Editorial: Miners sign on to Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition

The whole field of carbon taxes, cap-and-trade of carbon emissions, and other government initiatives to limit and tax industrial carbon emissions around the world is a complex and dispiriting grab bag of conflicting and ever-changing policies and economic interests — loosely held together by more than a little political grandstanding and feigned concern.

But if you were to bet on one group that major mining companies may coalesce around on the topic of carbon emissions as time goes on, it would have to be the new Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC), and so it’s worth reviewing what they’re up to.

The idea of forming the CPLC came from the calls for a firmer global carbon-pricing regime expressed at the United Nations Climate Summit in September 2014.

The CPLC was launched at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at its twenty-first Conference of Parties (“COP21”) in Paris last November, with a goal to “expand the use of effective carbon-pricing policies that can maintain competitiveness, create jobs, encourage innovation and deliver meaningful emission reductions.”

The CPLC describes its role as “bringing together leaders from across government, the private sector and civil society to share experiences working with carbon pricing and expand the evidence base for the most effective carbon-pricing systems and policies.”

The CPLC says it will “collect the evidence base, benefitting from experience around the world in designing and using carbon pricing, and use this input to help inform successful carbon-pricing policy development and use of carbon pricing in businesses. It will also deepen understanding of the business and economic case for carbon pricing … developing pathways for use by companies, investors and governments that will illustrate plausible outlooks under a variety of carbon-pricing policies and timelines.”

It will also “work to bring together government and business in leadership dialogues that identify and address the most pressing issues, and in doing so, accelerate the use of carbon pricing around the world.”

The CPLC has about 90 corporate members so far, including oil heavyweights Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Statoil and Sinopec.

On the metals and mining side are BHP Billiton, Tata, Rusal and — as the first and only member from Canada — Teck Resources.

The participation of U.S. organizations in CPLC is notably low, with exceptions such as the California government, California Public Employees’ Retirement System and Yale University.

Twenty national governments are full partners in the CPLC: Belgium, Canada, Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Six subnational governments are also partners, all from North America: Alberta, B.C., California, Northwest Territories, Ontario and Quebec.

On top of that are a group of CPLC “strategic partners” comprised of climate change-related lobby groups and non-governmental organizations, as well as large global institutions such as the World Bank, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, and the International Monetary Fund.

The highest-profile group at the CPLC is its Carbon Pricing Panel, convened by World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde, and OECD secretary general Angel Gurria.

Members of the Carbon Pricing Panel include German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, French President François Hollande, Ethiopian Prime Minister Haile Mariam Desalegn, Philippine President Benigno Aquino III, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Governor Jerry Brown of California and Mayor Eduardo Paes of Rio de Janeiro.