The necessity for environmental taxes for the avoidance of environmental thievery. A note on the paper "Environmental responsibility versus taxation"

Internalizing environmental costs is a necessary condition for an effective environmental policy. Since the majority of socioeconomic activities cannot be free of environmental impacts, the nonintemalized (external) environmental costs impose a peculiar thievery of welfare. Charging environmental costs through environmental taxes and other economic instruments is a necessary condition for avoiding welfare thievery. In this context, the anti-tax approaches emerging within ecological economics are found to be misleading and directing away from an effective environmental policy. Environmental responsibility is a different issue from the charging of the environmental costs. Therefore, environmental taxes should not be considered as an induction to less environmental responsibility and, hence, to environmental degradation. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.