US to tax carbon-rich Indian goods

Can you imagine a green house gas guzzler proposing to tax “carbon-rich” Indian goods – just proves that recession has not only hit the US economy but also the brains of the US House of Representatives! The US ranks 10th in the per capita carbon dioxide emission stakes with 22.2 metric tons per person per year whereas India ranks low down at 133 with just 1.2 metric tons per person per year. By putting in provisions to tax goods from countries that do not impose curbs on green house gas emissions, the intent of the US legislation is to target India and China whose economies do not seem to have been so badly hit by the recession. India is saying that there can be no linkage between trade and environment and that the US move smacks of protectionism which is true – as the US is trying to extract a dollar from developing countries for having over the years degraded the environment willfully. It is the classic US strategy to first take advantage and then cry foul once they realize that such issues can no longer be used to their advantage.

The biggest gas guzzlers are the record number of gas guzzling SUV’s which ply the US roads, why not stop them from running for starters. Most houses in the west and mid west of the US have been built with wood imported from the Far East by degrading the forests in those poor countries for which today a carbon tax will be levied! The maximum wasteful consumption of power is in the US, just take a look at the photograph which shows the global carbon footprint based on data collected, collated and calculated by the US Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), mostly based on data collected from country agencies by the United Nations Statistics Division.

The logic for imposing the tax is also a bit weird – apparently caps will be imposed on emissions from different sectors, which would result in increasing the cost of products emerging from such sectors. Similarly if other countries do not impose such caps their products will be cheaper and hence US products will not be able to compete on an equal footing! This is probably one of the biggest con being sold to the world – what does the US manufacture today apart from military goods (basically destructive), large cars, outer space machines etc – the goods used by the average Joe are all imported – just go to any store in the US and you will see what I mean. Clothes, jewelry, chocolates, food stuffs are all imported – why are they imported? Because they are way cheaper than what the US can produce them for. These guys have probably not read Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” and why the global economy cannot but be integrated with countries having certain skills supplying their products to others and buying from other countries what they themselves cannot produce. There is no reason for the US to import goods from developing countries if they have the wherewithal to manufacture goods in adequate quantities economically enough to satisfy the demand of their own population. The US economy is a wasteful consumption based, litigious economy with companies unwilling to manufacture retail products for the fear of being sued for frivolous reasons, hence the dependence on imports. All products come with a shelf life, hence unsold products are scrapped after the sell by date, thus resulting in more waste in material as well as green house gases due to the wasteful consumption pattern.

The very idea of taxing other countries indicates that the US is probably going bankrupt financially as well as intellectually!