Venice recently implanted a tourism tax to moderate the number of people visiting the place as if it’s a theme park. Up to 20 million of them every year, according to The Economist. Imagine the scale of that impact.
The city’s modest €5 tax wouldn’t get you within cooee of Disneyworld but apparently, it’s sparked protests.
Nevertheless the tax is now implemented for day trippers from 8.30 am and 4 pm, with 200 stewards trained to “politely walk anyone unaware of the fee through the process of downloading a QR code”. Not so politely, transgressors face fines of between €50 and €300 if they evade the tax.
What’s prompted the move that many might think was well overdue is that Venice narrowly escaped being placed on UNESCO’s because of the damage from overtourism on its delicate ecosystem.
The Conversation in May reported it’s not the only place to go the same way. The UK’s county of Kent has recommended a similar tourism tax on overnight stays in the county. So too Edinburgh and Wales.
“In fact, there are more than 60 destinations around the world where this type of tax is already in place,” the Convo says. These include Amsterdam Paris, Malta and Cancun.
In Barcelona, which famously faced big demonstrations from locals over the tourists that made their city unaffordable, a tax hasn’t worked and numbers have consistently risen.
But then again, what’s €5 in the context of a grand holiday?
Certainly the constant holiday/travel/discovery/cooking shows will do nothing to stem the the tide of people tramping everywhere they can possibly go to get their unique experience.
There’s a lot to learn from travel but for many people on quick stopover tours it may yield no more than insight what they’d get from their comfy lounge room.
Is that snobbery? I hope it’s more like a call to “save the joint”. And yes, there’s a contradiction between egalitarian access and preservation – no less so than for our delicate eco systems in places like Tasmania – or Mt Everest.
The truth is there is nothing in the handbook of human rights that says we have the right to travel wherever we want, whenever we want and to gawk at people who often live differently to us. Some people have called trips to developing nations as poverty porn.
For a formerly avidly keen traveller – in theory and appetite if not practice so much – this was an uncomfortable awakening for me. One I most certainly did not want to have.
Not just for the carbon miles we burn in travel but the human cost of leaching out the culture of others especially poorer areas where generous or simply needy people bend and scrape to accommodate the surges that descend on their shores.
The first time I became aware of over-tourism was at Uluru. I’d gone out to the rock before dawn to see the sunrise and the promised amazing colours of the awakening desert.
The pre dawn atmosphere was immense – a grand spiritual connection seemed to lie just the other side of the first rays of light.
Until it started. From miles away the relentless growing drone of heavy engines and tyres on the perfect tarmacked road. Buses. Not just one, but dozens, and dozens, until the place that had been as silent as the birth of time became a sea of swarming camera_clicking noisy humanity.
What’s worse is that the highway had been designed and built specifically for this purpose. Easy access for tourists who demanded a seamless airconditioned experience door to door on their must see list.
What did Indigenous people think of this? No matter how generous of spirit, how needy of commerce, it must rankle. I thought of the priests denying access to tourists at Notre Dame (before it burned). Same same. Maybe.
And then Bali with the rivers of rubbish hidden just behind the hedge bordering the luxe resort.
On a visit to India my friend and guide introduced me to Delhi on a New Year’s Eve. He was a frequent visitor – loved the place – and quipped by way of introduction to his conflicted feelings it was like going to Disneyland, except for real. I felt the sudden sinking feeling you get as you realise you’re part of the problem. That New Year’s Eve would be impossible to forget – the air thick with the smell of burning plastic and rubber that locals used to keep warm and my realisation that the people I saw around me would likely not grow very old.
Of course India was also the life changing revelation that the hippies had promised so long ago. I came away grateful for the enormous generosity and positivity of its people, no matter their challenges, and stunned by the thrilling intelligence and innovation evident everywhere.
I appeased my guilt of travel by promising long trips would be for long periods of time and infrequent. On the last visit to Italy to connect with my family and birthplace I did my best to pick up story ideas on sustainability and the vibe about the EUs leadership on climate action from ordinary folk on the street.
Check out the video/interview I did with my cousin’s daughter Federica Ortolan who’s been mayor of Carbonera, a province of Treviso, in the north for the past five years and has no intention of stopping. She’s enthusiastic about her job, keen to immediately don the mayoral sash and proudly list the sustainability achievements of her region.
Top priority was recycling with energy efficiency upgrades of facilities including schools and public lighting a close second. But also cycling as a sustainable and healthy way to get around “because we live in a very green and beautiful area, and so biking makes you enjoy your surroundings”.
But what a vast difference I could see in the big cities compared to my last trip there in 2006. Back then the country was starting to suffer the withdrawal of its industries with factories and other manufacturing moving to China for its cheap labour. There had still been craftspeople in abundance and creativity on show everywhere. Not this time. The great extraction seemed to be nearly complete. Plastics and synthetics everywhere.
One shocking revelation was a supermarket replete with cleaning products and disinfectants for the home – it seemed there were 20 brands of product for every housekeeping task you could imagine. No sign of white vinegar and baking soda.
An even bigger shock was the stopover in Dubai on the way back. This vast airport is the world’s busiest according to reports, with around 200,000 people passing through each day and 8000 flights a week.
Dante’s inferno had nothing on that cacophony of weary travellers.
On running with the bulls
In Australia we’ve got our own circle of hell.
On the weekend the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton emboldened by his win on the Referendum on the Indigenous Voice has found his own extreme and destructive voice – straight from the Trump playbook it seems, promising to take Australia back the dark days of the climate wars.
In his Values to Value column this week Murray Hogarth has noted these wars were never over. The protagonists were simply biding their time in the optimists’ parking station before bursting forth again. Did we really think that the squillions of dollars invested in fossil fuels could so easily be given up? Or even diverted to more positive uses?
The problem is that in tough times people are likely to wish for silver bullets to solve their problems. When nothing else seems to work the minds of the desperate make fertile ground for magical thinking.
Dutton as we all know by now, given the massive media coverage, has promised to walk out of the Paris Agreement if he wins government at the next federal election, except for the 2050 target, which is to say if we don’t meet that, and it’s discovered two days before 2050 kicks in, it’ll be bad luck.
There were three responses we detected in the immediate aftermath of that announcement that has come straight from the nuclear club/fossil fuel playbook that Murray has been meticulously documenting in his Nuclear Files series. Because waiting for nuclear is like waiting for Godot. In the meantime, we burn as much coal as possible. It’s the formula.
One response to Dutton’s dump was fury. Followed by the feeling that it might be time to throw in the towel. Ditto ours – at least for a few seconds.
A second response from another well placed source was cool rational jubilation that this seals the fate of the climate deniers and consigns them to the dustbin of history because it throws the election wide open to more teals in more seats. The logic goes that they will pressure the major parties to act. The best case scenario would be a minority Labor government with teals driving real action, said the source.
A third was way more pragmatic and anchored in the Realpolitik of commerce and economics if that’s a thing.
John Connor from the Carbon Markets Institute cited the many moving parts of investors, carbon border adjustment mechanisms and trade agreements that won’t be undone.
There’s also the fact of the disclosure legislation in place and driving a boom in the sector. Note the growth we’ve seen from outfits like Pollination and now Simon Wilds’ Andefena that in just three years is about to grow to 15 people and is already servicing the disclosure and scenario planning needs of a third of Australia’s top listed corporates.
This speaks to the biggest power we’ve ever seen in history – economics and money.
Which quite frankly doesn’t care about politics and the big money is now firmly on the massive profits that can be made in the net zero transition, not defunct coal industries.
In Connor’s words in his social medial feed:
“There are potentially stronger economic, security and diplomatic consequences outside as compared to within the Paris Agreement for reducing or failing to achieve a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target.” Our emphasis.
“The Paris Agreement is more a normative ‘bottom up’ with credibility tests rather than ‘top down’ with punitive consequences. The spirit of the Paris Agreement is clear with a stated intention that each NDC should be stronger than the next, in what is known as the “ratchet mechanism.
“Reducing or failing to achieve a NDC [nationally determined contributions] would breach the spirit of the Paris Agreement but does not technically equate to withdrawal. There is a year-long withdrawal process that Donald Trump instigated but did not complete with the Paris Agreement only formally coming into force in 2020 just after he lost the presidency.
“Economic consequences might take the shape of breaches or revisions of free trade agreements. The EU has made participation in the Paris Agreement a condition of each free trade agreement since the Paris Agreement was first signed in 2015. Also important is investment consequences, global capital is flowing to countries with clearer policy agendas for decarbonisation, e.g. US and its Inflation Reduction Act.”
The loss of face and leadership
And big consequences await an Australian leader who willingly sacrifices Australia’s emerging strong leadership globally for its role in the Asia Pacific – particularly noted by the US.
“Security and diplomatic consequences would be a loss of credibility and leadership within the climate negotiations, but also emphatically so in the Pacific Region where the Paris Agreement and its strongest 1.5C temperature goal is written into Pacific Forum security and diplomatic agreements.
“Reminder that physics will trump politics on climate change. Australia’s current revised NDC is still short of a fair share for 1.5C – any reduction will be complete rejection of contributing to that target and likely to the 2C target.
Then there’s the appalling smell – and look – of the pigs in the trough.
The Australia Institute which has been doing great work recently flagged details of what we all know. Except it’s worse than we think. Its report The Great Gas Giveaway shows that in just four years gas outfits like Santos, Chevron and Shell made $149 billion exporting gas out of Australia – “gas they got entirely for free”. It compelled Senator David Pocock to label the gas industry as “absolute leeches on this country” the institute said.
– Tina Perinotto