What will the carbon market look like in ten years? Of course, the honest answer is that we don’t know. We do however have a very bullish outlook on carbon.
By Dick Kempka, Chief Commercial Officer for The Climate Trust
Climate discussions like those we’ve just been seeing at the UN summit in Katowice, Poland tend to focus on working together to deliver existing climate commitments and raising ambition—getting countries to reduce more GHG emissions, faster. But there’s an equally important issue that gets far less attention: ensuring climate action is delivered in a way that doesn’t leave anyone behind, particularly the world’s most vulnerable people.
See Helen Mountford and Molly McGregors’ latest blog post on how carbon pricing can benefit the poor and reduce emissions.
The Arab Gulf States – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE –are highly vulnerable to oil price shocks due to their high economic reliance on oil and gas export revenues. Historically, oil price shocks have been a source of pressure on the Arab Gulf States economies. However, only since mid-2014 have oil prices seemed to pressure on political regimes to consider domestic economic reforms and development of alternative sources of income (i.e. economic diversification).
To avoid long-term negative implications – such as increasing total CO2 emissions and deterioration of air quality associated with increasing downstream petrochemical energy intensive industries, fossil fuel subsidy reforms, enhancing energy efficiency and the use of clean energy technologies are indeed instrumental to tackle such issues. In this article, carbon pricing is proposed as a useful instrument to complement the aforementioned tools.
To address the global development risks posed by climate change, a major technological shift leading to a substantial reduction in the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will be necessary. In parallel, the substantial global economic and development distortions - that lead to inequality - do not enable the technological and financial transfers needed for a sustainable and equitable global economy. This brings us to a fundamental question: when climate change only imposes an additional threat of unseen scale, how can we change the economic status-quo?
Statoil has been operating in a market where an external carbon price has existed since the early 1990s. Due to CO2 tax and other regulatory measures the oil and gas industry in Norway has adopted emission-reduction measures corresponding to more than five million tonnes of CO2 per annum since 1996. Consequently, Norwegian oil and gas production is in the global premier division for low GHG emissions and the average amount emitted per unit produced is about half the world average.
Model-driven energy scenarios provide policymakers and investors with a powerful decision-support tool but should not be used as a decision-making tool due to several limitations. So argues a new study in the journal Energy and Environment by Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a senior research scientist for both the Joint Program and the MIT Energy Initiative. The study shows that overall, energy scenarios are useful for assessing policymaking and investment risks associated with different emissions reduction pathways, but tend to overestimate the degree to which future energy demand will resemble the past.
On the eve of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, CDP announced the Carbon Pricing Corridor initiative, the world’s first industry-led initiative aimed at defining the investment-grade carbon prices needed for the power and industrial sectors to meet the Paris Agreement. The initiative seeks to address the emerging questions on how companies can manage climate change risk through the use of carbon price scenarios.
By Xie Zhenhua and Feike Sijbesma | China Daily
Most notably, a great opportunity lies in carbon pricing as a critical instrument to unlock the public and the private capital needed for the transition to low-carbon technologies. Putting a meaningful price on carbon, for instance, will stimulate energy efficiency technology and make renewable energy more competitive.
Low effective carbon prices in the context of energy taxation are the results of two factors. One is obvious: zero or low statutory rates on carbon and energy. The other one is more opaque, but significant: tax expenditures (TEs), i.e. government benefits granted through the tax code (such as exemptions, deductions, credits, rate reliefs or deferrals) that target a specific group of taxpayers as well as specific activities or regions.
“The future will not be like the past”. This was one of the first phrases used to describe the current stage of the transition to a low-carbon economy. In a partnership among the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development (CEBDS), Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), We Mean Business and technical support by WayCarbon, a workshop took place in São Paulo to approach carbon pricing and its importance to foster actions to drastically reduce carbon emission in companies from different sectors.
GOL is the second largest domestic and international carrier in Brasil, with 122 aircrafts in a single optimized fleet. Since 2011, we´ve been leading the Brazilian effort to establish integrated value chains to produce sustainable aviation fuels for low carbon flights. As we see, sustainable aviation fuels will be the final way to “decarbonize our operations”.
But when carbon reduction projects also require contributions to sustainable development, as Gold Standard projects must, they also accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The transition towards a low-carbon economy multiplies the challenges and the opportunities we are facing. In this rapidly changing environment, economic actors do not always have a clear vision of their prospects in tomorrow’s economy, nor do they necessarily have all the tools needed to exploit the full range of opportunities.