Plunge in Crude Oil Prices Seen Eroding Worldwide Ambition to Cut Carbon Emissions

摘要

While the falling price of crude oil is giving consumers cheaper energy, it's threatening long-term global pollution-control efforts. Reduced national income from energy taxes and "a low-growth economic environment" could spur countries to curtail their emissions-curbing pledges for after 2020, leading to more emissions of carbon for a longer time, said Zoe Knight, head of financial service HSBC Holdings Inc.'s climate change center in London. These proposals will be submitted under a United Nations climate-protection process starting in March. Public money "for funding low-carbon energy scale up and energy efficiency retrofits could be scarcer," Knight said in a Jan. 7 e-mail. A cut to government funds "leads to difficult choices on capital resource allocation, which in turn could mean high carbon lock-in over the long run."