Only eight entities in the country have implemented the carbon tax

Despite the fact that Mexico is a country vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and has assumed the global commitment to reduce 30% of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 2030, only eight entities have or are implementing the so-called tax. to carbon.

The states that already have this instrument are Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, Baja California, Querétaro, Yucatán, the State of Mexico and Guanajuato, while Jalisco plans to present the initiative for discussion in early 2023.

The low participation of the federal entities, explained the coordinator of strategic projects of the Secretary of Environment and Territorial Development of the state of Jalisco (Semadet), Luis Casillas, is due to the fact that “there is a disincentive and an obstacle on the part of the federal government for the development of this type of initiatives”.

In a conference on the occasion of the presentation of the report Carbon taxes in Mexico: development and trends, he added that a reflection of the above is that up to now no state in the country has been able to integrate into the international voluntary market through an initiative to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

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The foregoing, said the official from Jalisco, has not been possible because the federal government has not authorized the transactions of this type of credit, which is why they have encountered difficulties in implementing the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, when in other countries Like Costa Rica, the resources that enter from this concept are entirely used to finance the rural development policy.

“There has also been some suspicion on the part of the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources due to competition with the Emissions Trading System. It is a complicated issue because the intentions of each of the government orders and the mechanisms to achieve these objectives are not clear,” Casillas highlighted.

Uncertainty

Another reason for the low implementation of subnational taxes on carbon, he explained, is due to the uncertainty about the legal resolution on the case of the state of Zacatecas, which faced a four-year litigation with which the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation finally resolved in his favor and was allowed to collect this type of lien.

At the conference, representatives of the Finance and Environment secretariats of states such as Querétaro, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Jalisco, Yucatán and Guanajuato agreed that the price of carbon should not be seen as another tax, but rather as an incentive and an opportunity to mitigate GHG emissions so that Mexico achieves its global decarbonization goals and, at the same time, to boost the competitiveness of the country’s companies in this area.

“The court itself established that these taxes are not merely extractive, their purpose is not to collect, but to encourage the economy and industry to invest in technology to reduce their impact on the environment. It is a chapter that has not yet landed in Zacatecas, but there have been great advances,” said the general director of the Báez y Abogados Firm, José Baez.

“It is not just about implementing a tax to collect more, we also have a problem, there is a repair of a damage that was not being contemplated because the contamination affects us all”, considered the Undersecretary of the Environment of Tamaulipas, Karl Heinz Becker .

We do not want to make an environmental rent, we want it to be an economic instrument for the reduction of GHG emissions”, stated the head of the Secretariat for Sustainable Development (Sedesu), Marco Antonio Del Prete.

Homologation

Currently there is no approved price for the carbon tax, it is a rate that is set according to the particularities of each federal entity, since each one has its own emission intensity.

The variation in the prices of this tax in the country ranges from 43 pesos in the case of the State of Mexico to 530 pesos for Querétaro.

A carbon tax is an instrument that will make it possible to put a price on GHG emissions to encourage the use of low-carbon and more efficient technologies. The purpose is to tax goods or activities according to the emissions produced by the companies, explained the MEXICO2 project manager, Gerardo Ramírez, at the same event.

estados@eleconomista.mx