Governments needed to raise carbon prices much faster to meet their emissions reduction targets, the organisation for economic co-operation and development (OECD) said in paris on tuesday.
The OECD study examines how much money 42 industrialized and emerging countries collect from CO2 polluters – via taxes or through the sale of pollution rights, as in the EU emissions trading scheme. This is a way to incentivize business to protect the climate: if it costs money to emit carbon dioxide, companies have an interest in emitting less greenhouse gas.
The countries under consideration, including the USA, china and most EU countries, together account for around 80 percent of global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion. According to OECD estimates, this year they will demand such a price for an average of 54 percent of their self-generated emissions. That would be 10 percentage points more than in 2015.
However, only 12 percent of emissions are subject to a price of at least 30 euros per tonne of greenhouse gas. From the OECD’s point of view, the amount corresponds to a low estimate of the current real climate costs. However, the proportion of emissions compensated accordingly had not increased since 2015.
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