A Solution for Henry Miller’s “Air-Conditioned Nightmare”?
A story ran in the Financial Times in July explaining that, in some parts of the developing world, teenage wives are bought and sold like a commodity at prices lower than the going rate for “water buffalo”. The primitive treatment and inhuman abuses that these women face is juxtaposed in the article with the flatscreen televisions, refrigerators and other modern appliances that literally sit on mud floors in their homes.
In an account of his travels through the United States, the ever-patriotic novelist Henry Miller referred to his home country as an “air-conditioned nightmare”. Although he was writing in 1945 and did not intend to link air-conditioners with carbon emissions or electricity consumption, the notion of an “air-conditioned nightmare” can easily be given a modern-day spin: the emerging world’s desire to catch up with the U.S. – in material comfort, not always gender equality – underscores the need to address the environmental impacts associated with the western way of life as it spreads to become the global norm.
And even if climate change is not your shot of bourbon, perhaps resource constraints may be a more compelling concern.
Either way, in the midst of an international mood favoring austerity measures over other substantive changes to the status quo, politicians in Australia took a brave step forward when they announced a plan on July 10th to impose a carbon tax. The scheme will raise revenue while also reducing carbon emissions levels in Australia, which depends on coal-fired power stations for 80 percent of electricity generation.
Under the proposal, which will need parliamentary approval, an initial three-year fixed-price carbon tax will increase by 2.5 per cent each year. In 2015, it will move to a market-based emissions trading system. The top 500 polluting companies will receive carbon credits covering up to 94.5 per cent of their carbon emissions initially, on top of additional subsidies in the first few years.
As developing countries have been looking to the U.S. and other developed nations to take the lead in carbon mitigation, Australia’s carbon tax is a welcomed respite in an otherwise frustrating period since Copenhagen; and, at the risk of sounding too optimistic, the Aussie plan may even pave the way for other countries to address concerns associated with globalizing the so-called “air-conditioned nightmare”.