Today is Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
Great article by lawyer Luciana Vianna Pereira on the Consultor Jurídica portal, providing more details on how the discussions in the National Congress on the creation of the Brazilian credit market have been going so far.
She cites details of the session on December 21, 2023, such as, for example, "the confusion and evident lack of preparation were so great that, throughout the transmission of the vote, several times, the narrator said that the PL that was being voted on dealt with of environmental taxation, highlighting the total haste and lack of knowledge of what was happening in that House". On December 25th we also published about it, "Brazil, Carbon Market: Senate approves a bill in November and the Chamber approves another in December".
The core of the article and the author's focus is on the "restrictions imposed on jurisdictional programs and the exclusion of carbon credit as a negotiable title in the financial market and with the legal nature of civil nature and CRAM", the certificate of environmental credit receivables.
These are really central elements. Especially for a country on the supply side of carbon credits.
More recently, countries more on the credit demand side have adopted more direct (not to say simple) solutions. Two examples below.
- United Arab Emirates (UAE), Abu Dhabi, which to favor the market and stock exchange trading pragmatically defined “Environmental Instrument” as a "Financial Instrument recognized by the Regulator that: (a) enables its holder to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, in accordance with any emissions trading scheme (i.e. emissions allowances or equivalent); (b) attests to the reduction or removal of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (i.e. carbon credits or equivalent); or (c) attests to the environmental attributes of an underlying unit (i.e. renewable energy or environmental attribute certificates)".
- and Portugal, which did not forget to indicate that "carbon credits cannot be used or claimed for the purposes of complying with European or international obligations, namely for the purposes of the European Emissions Trading scheme and the Carbon Emissions Compensation and Reduction scheme of International Aviation or for the fulfillment of nationally determined contributions from any other party to the Paris Agreement".
Back to the article, according to the author, in an attempt to deal jointly with the issues of carbon credits and allowances (for example the European ETS, in operation since 2005), the legislators ended up with a line "completely distorted in the current text, which created four titles that are completely distinct from each other" and creating "unnecessary complexity in a market that is no longer simple..."
Click on the image below to read Luciana Pereira's full article (in Portuguese) on the CONJUR portal.
On Friday, we will in priciple publish about India's domestic carbon market, where equally interesting debates are also taking place.
And tomorrow, January 25, 2024, a post about solar energy to celebrate the 470th anniversary of the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It is a metropolitan region where more than 20.7 million people live. To put it in perspective, 70% of the countries in the world have populations smaller than this. In other words, whose efforts towards sustainability, which are obviously not trivial, could certainly help even more people around the world if they were better publicized.
