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hurting the most indebted, leveraged, or else impoverished because it comes in parallel with renewed fiscal consolidation. In other words, Nabiullina’s claims that normalization won’t hurt economic growth aren’t strictly wrong, but carry uneven consequences because of monetary policy’s interaction with fiscal policy and a general misreading of the last 4-5 years that serves political purposes:
2.3 Putin on ESG at SPIEF
On Friday 4 June, President Vladimir Putin made the following ESG-related comments at the St Petersburg Economic Forum.
· President asked the government to prepare the legislative base for implementing climate projects in Russia by July 2022, so that foreign and local companies are able to come up with their plans and incorporate them.
· He also requested that by 1 October, the government work out the plan to reduce emissions to a level lower than in the EU by 2050. In the next 30 years, the accumulated level of net GHG emissions from Russia should be below the level in Europe, stated Putin.
· Russia feels the risks and challenges due to the global environmental problems and is concerned about climatic change. "All political and other disagreements have to be put aside and the move to carbon neutrality should not be turned into an instrument of the unfair competition."
· According to the President in order to solve the issue of global warming, it is not enough to cut the volume of emissions. For carbon neutrality it is necessary to reduce the accumulated level of emissions in the atmosphere. Thus, the key goal is to learn to capture, store and apply CO2 in a useful way. Therefore, a new market with carbon units being traded is to be formed. Russia can take a special place in the global carbon units market with its rich forests and needs to increase the efficiency and the forests and land use.
· Putin offered suggested that companies which buy or are to start buying or are thinking of buying carbon units abroad, invest into the climate projects inside Russia instead to. Experts estimate that the revenues of the new climate industry in Russia could exceed USD 50bn per annum.
Overall, we see the messages as supportive for sentiment on climate-related developments in Russia. The deadlines for drawing up climate project legislation and plans to cut emissions were set, with a focus on climate projects and carbon units. In addition, there is work on the absorption capacity of forests. This raises expectations that CO2 emissions in Russia will get a price tag (we think by 2025) and that the current pilot CO2 trading project in Sakhalin could be expanded to the country, despite the current unambitious emissions reductions targets by 2030. The law on emissions in Russia has only recently been approved by the State Duma at the third reading. It sets the
11 RUSSIA Country Report July 2021 www.intellinews.com