Purse or quota – Kommersant

Industrial companies will not be able to compensate for emissions of harmful substances through compensatory measures. The corresponding law, which tightens the requirements for participants in the experiment on quotas for emissions, was adopted today by the State Duma immediately in the second and third readings. Earlier, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) opposed such changes.

Today, the State Duma approved in the second and third readings a law excluding the possibility for industrial enterprises to carry out compensatory measures to improve the quality of atmospheric air in cities that are included in the experiment on emission quotas. Against him, as Kommersant previously wrote, is the RSPP (see Kommersant dated April 20).

Government launched an experiment on emission quotas by industrial enterprises from January 1, 2020 – it will last until the end of 2026. It takes place in cities with high and very high air pollution – these are Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lipetsk, Magnitogorsk, Mednogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Novokuznetsk, Norilsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Cherepovets, Chita, Makhachkala, Barnaul, Astrakhan, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Rostov -on-Don, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

According to the rules of the experiment, in each of these cities, Rospotrebnadzor must determine a list of priority pollutants and a list of objects subject to quotas, such as vehicles, housing and communal services, and industrial enterprises. Permissible quotas for emissions are set for them – and it was initially assumed that those companies that could not comply with them would carry out compensatory measures, such as landfill reclamation or landscaping. Those who exceeded the quotas and did not compensate them using the proposed mechanism were expected to be fined up to 5% of the turnover.

However, later the Ministry of Natural Resources prepared changes to the rules for conducting the experiment, which provide for the waiver of the possibility to carry out compensatory measures in case of non-fulfillment of quotas.

According to the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, for companies that, including due to sanctions and technical reasons, will not be able to meet quotas, the experiment will de facto turn into an additional tax and, as a result, will reduce the volume of possible investments in the development of production.

Anastasia Manuylova