The Prime Minister of the Caribbean State calls for a massive overhaul of international development loans and a taxation of at least 10 % of the profits of fossil energy companies.
By Laure Stephan (Charm El-Cheikh (Egypt), Special Envoy)
His intervention for the defense of the island nations had already made an impression at the Glosgow World Climate Conference (COP), at the end of 2021. On the scene of Charm El-Cheikh, Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, S ‘Impose again as a powerful voice at COP27, welcomed by Egypt: the Caribbean leader calls for a massive overhaul of international development loans and a taxation of at least 10 % of the profits of fossil energy companies, which have achieved “200 billion dollars in profits in the last three months”.
“We want to keep our countries above sea level,” insisted the head of government at a press conference on Tuesday, November 8, on the sidelines of the COP27 leaders, during which, For two days, rhetoric was the star of the official gallery.
The former lawyer defended better access in the South country to international funding, and the legitimacy of obtaining financial repairs from industrialized nations, historical polluters. “If I pollute your property, you expect me to compensate you,” she says, as a comparison.
taxation of superprofits
The financial question is very present during these first days of COP27: emerging or developing countries are offensive on the subject, and the tone is often vindictive. The “losses and damage” were registered in the agenda for the first time in the history of the UN on the climate. For years, Europeans and Western did not want to hear from repairs. Upstream of the COP, the American special envoy on the climate, John Kerry, said he was favorable to finding common ground, while refusing to go to the field of legal responsibility.
The creation of a fund will not, a priori, be clear to Charm el-Cheikh. For the Prime Minister of Antigua-et-Barbuda, Gaston Browne, who spoke on Tuesday in the name of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), this financial tool would be “only a modest guarantee while our members lose Up to 2 % of their GDP in one day due to a climate event “. Mia Mottley pleads that one of the keys to advancing on this file is due to the taxation of the superprofits of fossil energy companies.
If the Prime Minister of Barbados wishes a reform of international funding, it is because it considers that the system, designed at the end of the Second World War, at a time when the colonial empires prospered, and thought without Developing countries have become deciduous in the twentieth e denth century. “The developing world has not been heard enough and must find its place,” she said on Tuesday.
You have 34.85% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.