ENVIRONMENT  (CONT)

nomics has to offer.''

From Brown's vantage point, the purpose of all this tax shifting is to incorporate the environmental costs of products and services into their market prices or, in his words, ''to help the market tell the environmental truth.''

The result would be a system offering carrots to the environmentally responsible, whose income taxes fall and who can cut their environmental taxes by reducing the amount of garbage and pollution they generate.

The system also would brandish a hefty stick at polluters in the form of higher fuel costs, however.

Brown cited analysis by the International Center for Technology Assessment, a private research group that has said that the real cost of gasoline--including such indirect items as oil industry tax breaks, oil supply protection costs, oil industry subsidies, and health care costs of treating auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses--amounts to about $9 per gallon.

Adding these external costs to the average price of gasoline in the United States would push the national average retail price today to around $11.70 per gallon--assuming consumers were expected to foot the entire bill without any sacrifice of profit by industry.

''For Americans, this is shockingly high,'' Brown acknowledged but added that gasoline is much cheaper in the U.S. than overseas.
British, French, German, and Italian drivers regularly pay around $6 per gallon for gasoline, he said.

However horrifying the prospect of higher pump prices might be to many Americans, environmentalists--including industry veterans--shudder at the possible consequences of not embracing ''green accounting.''

For Brown, the threat is aptly summarized in a quote from Oystein Dahle, a former vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea.

''Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth,'' Dahle said. ''Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.'

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.