Mutual Connection Between Taxes and Environmental Problems (Part 1)

Selva is also interested in environmental issues and has published some article related to mutual relationships between taxes and environment topics. She believes financial policies and taxes can impact greatly on environmental problem and can help solving them. Here we have an interview with her to ask about her experiences and works she has done and how they can solve nature problems and make our world a better place…

• Could you please explain your experiences related to environmental issues?

I attended elementary school in the Turkish capital of Ankara – which has served as an urban center in the fragile steppes of Turkey’s central Anatolian region since the Hattic civilization 2000–1700 BC (bronze age) for over the past 4,000 years.   During the 1970’s, Ankara’s air pollution was especially acute, where the combustion of coal heating fuels -- with the pollutants trapped by the city’s arid, hilly topography-- increased particulate density during the  winter.  

Turkey’s energy policy has heavily subsidized coal with long term plans of increasing coal-powered electricity capacity.  Energy production is the most important source of air pollution coming from human activity.  When coal is burnt its carbon is converted to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other compounds of carbon.  CO2 is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas which causes global warming, acid rain, severe hurricanes, wild fires which cause deforestation, which damages the environment and human health.  

Ankara’s smoggy pollutants which were worsened by abundant public smoking was a silent killer, indifferent to political agendas or contained by city or national borders.   The winter months -- pushing emissions higher than World Health Organization limits --were particularly difficult for me to endure as a developing child from ages five to ten.  My young lungs and eyes would burn every time I breathed -- while my face, hair, hands, clothes, even the walls inside our apartment would be rimed in ash grey soot from exposure to the coal air pollutants at the end of each day.   

Thankfully, to prevent further desertification and to reduce the CO2 emissions, the city of Ankara – which kept growing due to urbanization -- undertook major environmental initiatives while I was still a student.

Ankara established  green zones and undertook re-forestation and landscaping programs by planting  pine trees in large sections of the steppe city for their ability to photosynthesize the sun's energy to produce oxygen in air one-and-a-half times richer in CO2 starting in 1968.  I personally watched an evergreen pine tree forest grow next door to our apartment building from saplings to maturity during my lifetime.  

In 1986, Ankara implemented the Ankara Natural Gas Conversion Project where buildings fueled by coal were replaced with natural gas.  

In 2008, in a landmark move, Turkey also banned public smoking, four years after Bhutan became the first country in the world to ban smoking in public places following New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s public smoking ban in 2003, since air pollution emitted by cigarettes was 10 times greater than diesel car exhaust.  Turkey’s first smoking ban in 1997 was limited to public buildings, airplanes and public buses only. 

These green zone/clean energy/public smoking ban initiatives, not only improved the air quality of Ankara, but also shaped my environmentalist views since Turkey hosts more than three thousand endemic plant species, has remarkable diversity of wildlife, and is almost entirely covered by three of the world's thirty-five biodiversity hotspots due to its unique position between three continents and three seas.

After graduating from the New York Institute of Technology in New York in 1985, with a bachelor’s of science degree in accounting and computer science and becoming a certified public accountant, in 1990 I decided to attend the University Of Colorado School Of Law in Boulder, Colorado which ranks top ten in its environmental law program in the U.S.  The public university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) is the number one recipient of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) aeronautics and aerospace awards for research on sun, climate, space weather and solar modeling.  

While I was a second year law student, the first international environmental treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted and signed by 154 countries at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro from 3 to 14 June 1992 which set non-binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions for individual countries.  As an offshoot of UNFCCC, 197 countries also signed the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the only global convention to combat desertification in 1994.   

Starting my legal career as an international tax attorney, around  the same time world’s first  environmental treaties became effective, motivated to me to write and publish first of its kind legal analyses to address transnational environmental issues attributable to multinational companies as further detailed in section 3 below.