The Case for a Global Carbon-Pricing Framework
- Media Manager
- Sep 10, 2023
- 2 min read
Foreign Affairs
Written By: Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein and Farrukh Iqbal Khan
Published: September 11th, 2023
The 28th annual UN Climate Change Conference will begin on November 30 in Dubai, coming on the heels of the UN secretary-general’s Climate Ambition Summit in late September. The task facing the two hosts is stark: to jumpstart credible multinational action on climate change where previous summits have failed. Evidence is mounting that a climate apocalypse is coming, and fast. This past summer, large swaths of the United States and southern Europe sweltered in temperatures over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and exceptional wildfires and floods hit Canada and South Asia.
In 2020, UN scientists still considered it unlikely that the world’s average temperature would rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the late nineteenth century’s average—the threshold that, once crossed, would launch a phase in which the scale and speed of warming will outstrip the world’s ability to predict or manage its impacts. Now, just three years later, those researchers have put the chance at 66 percent—more likely than not. The agreement forged at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit called for limiting the world’s temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, yet global emissions continue to rise. Millions of people are expected to become climate refugees in this decade alone. The World Health Organization has predicted that between 2030 and 2050, an additional 250,000 people will die annually from climate-change-related malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress.
At climate change summits, world leaders tend to agree on almost everything except what could help the most: directly addressing rising carbon emissions by making them expensive for emitters. For decades, scientists and economists have concluded that pricing carbon is critical to reducing global carbon-dioxide emissions fast enough to combat irreversible climate change. Yet most politicians overlook or even fear carbon pricing. The fossil fuel lobby, in particular, has circulated dangerous myths about carbon pricing, including that it disadvantages developing countries.
