A Carbon Tax to Give New Meaning and Renewed Future to Europe

Abstract

For decades scientists and environmentalists have been warning about the threat to humanity represented by anthropogenic climate change, caused above all by the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels, which is causing the greenhouse effect to grow. And it is years, at least since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, that the international community has begun to tackle the problem by agreeing to the binding objectives of reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions – the main ones responsible, with deforestation, of climate change – released into the atmosphere due to combustion processes (in thermoelectric power plants, motor vehicles) of coal, oil and gas. Today climate change is no longer just a threat: it is an established reality made of a progressive increase in the average temperature of the earth, multiplication and intensification of extreme weather events (droughts, floods), melting ice and rising sea and oceans levels, of accelerated biodiversity loss. A reality that is causing serious environmental, economic and social damage: just think of the progressive desertification of areas that until recently could be cultivated, which, especially in Africa, deprived of food large rural communities, and fuels the phenomenon of “climate migrants” (tens of millions already today); or the increasingly intense heat waves that hit many metropolis, with a significant number of deaths each year and a greater impact in cities inhabited by a large percentage of elderly population. If there will not be a strong acceleration in the rate of reduction of climate-altering emissions, as required by the Paris Agreement signed in 2016, and the average terrestrial temperature will rise by more than two degrees compared to pre-industrial levels (it already increased by almost one degree centigrade), the consequences of climate change will become catastrophic: not for the planet, which in its history has experienced even deeper climatic oscillations, but for us humans.