China plans to levy carbon tax
Pan Yue, deputy director of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, says that a low carbon economy is a key to achieving China’s ecological balance.
However, the mechanism of levying carbon tax is challenged by some experts, who believed it could be improved.
Qi Ye, professor of Environmental Policy and Management, and Director of the Public Policy Institute at Tsinghua University, says: “different from the cap-and-trade system, which is an effective market instrument to control pollutant emissions, the mechanism designed in the report does not set a maximum of carbon emissions. I am afraid it would not be so effective in controlling the total amount of emissions.”
Another expert who declined to be named says: “The mechanism still depends on command-and-control regulation. In this case, if there is not a strong and strict monitoring system, it would be highly possible to rig data about carbon emissions when it comes to fee and tax collections.”
At the end of October, China issued a White Paper with policies and plans for addressing climate change. The paper outlined plans to decelerate climate change, including adjusting the economic structure to promote the optimizing and upgrading of the industrial structure; making great efforts to save energy and raise energy efficiency; developing renewable energy and optimizing the energy mix; developing a recycling economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; reducing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture and the countryside; promoting forestation and strengthening the capacity of carbon sinks, and intensifying R&D efforts to deal with climate change scientifically.
The country also pledges to cut its energy intensity, energy consumption per unit of GDP, by 20 percent from 2005 to 2010. The move, which some experts say would require at least 97 billion yuan in investment, can help China save up to 600 million tons of coal equivalents and reduce CO2 emission by 1.4 billion tons, one-fourth of the current annual emissions.
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