoid indoor air pollution, which has dropped faster, from more than 1.6 million deaths to 1 million deaths in 2010. Almost 2.6 million people died from air pollution in China in 1990, but the number declined to 2.3 million in 2010 despite an 18 percent increase in the population. In total, FEWER PEOPLE NOW DIE FROM AIR POLLUTION IN CHINA BECAUSE OF LESS POVERTY. With outdoor air pollution rampant in Beijing that may seem surprising, but we forget that indoor air pollution has always been more important. In 1900, almost all pollution deaths in the world were related to indoor air pollution, and the individual risk of dying from air pollution was more than five-fold higher than it is today. In short, indoor air pollution has declined, because the increasing number of people coming out of poverty can now afford to cook using modern energy. Yes, outdoor air pollution has increased - but that only confirms a long-standing finding that many environmental indicators tend to first get worse, then better, with economic development. Essentially, China, just like the United Kingdom before it, has traded off economic development for some additional outdoor air pollution. This prosperity buys food, education and medical services, while electricity and gas help eradicate indoor air pollution. The familiar pattern is that once a country obtains a certain level of wealth, it can also afford to protect more nature and reduce pollution. But if the clueless Lagarde and the IMF had their way, by increasing energy prices, theyd increase poverty, damage our environment and cause millions of deaths. businessinsider/r-imf-urges-higher-energy-taxes-to-fight-climate-change-2014-31?IR=T
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 13:07:37 +0000
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