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Climate, Bruno Retailleau

Carbon price: Carbon border mechanism strengthened and extended

Direction of change: increase, compared with current law.

The lever. Price put on CO2 emissions: carbon tax, European carbon market, or their freeze or abolition. Direction rule: ↑ higher or broader carbon price.

« Renforcer le mécanisme d'ajustement carbone aux frontières et l'étendre aux produits transformés. »1

Translation by the editorsStrengthen the carbon border adjustment mechanism and extend it to processed products.

Encoding

No cost-schedule parameter for this position: see the costing for the reason.

Costing

Announced by the candidate

not announced

The programme does not cost this measure.

Published costings

none

No external costing of this position recorded to date.

Our calculation

not costed

Extension of a European mechanism to processed products: no identified national revenue to cost.

Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule

Current law. The carbon component of excise duties on energy (formerly TICPE, TICGN, TICC) has been frozen at €44.6/tCO2 since 2018. The trajectory of the LFI 2018 (€55 in 2019, €86.2 in 2022) was abandoned after the gilets jaunes. The European ETS2 market (road fuels, buildings; Directive (EU) 2023/959) is postponed to 1 January 2028, with a price stability mechanism around €45/t (the ceiling is under revision in 2026).

Horizon. Gross revenue in a full year, without behavioural effects, excluding induced VAT and excluding compensation (energy cheque, etc.). Fossil energy volumes decline by 2032 (SNBC-3), so the lower bound is the most prudent for 2032.

Limits. The cost schedule is derived from I4CE figures and is not a recent official costing. High slope: raising the rate from €30.5/t to €44.6/t in 2018 was expected to bring in €2.7bn, i.e. about €0.19bn per €/t. Low slope: the 2017-2022 trajectory (€5.4bn at €30.5/t, €10.8bn planned at €86.2/t) gives about €0.097bn per €/t. Central value: average yield at €86.2/t, i.e. about €0.125bn per €/t. No official source from 2023 to 2026 isolates the current yield of the carbon component. Connaissance des énergies speaks of « avoisineraient 10 milliards » [“would be close to 10 billion”], without a source. The arrival of ETS2 in 2028 on the same base may lead to a reduction in the national component, which creates a risk of double counting. ETS2 revenue goes partly to the EU Social Climate Fund. The allocation of the revenue is read position by position: in most proposals, it funds redistribution. The return to the 2018 trajectory and abolition are given by the linear parameter.

How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.

  1. avecretailleau.fr, mesure n° 41 « Contrôler davantage les importations et exiger la réciprocité ». Read the programme page.

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