Businesses join climate fight
The world is on the brink of enlisting market forces in the fight against climate change on a truly global scale for the first time, United Nations officials have claimed.
After years of opposition, hundreds of the world's major companies and investment firms – including several oil giants – have agreed that there should be a charge for the damage done to the planet by greenhouse gases.
This means that an international carbon market – in which companies buy and sell the right to produce harmful emissions – is now close to becoming a reality.
Even China, the world's biggest polluter, plans to set up a carbon pricing system next year.
It is hoped that market forces will inevitably drive down the level of greenhouse gases as money flows from companies that produce emissions to those that reduce them, such as renewable energy firms.
Georg Kell, executive director of UN Global Compact, the body's initiative to get firms to adopt sustainable policies, said the recent conversion of much of the business world was hugely significant.
“This is a breakthrough as usually business blocks climate action on a national level,” he said yesterday. “For the first time, the private sector has argued in favour of pricing externalities. Polluters are making the case to be charged.”
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of senior executives from pension funds, major banks and institutional and sovereign wealth funds in Copenhagen, Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, stressed the importance of a global system.
“The United Nations cannot do it alone. No country can do it alone. We have to combine our resources and ambitions, particularly together with business communities,” he said. And carbon pricing, he stressed, was “one of the most powerful tools available for reducing emissions and generating sustainable development and growth”.
So far, 74 countries, including the EU, China and Russia, but not the US, Canada, Japan or Australia, and 1,000 businesses – from oil firms BP and Statoil to giant corporations such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Unilever – have signed up to a UN declaration in support of carbon pricing.
And a group of 354 major institutional investors, such as BlackRock, the BT Pension Scheme, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rothschild & Cie Gestion, have also agreed to call on governments to “provide stable, reliable and economically meaningful carbon pricing that helps redirect investment commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge”. Collectively, they handle about £15trn in assets – more than the United States' GDP.
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