The Green Technocrat

In his Op-Ed this weekend in The New York Times Thomas Friedman gave a quick account of one country that has recognized the need to develop its environmental policy and energy policy hand in hand.  That country is Costa Rica, and for the last 20 years they have been doing just about everything right in order to ensure the preservation of their incredible biodiversity.

Here is a quick run down of some of Costa Rica’s environmental accomplishments:

• 95% of Costa Rica’s energy comes from renewable resources (chief among them are hydroelectric, wind and geothermal)
• When oil was discovered 5 years ago the country banned oil drilling
• Imposed a 3.5% carbon emissions tax
• Used the revenue from aforementioned emissions tax to pay indigenous communities to protect the forests around them.  The country now has nearly twice as much forest as 20 years ago

We should take a page from Costa Rica’s playbook.  As Mr. Friedman puts it “we are racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.”