Democrat President Joe Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, urged a global transformation of carbon-based economies at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, noting that estimates put the price tag as high as $150 trillion.
“The United States on Wednesday announced its support for a new capital market mechanism that will issue investment-grade bonds and raise significant new finance for scaling clean energy and sustainable infrastructure in emerging economies,” Reuters reported. “Underscoring the urgency of acting to stop global warming, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the COP26 climate conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow that the United States would join Britain in backing the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIF) new Capital Market Mechanism.”
In her prepared remarks, Yellen claimed that the event was “a pivotal moment at the start of this decisive decade of climate action,” adding that she thinks that “climate crisis is already here.”
“Rising to this challenge will require the wholesale transformation of our carbon-intensive economies,” Yellen said. “It’s a global transition for which we have an estimated price tag: some have put the global figure between $100 and $150 trillion over the next three decades. At the same time, addressing climate change is the greatest economic opportunity of our time.”
Yellen said that Biden had already decided to quadruple America’s investment in “international climate finance for developing countries by 2024 to more than $11 billion.”
“But as big as the public sector effort is across all our countries, the $100-trillion plus price tag to address climate change globally is far bigger,” Yellen added. “The gap between what governments have and what the world needs is large, and the private sector needs to play a bigger role.”
Yahoo Finance reported:
Financing for developing countries have increasingly become a contentious point of larger climate discussions, with a $100 billion pledge by the world’s advanced economies yet to be paid out more than five years after it was initially promised.
Yellen recently took heat after she said last week that Senate Democrats were considering a proposal to impose a tax on unrealized capital gains of the wealthiest individuals in the U.S.
Yellen made the remarks in response to a question about how Democrats plan to pay for Biden’s massive Build Back Better social spending bill.
“Well, I think what’s under consideration is a proposal that Senator Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee have been looking at that would impose a tax on unrealized capital gains, on liquid assets held by extremely wealthy individuals, billionaires,” Yellen said. “I wouldn’t call that a wealth tax. But it would help get at capital gains, which are an extraordinarily large part of the incomes of the wealthiest individuals, and right now escape taxation, until they’re realized, and often they’re unrealized in the death benefit from a so- called step up of basis.”
“So, it’s not a wealth tax, but a tax on unrealized capital gains of exceptionally wealthy individuals,” she added.
Related: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Signals Trouble Over How Long Inflation Will Continue To Remain High