But in fact, the “Economist” believes that precisely because the progress is far behind expectations, the international community may introduce more radical carbon reduction measures, that is, a global carbon emission tax. So how much carbon dioxide a company emits, it must pay taxes on this amount.

Since only one-fifth of the world’s carbon emissions are included in the pricing system, on average, the global price of carbon emissions is about US$3 per ton; the current price in China’s carbon trading market is three times the global average price, RMB 50 per ton; and the EU’s current carbon emission price is eight or nine times that of China, exceeding 60 euros per ton. Currently, the United States does not have a unified national carbon pricing mechanism. In addition, according to the estimates of the International Carbon Pricing Committee, if the Paris Agreement requires that the global temperature rise by 2050 does not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, the global carbon price will reach 50-100 US dollars per ton in 2030.

In other words, once the global carbon emission tax is implemented, the carbon tax to be paid by high-emission companies will be ridiculously high, and carbon tax may be one of the main tax burdens of enterprises.

 Impact on developed countries

For developed countries, the main impact may be on the consumer side. Once a carbon tax becomes one of the main costs, it will change the supply of goods. For example, because airlines have to pay high carbon taxes, people can no longer buy cheap air tickets; because they want to avoid long-distance transportation of goods to reduce carbon, people can only buy expensive local food; because they want to reduce methane emissions from animal husbandry, people can only eat artificial meat; etc.

 Impact on developing countries

On July 14 this year, the European Union put forward the idea of ​​creating a “carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM)”, which is to impose carbon tariffs on high-carbon products imported from other countries, such as electricity, steel, cement, aluminum, and fertilizers. As long as the EU determines that commodity exporting countries have not imposed carbon taxes on these commodities, or that these commodities have not purchased corresponding allowances in the exporting country’s carbon market, or the EU believes that the exporting country’s carbon market does not meet its own standards, it will be priced according to EU carbon market prices, and carbon tariffs will be levied.

The current EU carbon market price is eight or nine times the Chinese carbon market price and twenty to thirty times the global average. You can imagine how high this carbon tariff is. Not only the European Union, but the United States also proposed the idea of ​​imposing similar tariffs.

It has been suggested that a carbon tax is like the “proton” thrown by the “Trisolaran”, which can lock developing countries at the current level of development. Because of the introduction of a carbon tax, developing countries have only two options: first, to carry out an energy transition, but to spend a high price to purchase clean energy technologies from developed countries; second, not to carry out an energy transition, and to bear high carbon taxes. Regardless of the choice, it will greatly increase production costs.

This is tantamount to smoothing out the comparative advantages of developing countries in the low-end industrial chain, making it difficult for them to achieve industrial upgrading through accumulation. Furthermore, if the energy structure of developed countries achieves a complete transformation, their manufacturing costs will even be lower than that of developing countries that pay high carbon taxes, and manufacturing will quickly return to developed countries.

By Demi Zhang