French president calls for global taxation to ‘fight climate change’
French President Emmanuel Macron last month called for global taxation to “fight climate change”.
Macron made the remarks during the New Global Financing Pact in Paris, a two-day conference during which delegates from around the world pledged more money to fund the war against global warming.
"I'm in favor of an international taxation to finance efforts that we have to make to fight poverty and in terms of climate [action]. . . . It doesn’t work when you do it alone, the [financial] flows go elsewhere,” said Macron.
The globalist leader suggested special carbon taxes on plane tickets and transactions, a scheme already introduced in France.
"France already has in place two types of taxes that have been suggested: one on plane tickets, another on financial transactions," he said, according to Bloomberg.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire built on Macron’s remarks, adding that time is of the essence. Le Maire’s experience in negotiating OECD reform proved that for "international taxation, minimum taxation and tax on Big Tech, you need five years every time. So you need to start early if you want to achieve results because it takes a lot of time,"
Another French official told Politico that the country is “thinking about ways to reinforce international fiscal cooperation, but nothing has yet been set in stone.”
The push for international climate taxation comes just weeks after the United Nations called on member states to implement carbon taxes.
In policy briefs published last month titled “Our Common Agenda,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said countries should impose “carbon pricing, fossil fuel taxes or other environmental taxes, or through direct regulations to prevent harmful activities, with fines and penalties larger than the potential profit.”
Climate taxation has also been promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), of which Macron is a devoted member.
Representatives from the climate summit in Paris last week are confident about securing a $100 billion pledge in “climate financing” from wealthy nations, who will lend the money to developing countries to fund climate efforts.
But billions of taxpayer dollars already earmarked by wealthy nations to “fight climate change” are being spent without oversight or explanation.
In 2015, 38 developed countries signed the Paris Agreement in which they pledged $100 billion annually to poorer countries to not only “fight climate change” but to also help mitigate climate-related damage. The money would be used to finance projects like wind farms and sustainable energy sourcing, as well as reconstruction after storms or floods. These projects and expenditures would be reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But a report published this month revealed that while some of the money goes to environmental projects, many funds are spent on undisclosed ventures, and still others are spent on initiatives that aggravate “global warming”.
Between 2015 and 2020, developed countries contributed $182 billion towards climate projects. Japan made up the lion’s share, reporting $59 billion in loans, grants, equity investments and other contributions geared towards climate projects.
According to the report — which analyzed only 10% of all contributions — $9 billion of Japan’s reported endowments went to climate changing projects that used coal and natural gas. The country also reportedly has plans to spend $40 million on projects unrelated to climate such as parking facilities, roads and consulting services.
Governments are also finding ways to include unrelated initiatives in their climate finance reports. The United States, for instance, agreed to lend $19.5 million for a posh hotel project in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Since the hotel is being designed with protection against storms and hurricanes, the project was counted as part of the US government’s pledge. Italy spent $4.7 million to open a retail chocolate franchise across Asia and reported it as climate related, but did not specify how so.
“This is the wild, wild west of finance,” said Philippines Department of Finance Undersecretary Mark Joven. “Essentially, whatever they call climate finance is climate finance.”
Countries also report ventures that never occur. France earmarked $500,000 for climate initiatives in China, Mexico and Kenya. Even though these projects were later canceled, they remained on France’s report to the UN.
There appears to be no oversight body, either in the respective countries or the UN, which monitors these climate expenditures, and there are no plans to change that.
“Climate negotiators from wealthy countries that oppose stricter rules told Reuters that more restrictions on how funds are spent could limit developing nations’ autonomy in tackling climate change, restrict the flow of money, and hinder the flexibility needed to keep pace with the fast-evolving crisis and the technologies needed to solve it,” reports Reuters.
