The Tung administration and 47 of our esteemed Legislative Councillors have spearheaded yet another victory for the cause of inactivity by not taking the chance to raise the smoky vehicle fines in last month's Revenue Bill.
By doing so, they have even snubbed the business community, represented by 21 chambers of commerce and business associations which recently formed the Hong Kong Business Coalition on the Environment and condemned the Government for its inactivity on issues of pollution.
This coalition of businesses is estimated to represent more than 85 per cent of Hong Kong's private-sector gross domestic product (GDP), yet the feared taxi and vehicle lobbies, representing less than 0.5 per cent of GDP, seem to have government officials eating out of their hands. How can this even be possible? The main problem in solving the pollution problem in Hong Kong is that every official likes to revert to the excuse that this is a laissez-faire economy, and incentives or penalties should not be used. Unfortunately, there is not one country in the world that has succeeded in improving environmental conditions without the use of some sort of subsidies or incentives.
In fact, in most countries that care about environmental protection, penalties are both the norm and the accepted practice in deterring pollution.
These penalties must be higher than the price of remediation in order for them to be effective, and they must be enforced (enforcement being an idea which seems to be novel to Hong Kong in this respect).
Human nature adheres to the law of physics, whereby individuals take the path of least resistance, just as air travels from a high-pressure system to a low-pressure system.
This is validated in Hong Kong in many facets of life, as witnessed by the condition of our beaches, parks and sea with the amount of litter that is left behind by those who are too lazy to dispose of it properly. The attitude of finding the easy way out will take this city nowhere.
