Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, whose members control eighteen trillion dollars in assets, has urged the world’s governments to shovel more taxpayers’ money into their pockets.

Source: http://ift.tt/2pbtZdY

The most interesting point is the demand for carbon pricing. From page 5;

2. Include carbon pricing in climate-energy action plans – Investors reiterate the need for governments to provide stable, reliable and economically meaningful carbon pricing that helps redirect investment commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge. This will level the playing field for low carbon technologies and factor in the costs of GHG externalities. These mechanisms are most effective when supported by complementary mechanisms such as public procurement measures, regulations, energy targets, carbon performance and energy efficiency standards.

• To ensure that carbon pricing assumptions are as representative as possible of the true cost of carbon – and in alignment with the policy trajectory of G20 leaders now and into the future – investors urge governments to commit to include carbon pricing in their climate-energy action plans, if they have not already done so. In this regard, investors encourage G20 leaders to support the work undertaken by the World Bank through the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition.
• Investors welcome the news that many nations are moving forward with carbon pricing programs. Investors encourage those countries that have not implemented some form of carbon pricing to do so promptly as part of their climate-energy action plans.
• Investors encourage those nations that already have carbon pricing systems in place to continue to look for ways to increase their ambition and improve the effectiveness of these systems in pricing the true cost of carbon as a negative externality.15 Recent efforts by some countries to move towards linking their pricing systems are welcome – international cooperation can make NDCs significantly cheaper to implement

Read more: Same link as above

In my opinion this document is a blueprint for rent-seeking. This group of merchant bankers, asset managers and others is offering to come to the party and invest big time in renewables, if governments provide them with a guaranteed income by siphoning the maximum possible money out of the pockets of the working class of their respective nations, by applying the most “ambitious” possible carbon price onto the energy bills of consumers.

French climate enthusiast Emmanuel Macron’s overwhelming victory against a nationalist climate skeptic party on Sunday, and President Trump’s dithering over the Paris Agreement, may have convinced this group of rich bankers that the climate game is still on – that they still have a chance to pressure politicians into granting them a permanent green tithe from the pockets of the world’s working class.