DO we really care for the environment? Yes of course we do, I hear you say. But it’s a bit like wife-beating – you certainly wouldn’t admit to not caring for the environment.

Indeed, many of us go to considerable lengths to do our bit, like loading our petrol-guzzling four-wheel-drives with bottles and driving them to the bottle bank. Or taking our grass cuttings and garden debris to the dump so that someone else can make compost out of it.

Now we are going to be able to do even more: we’re going to be taxed so that the States can pay for all sorts of environmental improvements that no-one would do unless they were persuaded to.

(This incidentally, is one area of public spending that is rarely criticised, but let’s not go down that route again.) However, the woolly thinkers are having a field day.

Firstly, there’s the question of what environmental taxes are supposed to achieve. Is it to raise money to help the environment, or is it to change people’s behaviour? It can’t be both. The more people are forced to change their behaviour, the less money is raised.

For example, if you force all gas-guzzlers off the road – which many people would consider a totally reasonable policy – this source of taxation will soon dry up unless you applied the taxes to cleaner vehicles as well.

That might produce a worthwhile result by forcing (or should I say, persuading) people to drive environmentally friendly vehicles, but you still need tax revenue to help where behaviour is not a factor or where you need to provide an alternative.

Then there’s the question of social justice. We would all like to see people driving cleaner cars, but what about those people who can’t afford to replace their current polluting wrecks? (And yes, many of them do need a car or at least a reasonable alternative, as much as the wealthy.)

In the UK they are giving people money to scrap their old cars. This is not an option being suggested in Jersey and it has obviously been ruled out by Treasury and Resources, if they even considered it. They assure us in their consultation document that all options have been considered, but then they go on to discuss only two options and a combination of the two. And frankly there’s very little to choose between them.
This public consultation exercise is therefore hardly likely to throw up anything interesting or innovative.

The poor do come out well on the spending side of the environmental equation. They will be the recipients of some of the money raised so that they can insulate their homes and use energy more efficiently.

Of course it’s not only the homes of the poor where energy is wasted. Indeed, it could be a case of the bigger the home, the more energy is wasted. However, unless the States raise a serious amount of money from green taxes, the rest of us will have to pay for our own loft insulation as well as coughing up the taxes to pay for the help given to the poor.

On the face of it, that might seem entirely fair. But the way middle-income earners are being clobbered from all sides by the States, there’s not likely to be a lot of money left for the middle earners to be able to afford to lag their roofs.

THE real problem is that we are just tinkering at the edges of the environmental problem. We want to do something, but apparently not much.

Many people would think that a small prosperous Island with a well-educated population would be able to set an example to the rest of the world on how to deal with environmental issues. Sure, we’re spending £106 million plus a few more euros, on a spanking new waste-from-energy plant, but we’re only doing that because we’ve been forced to at the very last moment before the Bellozanne plant seizes up entirely.
They can say that it’s all part of the overall environmental strategy, but it looks very much like firefighting to me.

Of course there are some members of the States who don’t believe there is a problem. Some even don’t accept the threat of global warming, but they tend also to believe that the Earth is flat and that there’s an unlimited source of water sitting under the Island.

Then there are others who believe that saving the planet simply involves keeping our plastic separate from our cardboard and washing out our bottles to be collected (a ridiculous notion; don’t they wash them again?). But there is a lot more that could be done and, frankly, we’re only scratching the surface of possible solutions.

There are many things out of our control, but there are also many things we can do that are totally within our control. All it needs is the will and some strong leadership.
Environmental taxes (if they are supported) are a start, but we should be half way down the road by now, not just at the beginning.

• Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine