What’s that old saying about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions? Communist countries also talked a lot about the public good
Reversing climate change should be treated as a global public good
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who was in Washington last week for the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, made a valuable and insightful observation in a side conversation with a group of India observers.
Hmm, so he took a long fossil fueled trip from India, a nation which is putting up lots and lots of coal power plants?
In reference to climate change and assorted efforts to mitigate and even reverse it, she rued that while the European Union’s carbon tariffs – the so-called border adjustment mechanism (BAM) – are a unilateral and burden-shifting effort at climate mitigation, the underlying earnest desire to act on the climate front must be recognised and given a more productive form and channel. That calls for a wider debate on global public goods that Sitharaman referred to.
There’s a lack of awareness or debate about global public goods and externalities. And there’s no agreed-upon definition of them. (snip)
A public good costs money to provide. Normally, the state provides the public good, paying for it from the proceeds of taxation. That is in the case of national public goods, where the provider and the beneficiaries are clearly definable and have a defined mutual relationship.
In the case of global public goods, things get complicated. The cost of providing global goods is borne nationally but the benefits are enjoyed globally. Naturally, governments prioritise national commitments over global public goods. The challenge when it comes to global public goods then becomes – who will provide, who will pay, and how? There are no easy answers. But another concept from economics can help us with an answer: externalities.
In other words, putting government in charge of most things. But, hey, this is all about science, not authoritarian science, right?
A “public good” is the phrase used when one group of people wants to impose costs and curtail freedom for another group of people.