Political fossil Al Gore’s sequel to his Oscar winning environmental documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ – may have underwhelmed at the box office this month, but it provided a timely counterweight to President Donald Trump’s announcement some weeks earlier that the United States was pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Despite the protestations to the contrary of substantially every-government-that-is-not-America’s (as well as several of the States that enable the United States to be called the United States), without Federal US involvement all bets for preventing environmental Armageddon appear to be off.

Until recently, the Tax World’s contribution to the fight against this threat to our future generations had taken the form of airing the concepts of ‘Cap and Trade’ and ‘Carbon Taxes’ – the former involving the auction and trade of emission permits that seek to limit total pollution from certain gases, the latter a hit or miss, essentially regressive, tax on fossil fuels and suchlike.

Then, last month, things hotted up.

In his State of the Nation address, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines told mining companies that ‘he would tax them to death’ if they did not clean up their act. Coming from anyone else, the statement might have been filed alongside Benjamin Franklin’s ‘nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’, but Duterte has, for some time now, been proudly having drug pushers and other undesirables knocked off wholesale in extra-judicial killings. The message is clear – the president clearly reckons himself the biggest threat since Mohammed Ali throttled Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila.

Indeed, Duterte also announced that, you-couldn’t-make-up-its-name, ‘Mighty Corp’ has agreed to pay the government a cool half a billion dollars to settle the mining giant’s alleged catalogue of criminal tax evasion offences. Simple when you have the method sussed.

And, to cap it all, any additional tax take from the mining sector is to be earmarked for local communities damaged by the mines, while processing of mineral resources is ‘requested’ to be performed in the Philippines before export, thus adding to employment.  Interesting, if worrying.

With all due respect to Mr Gore’s valiant efforts, if the environment is to get back on track, the mob that elected Trump doesn’t need a staid documentary – it needs exciting Alternative  Facts. So, perhaps the real existential question now is whether there is enough material for Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about taxing environmental terrorists. The climactic scene: an Internal Revenue Service agent, in sleek black suit and Ray-Ban shades, standing with his foot pressuring the windpipe of a prostrate business executive, two revolvers cocked and pointed at the entrepreneur’s trembling head, spits, ‘You’re going to clean up the river in this goddamn town, or we’re going to tax you to goddamn death’.

All’s fair in love and war. And, if Mr Tarantino is looking for a working title, how about: ‘Kill Fake Bills’?