BRUSSELS — Postponing the start of the EU’s new carbon levy for building and road transport emissions by one year to 2028 is going to cost European governments lots of money, according to a top Danish official.

Denmark, for instance, is estimated to lose half a billion euros in future revenues from the delay of the new carbon market (known as ETS2), said Christian Stenberg, deputy permanent secretary of state at the Danish climate ministry, at POLITICO’s Sustainable Future Summit.

“The delay will mean that we will lack that tool for one year,” he told a panel discussion. “It will cost us quite a bit of revenue that we could have gotten,” he added. “About €0.5 billion.”

“For the Danish economy [it] is not little.”

To bring more skeptical EU countries on board, like Poland, Italy and Romania, and reach a deal on the EU’s new climate target for 2040, environment ministers pushed the European Commission to agree to postpone the new carbon pricing mechanism by one year.

Stenberg explained that, as the talks over the 2040 climate target stretched overnight, he “had to go back to my finance ministry in the middle of the night and say the compromise will cost us this in revenue.”

But the ETS2, which has raised concerns in a majority of EU governments that it will increase energy bills, is “the most cost effective way of reaching our targets within transportation and buildings,” Stenberg argued. “And cost effectiveness, at the end of the day, is to the benefit of the economy.”

Chiara Martinelli, director of the NGO Climate Action Network Europe, also said on the panel that the delay of the new carbon market is “problematic,” and called on the EU to ensure that social measures to support people in the green transition come with the ETS2.