Biden Administration Pledges to Pay ‘Climate Reparations’-- for what?
On Nov. 20, officials at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) agreed to form an international fund to promote “climate justice” by implementing “climate reparations.”
According to Simon Stiell, the UN climate change executive secretary, “We have determined a way forward on a decades-long conversation on funding for loss and damage—deliberating over how we address the impacts on communities whose lives and livelihoods have been ruined by the very worst impacts of climate change.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the climate reparations deal as “a small step towards climate justice.”
In reality, the deal struck at COP27, in which wealthy nations will pay billions of dollars to poor nations, has nothing to do with climate justice and everything to do with global wealth redistribution.
As of now, there’s no evidence that poor, undeveloped countries have suffered from increased climate change disasters due to the carbon dioxide emissions from wealthy, developed countries such as the United States.
Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the billions of dollars that would be funneled from rich countries to poor countries would be invested in “green” infrastructure. In fact, the poorer nations that are in line to receive the climate reparation payments scoffed when U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry attempted to insert a provision into the agreement that would phase down their use of “unabated” fossil fuels.
In other words, rich Western nations have agreed to send boatloads of money to low-income countries with no assurance that these funds will not end up in the pockets of corrupt officials, as has happened so many times in the past.
Moreover, the climate reparations agreement ignores the fact that poor nations are poor not because of the carbon dioxide emissions from rich countries, but mostly because they lack access to affordable and abundant energy.
As we have seen with the European energy crisis in recent months, ample access to reliable and cheap energy, namely via fossil fuels, is the bedrock for a thriving economy.
If the UN actually sought to improve the living standards of the billions of people residing in abject poverty in developing countries, it would do everything in its power to ensure that they have total access to low-cost, dependable energy.
According to the International Energy Agency: “Today 770 million people live without access to electricity, mostly in Africa and Asia. … Africa’s increase in the number of people without access contrasts with Asia, where the rollout of grid connections and distributed electricity access solutions was supported by more concerted policies and easier access to financing. … Almost 1.2 billion people have gained access to electricity in developing Asia since 2000, with 97% of the region having access in 2020 compared with 67% in 2000.”
The principal reason that Asia has made great strides over the past 20 years in ensuring that almost all of its population has access to electricity is because it has embraced fossil fuels.
In turn, several Asian nations, notably China and India, have drastically reduced the percentage of their people toiling in poverty.
China, in particular, has fully embraced fossil fuels as a means of spurring its dramatic economic transformation. As of today, China is responsible for emitting more than double the amount of carbon dioxide emissions than the United States and European Union, combined.
Yet, according to the COP27 climate reparations agreement, China is considered a “developing” country and is therefore exempt from paying into the newly created fund.
What’s more, the climate reparations agreement is just a down payment on what the UN has in mind for the years to come.
According to the UN: “A global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investments of at least USD 4-6 trillion a year. Delivering such funding will require a swift and comprehensive transformation of the financial system and its structures and processes, engaging governments, central banks, commercial banks, institutional investors and other financial actors.”
Make no mistake, the UN’s calls for “climate justice” via a “climate reparations” fund isn’t the end of the quest for rich nations to transfer wealth to poor nations; it’s just the beginning.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-administration-pledges-to-pay-climate-reparations_4879659.html
*********************************************************World cup stadiums and “green” exploitation of cheap, disposable workforces
Wealthy countries seem to be oblivious to the humanity atrocities and environmental degradation occurring in other countries to support bizarre environmental policies and the need for athletic entertainment.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Sunday November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll on the cheap disposable workforce will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, many while helping build World Cup infrastructure including seven new stadiums. The low cost of stadium construction reflects the even lower cost of labor in Qatar.
Many of us had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities that took place in Qatar to build seven new stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, and continues occurring today in the developing countries that are mining for the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries.
Wealthy countries continue to silently support similar the exploitation of folks with yellow, brown, and black skin by supporting subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries and environmental degradation to landscapes in “other” countries
Even President Biden’s expressed his recent shift on child labor when the Biden administration declared October 4, 2022, that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, a move that could upend the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of White House climate policies.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to a list of goods made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor under a 2006 human trafficking law. The decision was based on many batteries using cobalt, a mineral largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found to work at some mining sites.
The department released the list in the form of a report that excoriated “clean energy” supply chains for using forced labor. It grouped Chinese batteries together with polysilicon — a key material used in solar panel cells — made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Biden’s 2022 declaration occurred one year after the book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy was nominated for a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. The book does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Whatever the plan to satisfy our sports entertainment values, and our attempts to address climate challenges, we best not forget that have ethical and moral responsibilities to continue to address the materialistic needs of those eight billion now on this planet.
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Cooling Aerosols must be included in climate risk assessments
When Pakistan faced appalling floods in June this year, global attention focused on climate change as the culprit. The country had three times the usual rainfall in its summer monsoon, exacerbated by short spikes of extremely heavy rain. Riverbanks burst and more than 1,600 people died. Formal attribution studies and politicians alike blamed global warming for making such an event much more likely. Something else should have been mentioned, too: aerosols.
Aerosols are the miasma of soot (black carbon), sulfur dioxide, organic carbon and other compounds that drives poor air quality over many of the world’s most-populated regions. Studies show that aerosols strongly affect the likelihood of extreme precipitation events1, such as those that contributed to Pakistan’s floods, and many other climate hazards.
Worse, it is not clear whether aerosols are set to rise, fall or stabilize. The amount of uncertainty about aerosol levels by 2050 is as large as the total increase since pre-industrial times (see ‘Drastic uncertainty’). Over the next 20–30 years, we might — or might not — see aerosol-driven climate changes as large as those that have played out over the past 170 years, adding as much as 0.5 °C to global warming. That could rapidly change the likelihood of extreme events occurring in many regions.
Yet the impacts of aerosols on climate risk are often ignored. The issue was not on the official agenda of the 27th United Nations climate conference (COP27) in Sharm-El-Shaikh, Egypt. This neglect must end.
Critical gap
Aerosols are hugely important to the climate, globally and regionally. The details are complicated. Some aerosols warm the atmosphere, others cool it, depending on their type, height above ground and impact on clouds. But, overall, vast emissions of aerosols since the start of the industrial age have had a profound cooling effect by reflecting sunlight. Without them, the global warming we see today would be 30–50% greater.
Historically, aerosols have had dramatic regional impacts. They were the main reason temperatures in Europe didn’t warm between the 1950s and 1980s2. They drove a decline in the South Asian monsoon during the second half of the last century3. And they were a major driver of the late-twentieth-century Sahel drought4, which triggered a famine that killed 100,000 people.
How climate change and unplanned urban sprawl bring more landslides
Globally, aerosols are a more powerful player in climate extremes than are greenhouse gases. Warm the world by removing aerosol emissions and this will create more extremely hot days, more extreme precipitation events, and more consecutive dry days over highly populated regions, than if the world was warmed by the same amount by adding greenhouse gases5.
Despite all this, regional estimates of risk from climate change often omit aerosol impacts. Most evaluations of near-term climate risk used by policymakers either ignore aerosols or reduce their effects to a globally averaged offset to warming by greenhouse gases. This probably strongly underestimates risks to communities both near and far from sources of aerosols.
As experts in aerosol–climate interaction, climate impacts and scenario development from many nations, we call for estimates of climate risk to include regional aerosol projections. Policymakers and stakeholders must recognize that their assessments of near-term risk are probably missing a critical component. In the longer term, we need to ensure that any forecasting tools used are ‘aerosol aware’.
Stakeholders potentially face a range of nasty surprises if they continue to be solely focused on risks driven by greenhouse gases.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03763-9
************************************************A picture of a tree in regional South Australia has sparked a wild climate change debate
The photo posted on social media shows the tree littered with markings from recent floods.
Well above the current flood level is a marking from 1956.
For some, it was a smoking gun that climate change isn’t real.
“And the climate change back in 1956 was caused by what?” one person joked. “I wonder if they were talking climate change in 73, 74 and 75,” another added.
Others pointed out an obvious issue. “How tall was that tree in 1956?” one person questioned.
“Trees grow upward from the top, not from the bottom. Their trunks spread outward, not upward,” one person correctly stated.
Others said the one tree was just a bad data set.
“Using one tree as evidence to suit your agenda shows what level of intelligence we are dealing with,” one said.
“There are many factors why areas have worse flooding. There is no denying though, with mass land clearing as one factor, flooding will only get worse under extreme climate events such as La Nina,” he continued.
Hundreds have flocked to the seemingly innocuous post to duke it out in a debate about climate. In fact, 1956 was the worst flood on record for the area, with the ‘Great Flood’ described as “the greatest catastrophe in the state’s history”.
According to the Adelaide Advertiser, the flood was a culmination of two years of a La Nina, which had brought three months of heavy rain to Queensland, Victoria and NSW.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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