An ethical tax designed to raise up to 20 billion euros a year could be the key to funding renewable energy projects in the world’s poorer regions, according to proposals by the French delegation to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen next week.
The French concept of a ‘justice-climate’ plan could be funded by a tax on financial transactions, similar to that once proposed by the Nobel prizewinning economist James Tobin.
The comments came from France’s ecology minister Jean-Louis Borloo, in an interview recently with the French weekend newspaper ‘Journal du Dimanche’.
Revenues from the proposed eco-tax would assist the 1.2bn people in developing countries who suffer most from climate problems, lack of economic development, and exclusion from international negotiations, Borloo said.
Specific projects that could become possible through the introduction of the scheme might include hydraulic dams, solar energy power stations or wind energy facilities, he said.
As a project which would symbolise a payback from the major polluters, the industrialised countries, to those regions most affected by climate change, the plan would have an important psychological role to play in breaking the ice between the richer and poorer nations present in Copenhagen for the conference, Borloo said.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference takes place in Copenhagen from 7th – 18th December.
