While the falling price of crude oil is giving consumers cheaper energy, it’s threatening long-term global pollution-control efforts. Reduced national income from energy taxes and “a low-growth economic environment” might spur countries to curtail their emissions-curbing pledges for after 2020, leading to more emissions of carbon for a longer time, said Zoe Knight, head of the HSBC Holdings Inc.’s climate change center in London . These proposals will be submitted under a United Nations climate-protection process starting in March. Public money “for funding low-carbon energy scale-up and energy-efficiency retrofits could be scarcer,” Knight said yesterday in an e-mailed note. Reduced government funds “leads to difficult choices on capital resource allocation, which in turn could mean high carbon lock-in over the long run,” she said. The International Energy Agency said in November that the world would probably reach by 2040 an emissions ceiling recommended by a panel of scientists formed […]