Madam, - In her column on carbon taxes (Opinion, September 16th) Mary Raftery managed to avoid all the salient considerations relating to the Government's recent decision not to proceed with the imposition of new measures. She concentrated instead on a rant about SUVs based on trendy, politically correct, irrelevant and second-hand American twaddle.
The central point to be made about carbon taxes as a policy measure designed to reduce carbon emissions is that isolated action by any one country, and particularly by a small country with an open economy, is bound to fail, since it will be immediately exploited for competitive advantage by the country's competitors. For that reason, I believe the Government was right not to proceed, even if its actual motivation was different.
Carbon taxes as a policy instrument should be deployed at a level at which they can be effective. In our case, that means this instrument should be developed and deployed at EU level, so as not to distort the conditions of competition in the EU's single internal market.
Ideally, of course, the EU and its major competitors and trading partners should "jump together" on the issue, but that is far too logical an approach to hope for in the current climate of EU-US relations, to mention only those.
Three further brief reflections:
First, we already have substantial carbon taxes, in the form of excise duties on petroleum fuels which are higher than those applied in many competitor countries.
Second, the competitive effects of our current carbon taxes have been and continue to be a source of competitive concern for the manufacturing and transport sectors of our economy.
Third, most SUVs in Ireland are smaller and have smaller engines than those common in the US. Many SUVs in Ireland are smaller and have smaller engines than, for example, many Mercedes models or several BMW models, to name only a few. Today's SUVs have more fuel-efficient and cleaner engines than many "respectable" cars over four or five years old.
If we are going to debate carbon taxes, let's deal in facts rather than "urban myths". - Yours, etc.,
ALAN DUKES, Tully West, Kildare, Co Kildare.