A 2013 report said almost two-thirds of the main greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, came from the fuels produced by a mere 90 companies. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit here is in the final hours of its attempt to broker a just and effective global treaty on reducing those emissions and limiting their impacts: extreme weather, drought, flooding, sea level rise, land and forest degradation, desertification.
Pressure is growing to work out if and how these big fossil fuel producers can be held financially responsible for the damage their products are causing.
The 90 fossil fuel companies responsible for 63% of CO2 emissions from human activities are a roll call of household names, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, BP, Gazprom and Shell.
Now the Climate Justice Programme and the Heinrich Boell Foundation are urging that producers should pay a carbon levy on all fossil fuel extraction and mining, with the proceeds going to help pay poorer countries for adapting to climate change and meeting the costs of its impacts.
Phase-out needed
The levy would be applied to both the exploitation and the burning of fossil fuels. If a company was involved in both, it would have to pay the levy only once.
It would charge the carbon majors US$2 for every tonne of carbon dioxide their products release into the atmosphere. In 2014 this would have meant $50 billion coming from the companies.
The levy is based on a calculation of how much CO2 is released on average from burning a barrel of crude oil (or a tonne of coal, or a cubic meter of natural gas). The CO2 footprint of the drilling or mining itself would not be taken into account.
Read more at Carbon Levy Mooted for Big Fossil Fuel Firms
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