France's Emmanuel Macron, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley and Kenya's President William Ruto suggested more "solidarity levies" ahead of the UN climate conference starting Monday in Azerbaijan.
Nearly 200 countries are supposed to agree at COP29 how much money should flow every year from rich nations to poorer ones to help them prepare for climate change.
"There are swaths of the economy which are largely under-taxed yet polluting the planet," Macron, Mottley and Rutoa wrote in an op-ed on the Project Syndicate website.
"This applies to maritime shipping, aviation, and, of course, the fossil-fuel industry, which enjoys low effective tax rates due to government subsidies (totalling an estimated $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund)."
Yet for example, "a levy on shipping of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide could raise $80 billion per year," they said.
"A levy on fossil-fuel extraction of $5 per ton of CO2 could raise $210 billion per year."
They argued that "even a partial redistribution through solidarity levies would guarantee a large source of predictable climate finance" for developing countries.
A task force launched last year had been examining the "potential of levies across shipping, aviation, fossil fuels, and financial transactions, as well as exploring options like levies on plastic or cryptocurrency", the leaders added.
It would "publicly launch a handful of concrete proposals" in early 2015, they added, hoping for support at COP29 towards implementing the initiative as early as next year.
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