"Adoption of carbon tax has to be a global response," says Rusal’s Deripaska

Oleg Deripaska, president of the world’s biggest aluminium manufacturing group Rusal, says the outcome of the Paris Climate Summit late last year was nothing more than an agreement for 196 countries to “kick the can down the road a few decades’’.

He writes that for a summit notionally about emission reductions, none were meaningfully agreed to in Paris. “Indeed, even the applauding atmospheric chemistry scientists at MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Global Change Program calculated that if all the unenforceable, non-binding pledges made in Paris were implemented, the improvement by 2100 would total only 0.2 degrees Celsius.’’

A harsh critic of Australia’s previous carbon tax forays, Mr Deripaska emphasises that the adoption of a carbon tax has to be a global response.

Industry resistance - including that from Rusal - to previous action on the pricing of carbon in Australia was based on the impost not being adopted universally, eroding Australia’s cost competitiveness and diluting its advantage of low-cost energy supplies.

Mr Deripaska says that without immediate action on a carbon tax, the losers from the Paris Summit are “those of us who breathe the air, drink the water, and wish for the safe and healthy environment our children and grandchildren deserve”.