Shipping granite to Scotland: a taxing issue?

I am returned from a few windswept sun-kissed days in the Uk’s best-kept secret – the Inner Hebrides. Whilst up there, I came across a couple of ‘new build’ granite houses -fine builds they were too. Save that when I inquired where the granite had come from in this fatherland of granite, I was told China!

There was one working and one disused granite quarry within ten miles of each house. What are the mathematics and anthropology that add up to the idea that Chinese quarried granite can conceivably be cheaper than Scottish granite for use IN Scotland?

OK so the labour’s cheap in China. But what else? The blindingly obvious are the carbon costs of shipping 20 tonnes of Granite half way round the world. And they are high. Given that China doesn’t import much, it can hardly be argued that there is spare capacity in shipping.

A carbon tax would deal this sort of trade a death blow, but it would not necessarily revive the ailing fortunes of the Scottish Granite quarrying industry. What happened to the global call for carbon taxes? Were they too destroyed by the wholesale undermining of the climate change debate by the leaked emails from East Anglia University? If so were we the media to blame?

And isn’t there another problem here – that carbon taxes would seem to militate particularly heavily against emerging economies?

In the aftermath of failed Copenhagen; more successful talks in Mexico, and now the nuclear fall out from the Japanese Tsunami, it is looking very much like business as usual on the climate change front. In other words, precious little carbon reducing action.

I guess we should build while stocks last, for tomorrow we die! It’s just that one doesn’t like watching humanity hastening the morrow.