Intervention Strategies for Air Pollution Summary

Intervention Strategies for Air Pollution
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Intervention Strategies for Air Pollution
Introduction and Review
The intersection between the environment and the economy is manifold: the environment is the source of resources that drive economic growth and acts as a sink for wastes and emissions resulting from economic growth activities (OECD, 2022). The environment is an (almost) closed system because all inputs, except for the sun, are sourced within, and all outputs must remain within. Essentially, economic growth can harm the environment, and where the negative impact persists, economic growth suffers. Poor environmental quality lowers the quality and quantity of resources required to drive economic growth. On the other hand, economic growth can result in solutions that can help enhance sustainable programs.
Current research and policies are centered on how economic growth can be realized with a minimum impact on the environment (Barrage, 2019). The need to strike a balance between optimal economic activities and environmental sustainability is the key driver of current research and policy formulation discussions. A key characteristic of these discussions is the assumption that the environment and economic growth have equal importance on life and must be treated equally, one inclusive of the other. As a result, the world relies on weak sustainability policies, such as the Carbon Tax, because they are the most efficient in quelling disagreements in matters where the environment and economics intersect. While weak sustainability is better than no sustainability, weak sustainability is a poor substitute for a poor environment. The main reason why weak sustainability is preferred is that it is the most politically feasible due to its lack of radicalism. The outcome of weak sustainability, like Carbon Tax, is that it does not address inequality (Haites, 2018). Rather, it only gives the impression that the biggest polluters are paying for reductions. In reality, it is the smallest polluters who suffer the most consequences, from global to household level.
Therefore, there is a need for a fair system that compensates for the fact that wealthy nations emit far more carbon than developing nations who suffer the most from the impacts of global warming and climate change. A carbon tax is a fee imposed on the carbon contents of different types of fossil fuels by factoring in long-term social costs of emissions. A key question in this policy is who should be taxed? The point of taxation could be the energy producers (upstream), distributors and retailers (midstream), or the consumers (downstream) (Barrage, 2019). While the current Carbon Tax policy focuses on the upstream, the burden trickles downstream to the consumers, which is regressive because it only widens carbon inequality. While carbon tax seeks to reduce emissions by forcing companies to adopt sustainable production methods, it interferes with profits and economic growth.
Carbon tax increases the prices of basic products like food and utilities and slows down economic growth. Like developing nations, poor households spend a higher portion of their i...