LThe economist Esther Duflo recommended, in a column in World, the creation of a global tax to finance the growing needs of the poorest countries facing the impacts of global warming. Let us hope that this call is finally heard. In the absence of a specific resource, existing financial mechanisms only manage to raise funds that are inadequate in relation to the needs of these countries. But we could also complete Esther Duflo’s proposals on two points: the tax base to be levied, the rules for distributing this new resource.
The inequity of climate change is twofold. The poor are much more affected than the wealthy by the impacts of global warming; their historical responsibility, measurable by their contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is derisory.
In the name of this double inequality, Esther Duflo calculates a climate debt of the United States and Europe based on their emissions and the number of premature deaths that global warming will cause in the world. Of the order of 485 billion euros, this debt is calculated by default. The United States and Europe do not bear all of the responsibility for warming and survivors will also suffer damages that are not counted.
She proposes to settle this debt by mobilizing two resources: increasing the future minimum tax on multinationals by two to three points and a 2% tax on the 3,000 largest fortunes identified on a global scale. A third way should be explored to resolve the climate debt: directly tax fossil carbon emissions, as soon as they exceed a minimum threshold. This third path would present three advantages relative to a tax base on multinationals and big fortunes.
Popular taxes
First, a global tax on CO2 of fossil origin redistributed towards poor countries acts on both terms of the equation. It encourages the rich to reduce their emissions by exempting the poor whose emissions are below the tax threshold. Its redistribution strengthens the poor in the face of climate change, while dissuading them from reproducing development patterns based on fossil energy.
Then, the tons of CO2 are a less volatile base than the profits of multinationals and great fortunes. Ex antethese taxes are popular because the vast majority of the population knows in advance how to avoid taxes. Ex post, the tax bases in question risk disappearing and ultimately no one will actually pay the tax. It is much more difficult to hide CO emissions2 whose accounting through national inventories, with methods validated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is an obligation under the Paris Agreement [traité international sur le réchauffement climatique adopté en 2015].
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