You pollute, you pay! Russia touts plans to make corporations cough up cash for CO2 emissions in new bid to tackle climate change

Russian officials are working on a new system to charge companies based on their contribution to global warming, a top minister has said, outlining efforts to bring the country’s policies in line with those elsewhere in Europe.

Speaking at an international oil and gas conference in the Far East on Tuesday, Maxim Reshetnikov, the head of Russia’s Economic Development Ministry, said that plans were underway to work out what corporate polluters owe under the system.

“We will launch our version of a carbon dioxide pricing system,” he said. “And here we have to follow the example of our European colleagues who have been doing this for 20 years, and implement it in a fairly short period of time.”

According to him, there are still tough questions around how much of the gas companies should be allowed to emit free of charge, and how much businesses should be able to sell spare credits for to help other firms meet their quotas. An experiment trialing the scheme on the island of Sakhalin, north of Japan, has reportedly given officials pause for thought about how to work out the charges. Under the ambitious plans, Sakhalin hopes to be carbon neutral by 2025.

However, Reshetnikov went on, when it comes to putting new policies in place to fight climate change, “the burden on the budget shouldn’t be increased.”

Moscow has announced it is looking into a range of measures to reduce the nation’s carbon footprint in recent years. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the world’s largest country is being disproportionately affected by climate change, with its average annual temperature for the past 44 years growing 2.8 times faster than the global average. “I have already spoken about this, and experts are well aware of this,” he said.

Putin went on to chalk up the series of catastrophic wildfires and floods over the summer to global warming, saying that, “if not entirely, then at least to a large extent, this is due to global climate change in our nation.”

Just weeks before, the president told former US Secretary of State John Kerry, who now serves as President Joe Biden’s climate change envoy, that the two countries must work together to tackle the issue in unison. “We are pleased that Russia wants now to take steps, additional steps, because your country is impacted [by climate change], obviously. And we believe that there is space for us to cooperate on this,” Kerry replied.

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