Exportando basura a Europa

Belgian Role Model
October 30, 2006

Al Gore may have failed to carry his home state of Tennessee as a Presidential candidate, but the former Vice President is all the rage in . . . Belgium. The country has even named a tax after him. Earlier this month, Mr. Gore spent a day in Brussels to promote his film on global warming. "Our planet has a fever, and the fever has been getting steadily higher," he said in a speech. "It is in fact a full-scale planetary emergency." Within days, Belgian politicians were rewriting their tax laws to do something about this looming calamity. Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt invoked his American visitor in proposing a new "environmentally friendly" tax on packages that would penalize users of aluminum or plastic and provide incentives to switch to paper or cardboard, whose production releases less CO2 into the atmosphere. The details have yet to be worked out, but the idea is for milk sold in, say, a plastic bottle to cost more than milk sold in a cardboard container. "We must take Al Gore's message seriously," Mr. Verhofstadt told parliament the other day. The measure, introduced into the draft 2007 budget, was fast dubbed "the Gore tax." Also in the works are tax breaks for car pollution filters and deductions for energy-efficient investors. To be sure, this Belgian scheme to save the planet also raises a bundle for the politicians to spend, to the tune of roughly €600 million ($750 million) a year. A government spokesman says that the revenue will make up for what it expects to lose from planned reductions in social taxes, which are some of the highest in Europe. Evidently the government figures that dressing the new tax package in Al Gore green will make it go down easier. If the former veep decides he can't beat Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic nomination, he can always try Europe.