THE European Union's ability to protect the environment is being blocked by the resistance of certain member states to the idea of imposing EU wide "green taxes" according to a senior official of the European Commission.
Mr Tom Garvey, deputy director of the Commission's environment division, said these countries regarded the adoption of fiscal measures by qualified majority voting as a "surrender of sovereignty" and insisted that the measures must have unanimous support.
"Thus, we deprive ourselves of what many regard as the most effective instrument we could have for tackling the root causes of environmental degradation in our continent," he told an academic symposium at Trinity College. Dublin.
In the absence of agreement on green taxation, "we are failing in our obligations under the treaty to implement the polluter pays principle and the prevention principle and we are failing to integrate environmental requirements into fiscal policy".
Mr Garvey said this failure of political will was happening despite a "large and growing consensus" on the need for environmental protection and a growing acceptance that positive policies were needed to achieve sustainable development.
"The most effective and rapid way of effecting changes in both corporate and individual behaviour is through the pocket, by market mechanisms which encourage and reward environmentally friendly behaviour, and penalise the opposite.
Environmental taxes were also efficient, requiring no elaborate new structures of bureaucracy, they were "relatively quick in terms of achieving results and they could stimulate innovation by leaving it to entrepreneurs to devise the least cost response.
Prof David Pearce of University College, London, agreed that there were "vocal elements" standing in the way of full consensus. "One has to wonder if they really care about the environment itself or simply the theatrical role that they play in the debate" he said.
Recent official documents on sustainable development produced by Ireland and the UK represented an advance on what was happening 10 years ago. But they shared a common failing - "they lack any coherent theory of what it is they are trying to measure".
Prof Pearce said that countries which had undergone fundamental political revolutions in recent years were better able to rewrite their legislation from first principles. Poland, for example, had adopted wholly new environmental policies with market based instruments.
Prof Wilfred Beckerman of Balliol College, Oxford, told the symposium that he didn't think much of the concept of sustainability. The idea that we had a responsibility to future generations was "bunkum", he said.
Though he agreed that we should not leave them "impoverished", he believed that there was little chance of this happening. "If we were to cut our consumption to zero, there won't be any future generations, so we wouldn't have to worry about them," he said.
"I am not worried at all about using finite resources; as they become increasingly scarce, they will become increasingly expensive."
Prof David Pepper of Oxford Brookes University said sustainable development was about leaving open as many options as possible for future generations. But this was threatened by an economic system based on "constant expansion of production and consumption".
He also warned that the EU convergence criteria for monetary union would "stave off efforts to deal with the widening gap between rich and poor and to move towards environmental sustainability". Only a form of socialism, based on community participation, would work.
Ms Hilary Tovey, lecturer in sociology at TCD, queried the concept of sustainable development. "We need to ask whose vision is being advanced, whose common future is being protected and whose grandchildren are being marginalised," she said.
Dr David Jeffrey of TCD's botany department agreed that social equity was important. In the context of an "exponentially rising world population", the primary need was to look at people's "quality of life" rather than their "standard of living", he said.
