Nobel-winning economist calls for climate tax – 06/21/2023 – Environment

The global warming caused by the rich countries will result in an increase in mortality in the poor countries, warned the French Esther Duflo, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in an interview with AFP, in which she called for the adoption of a global tax.

“We can ask ourselves what effect climate change will have on mortality in the poorest countries. And the way to sum it up is that it will cause 73 more deaths for every 100,000 people” by the end of the century, said the economist specializing in climate issues. poverty.

“It may seem like an abstract number, but what makes it very concrete is that it is equivalent today to all deaths from infectious diseases,” he explained, noting that poor countries are already in the hottest areas of the planet, such as the Sahel, in Africa.

“Each ton of carbon we put into the atmosphere costs human lives,” said the professor, who holds the chair of poverty and public policy at the Collège de France and teaches at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA). According to her, rich countries “impose an enormous cost on poorer countries by the way we choose to live”.

The 50-year-old economist pioneered the fieldwork that won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer.

Duflo, who lives between Paris and Boston, says the situation is all the more urgent because extreme poverty has been on the rise since 2020, after halving since the 1990s.

Rich countries managed to “spend 27% of their GDP on measures to support their populations” during the pandemic, while poor countries spent only 2% and “saw that solidarity was at an almost zero level”, both in international aid and for vaccines.

The Ukrainian War and food price inflation aggravated the situation.

binding taxation

Experts, with support from the UN, estimate the needs of developing countries at more than US$ 2 trillion per year until 2030 (R$ 9.5 trillion in the current exchange rate). However, the commitments of the UN climate conferences, the COPs, “are insufficient on the one hand and, on the other hand, they are not being met”, regrets Duflo.

She cites as an example the fact that the States never respected the commitment to pay US$ 100 billion dollars a year (R$ 479 billion at the current exchange rate) for the climate transition of poor countries. They also did not find funding to establish a fund announced at COP27, in Sharm el-Sheikh (Egypt), in 2022.

Duflo also has no hopes for the international summit this Thursday (22) and Friday (23) in Paris to reform the architecture of global finance, because “there is no real intention to generate compromises”.

The economist defends “a mechanism to tax countries” on an international scale and that is “binding”, with the aim of increasing the minimum taxation of multinationals or taxing the greatest fortunes on the planet.

“A portion should go directly to supporting people subject to climate risk,” Duflo said, “for example, with financial transfers that would go directly into the bank accounts of people affected by flooding or extreme heat.”

The other part would serve to “promote the emergence of solutions for adapting to a different life in these countries, which will undergo profound transformations”, he points out.