Business Ethics of UK Green Tax Plan

I was surfing through the business section of BBC’s news online and came across an informational article relating to global warming, one of the hottest topic around the globe. The title of the article is “Miliband draws up green tax plan” published on October 30^th, 2006. Below is a link to the article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6095680.stm

In this article, United Kingdom’s Environment Secretary David Miliband established the fact that the government is holding discussions on tackling climate change by implementing green taxes. This green tax plan, also known as “pay-as-you-drive” plan, is unique is which it calls for measure to combat “car use and ownership”, and a “substantial increase” in road tax. The proposal suggest families with big cars would have to end up paying more than £1,000 a year in additional tax.

Many ethical problems surfaced from this article. However, the main ethical issue is that why would or should a household with a bigger car responsible for paying a higher tax than a household with a smaller car? This is extremely unfair to the bigger-car owners because even though smaller cars produce less greenhouse emissions from their exhausts, the smaller cars are still on the road and they still contribute to problems of air pollution and global warming.

Large families needing larger automobiles to accommodate the number of passengers should not be the only targets of the new taxation. If government were to implement the new green tax plan, they should tax all cars the same amount of tax because no matter the size of the vehicles, they still provide the harmful greenhouse emissions that leads to global warming.