Which is why, given the demands of transitioning from fossil fuels in the Global South – coupled with what successful transition might mean for economic development and climate change – a third body should be added to the World Bank Group. This would be called the International Bank for Energy Prosperity, its mission being to help create NEIBs in poorer countries which would be funded by a new ‘One Planet Tax’. The purpose of this tax, global in its extent, would be simple: to channel resources from afluent countries – who are overwhelmingly responsible for climate change – to poorer ones, who are set to disproportionately sufer its most adverse consequences.
The revenues for this tax would be raised by imposing a \$25 fee on every tonne of $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emitted in high-GDP countries. As well as helping fund energy transition in the Global South this would also create an additional incentive among the wealthier nations to decarbonise in the decade following 2020, not to mention stimulating a market in carbon sequestration technologies. A reasonable projection is that this alone would raise around \$250 billion a year – not an insignificant sum. If the measure fell short in raising as much, which would represent success from the perspective of decarbonisation, the remainder would be generated from countries paying into the fund based on a GDP per capita basis.
In addition to capitalising EIBs in some of the poorest countries in the world, whose role would be precisely the same as their equivalents in the Global North, the One Planet Tax would also pay for technology transfer and research and development into modular renewable solutions adapted to low-infrastructure, low-income environments. Here the aim would be to create an energy analogue to the mobile phone of the early twenty-first century. The difusion of abundant energy in low-income countries will look nothing like the national infrastructures of the last century. If household PV does spread as quickly as mobile phones have since the 2000s, seemingly unbridgeable gulfs between the world’s rich and poor in electricity, clean drinking water and living standards will be overcome in an extraordinarily short span of time. This would be an energy revolution – with Asian and African characteristics.
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paradise found