Isra-Mart srl : UN panel hints at plan for global carbon levy

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Isra-Mart SRL news:

Controversial proposals for a global carbon levy will be on the agenda at the UN's upcoming climate change summit in Cancun, after the co-chair of the advisory panel tasked with assessing how to raise $100bn a year in climate financing confirmed that it would recommend a form of carbon pricing.

Speaking in a telephone interview to the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said the panel, which he co-chairs with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, had concluded that it would be "challenging but feasible" to raise $100bn a year from 2020 onwards to help developing countries tackle climate change.

The panel, which was appointed earlier this year by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, is expected to release a report on its recommendations early next month.

The recommendations will inform a central part of the negotiations at the UN's Cancun climate change summit where diplomats are hopeful some sort of agreement on climate financing can be thrashed out.

According to reports, the most recent round of UN climate negotiations in Tianjin, China last week delivered some progress on the topic of climate financing, despite the ongoing stand-off between the US and China over emissions targets.

Signatories to last year's Copenhagen Accord agreed in principle to the development of international financing mechanisms that would provide poorer nations with $100bn in funding to help them cut emissions and adapt to climate change.

However, the agreement provided no indication of how the cash would be raised, prompting speculations that a variety of measures could be used, including a global carbon tax, a levy on financial transactions, a charge on flights, or a tax on bunker fuels.

Stoltenberg told Reuters that the panel's recommendations were unlikely to be adopted in full and were intended as a starting point for negotiations in Cancun.

"This will not be a blueprint with an exact formula of how exactly to raise $100 billion," he said. "We will provide some analytical work, some guidelines, and narrow down the different options that we believe are the most realistic and most viable." However, he stressed that "carbon pricing has to be one of the major sources of finance", adding that a variety of techniques could be used to raise funds while also putting a price on polluting activities.

Any attempt to introduce international carbon pricing, either through a levy on the carbon market or a tax on carbon-intensive fuels and activities, is bound to be highly controversial.

Carbon-intensive countries are likely to voice opposition to measures that would put them at a competitive disadvantage to cleaner economies, while some developing countries are concerned that measures such as a tax on aviation could result in them making a sizable contribution to an international fund that is meant to help them tackle climate change.

In related news, the recently-appointed clean energy chief at the World Bank, Daniel Kammen, told the Reuters Summit that he intended to oversee a major transformation in the bank's approach to funding clean energy projects.

"One of the nice features of working at a bank is that banks are focused on the bottom line," he told the news agency. "And if the bottom line traditionally has been just the finances of projects and the attention to the poor, the metric that we're adding... is going to be carbon, but carbon combined with understanding (energy) access."