FAIRNESS (10 april 2004)
Ever realized you have to pay for going to the toilet when you live in a city?
The sewage you produce has to be purified. This process costs money. And you pay for the pollution you cause. That's only fair, isn't it?
Still, internationally, some countries are not prepared to pay for the pollution they bring about.
As you know, the industrialized countries are producing massive pollution. If they go on polluting at this pace, our planet has little or no chance to survive. That's why a few years ago several countries decided they had to do something about it - the so-called Kyoto Protocol. But the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, the United States, refused to sign because it would be bad for business. Can you imagine some people have trouble believing in US fairness?
Paying for the pollution you cause may seem logical to you and me, but not to the vultures that buy gold, uranium and wood in tropical countries. The local hotshots are bribed to allow them to ransack the country, which is abandoned in a deplorable state.
Sometimes even the authorities seem to consider fairness a rather cheap commodity. If you run a pub or café in Amsterdam, environmental laws oblige you to insulate the place as if it is a recording studio - a long cry from the situation twenty-five years ago when I lived in the centre and could not sleep until the local bars closed.
I must have told you about the building noise that wakes me up almost daily. But can you understand why the authorities forbid bars to produce almost any noise at all, whereas builders are allowed to produce as much noise as they want?
Can you imagine that more and more people feel frustrated in a society where fairness is not a guiding principle?
