World Bank Launches Carbon Pricing Coalition

At tomorrow's UN Climate Summit in New York City, world leaders, business CEOs, and civic group representatives will gather to discuss reducing emissions and how to "mobilize political will" for a new climate change treaty by 2015.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has urged leaders to make bold financial and policy pledges. Meanwhile, the World Bank Group today announced the launch of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition.

Seventy-three countries and more than 1,000 companies and investors support a price on carbon.

This is the fundamental way in which we have to reorient our economy.

Rachel Kyte

"The global trend is that if we want to drive carbon out of our economy, then we're going to have to put a price on it," Rachel Kyte, the vice president of the World Bank Group and special envoy for climate change, told Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson. "This is the fundamental way in which we have to reorient our economy. We have to start putting taxes and prices on the things that we burn that we don't want in our economy, and then take the funds from that and invest it in what we need, and what we need are jobs in a clean economy."

Kyte says that while the United States has not signed on to the coalition, there are individual states in the US that are in the process of developing a system for carbon pricing. China is part of the coalition, and is developing pilot programs for carbon trading in various provinces and cities, with the goal of having a national carbon trading system by 2017.

Kyte says because leadership from both government and private industry are working together in this coalition, it allows for "broadening the political space within which people can negotiate."