Martin khor’s climate trade import duties

Thus making them, collectively achieving a pseudo critical analytical consensus derived from a council that merely groped the elephant in the dark. Separately declaring the trunk, tusk, tail, torso as the negative, blindly thinking it all as one and the same thing.

*This post was originally written on Tuesday 27th August. Part of this post was published on RA 7 days ago with the title ‘Elephant Analysis’.

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Last Monday over breakfast I read a rather simple yet good (to my lowly standards) piece written by Martin Khor. No. Not Michael Kors. Khor is an economist and Director of the Third World Network. He has been critical regarding the negative effects of globalisation for third world countries. Excerpt from ‘Climate to be used for trade protection’,

He (Sarkozy) indicated that when France takes over the presidency of the European Union (it did so in July), he would advocate the use of higher duties on imports that contain higher carbon content.

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This can be taken to mean that if the amount of carbon dioxide emissions exceeds a certain level in producing one unit of a product, then extra duties may be placed on that product, thus raising its cost and discouraging imports.

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Developing countries, consider this unfair. Firstly, developed countries have historically been responsible for much of the carbon dioxide that has built up in the atmosphere, giving rise to global warming. There were then no punitive measures against their high emission-products.

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Secondly, they have superior technology and can produce goods with lower carbon content than developing countries and thirdly, they have so far refused to transfer these technologies to developing countries at affordable prices.

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The use of trade measures is thus unfair to developing countries. They are also against the spirit and principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which mandate that developed countries must finance the costs of actions dealing with climate change in developing countries and that discriminatory trade measures should not be taken.

A few things you can note from the piece above.

Capitalism, democracy, globalisation or a combination of either could in fact makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. While I agree that (the overrated) democracy is the best system we have available, that does not make it great. The excerpt above is a reflection of one of the many loopholes that democracy offers.

In fact, present day no country has adopted the doctrine of democracy wholly a 100%.

Being in the generation that went to school in the post-cold war era being told that democracy is great, and communism is shite (without ever being told what either of them actually works or stand for), I’ve come to note that due to peer pressure most have a tendency to want to appear to be politically correct and politically conscious. Thus making them, collectively achieving a pseudo critical analytical consensus derived from a council that merely groped the elephant in the dark. Separately declaring the trunk, tusk, tail, torso as the negative, blindly thinking it all as one and the same thing.

Going back to the article, I suppose to some extent, this is somewhat in congruent with Marx’s view that capitalism breeds war. If we share the same foresight, that is.

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*The writer is not an economist, nor a graduate in economics. Or political science. His view is, the elephant tastes like chicken.