The Money

How much money in the Carbon Extraction Quota worth for your country? This table tells you.

The table is based on the scenario of reducing carbon extraction to a floor of 2.5 GtC per year, that is about 25% of current levels. So while the quota reduces over time, it never goes below 25% of the initial value.

At the time of writing, (August 2021), the price of Brent crude equates to about $555 per tonne of carbon. If the carbon extraction quota only sells for $1 a tonne, then that number under the years is the dollar annual income. That seems cheap, so I expect it will be several times higher, but that's down to the market and the economics of supply and demand.

Another way of pricing carbon is by how much it costs to sequester. In Iceland a plant has just started to turn CO₂ into rock at a cost of $400 per tonne of CO₂. They think the cost could be reduced to $100 a tonne eventually. So that's a range of nearly $1,500 currently, to maybe $400 per tonne of carbon. That has to be a minimum price. You do the maths.

This table also shows each country's recent emissions (where available) and the ratio of quota to emissions. This shows that there are 136 countries which are winners and 73 which lose out. Note that although, as expected, most developed countries lose out - including China, India is a big winner.