License to harm

Promoted by the OECD since 1972, the polluter-pays principle charges the polluter the costs of preventing, reducing and combating the pollution he generates. It is found in many forms – carbon markets, environmental taxes, ecological compensation – and it is credited with many virtues, in particular that of putting companies back on the right track thanks to its incentive effects. But in reality, the polluter-pays principle above all authorizes industrialists to pollute with complete impunity – for a fee! Successive legislation thus goes in the same direction: rather than forcing companies to reduce their use of plastic or their CO2 emissions, they apply corrective measures in the event of "negative externalities". Flore Berlingen denounces the weakness of measures which evacuate any public debate on the sources of pollution and which delay the adoption of measures commensurate with the ecological emergency. Faced with the democratic impoverishment to which the polluter-pays principle condemns us, it invites us to choose deliberation and to draw inspiration instead from the Hippocratic principle primum non nocere ("first do no harm") to take care of our environmental commons. "Have we thus entered into a regime of 'pollutocracy'? »