What poor nations need is wealth, not climate reparations
by Jeff Jacoby
THERE IS a lot to dislike about the climate reparations deal hammered out last month at the United Nation's climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Under presidents of both parties, the United States had for years firmly opposed the idea. Heading into the conference, US climate envoy John Kerry insisted that any deal "tied to compensation or liability [is] just not happening." But in the end, succumbing to pressure, delegates from the wealthy countries agreed to compensate developing nations for the costs of coping with storms, heat waves, and droughts worsened by climate change. The plan to create what the conference called a "loss and damage fund" was greeted by supporters as a "new dawn for climate justice." Cynics called it a "Sharm el-Shakedown."
Scientists say carbon dioxide emissions from the advanced industrial world may contribute to an increase in extreme weather events like the recent terrible flooding in Pakistan. But the notion that wealthy countries, by using fossil fuels, have made life worse or more dangerous for residents of poorer countries doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Through the burning of petroleum, coal, and natural gas to generate energy, the industrialized nations have improved the quality of human existence — not just within their own borders but everywhere — to a degree that would have been inconceivable in the 19th century. Of course the spread of carbon-based industry has generated costs, some quite serious — air pollution and mining accidents, for example. So did the gift of fire that Prometheus, in the ancient Greek legend, turned over to human beings. But just as the benefits of fire enormously outweigh its drawbacks, so do the benefits of fossil fuels.
Since the rise of the industrial revolution made possible by oil, coal, and gas, billions of people have been liberated from destitution. The energy derived from fossil fuels has been a feedstock for fertilizers that massively increased the world's food supply. It has facilitated the building of modern infrastructure — paved highways, modern hospitals, well-built homes and schools. In countless ways, it has made the lives of human beings today safer, healthier, and longer than ever before.
The gains from fossil fuels have been especially dramatic when it comes to protecting societies from natural disasters. Writing in Foreign Policy about the UN climate summit, Ted Nordhaus, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute observe that people now are more than 90 percent less likely to die from floods, droughts, storms, or other extreme weather events than in the 1920s.
"Well into the 20th century, annual death tolls from climate-related natural disasters numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions were routine," the authors note. The death toll in the 1931 Yangtze-Huai River floods in China, to cite one horrific example, may have been as high as 4 million. Tropical cyclones in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh frequently left tens of thousands dead. Millions died in famines. Today, however, deaths in China from flooding number fewer than 500 each year, cyclone fatalities across the subcontinent are numbered in the hundreds, and China has not suffered a famine in decades.
What made those tremendous global gains possible was modern industrialization in the wealthy nations. That economic growth would have been impossible without extensive use of affordable fossil fuels. And it is the energy from those fuels, not reparations, that offer the best chance for the developing world to catch up to the wealthier nations.
Rising CO2 levels are not the greatest handicap faced by the world's most vulnerable countries. Poverty is. Poverty makes every problem worse, including those caused by climate change. The premise of the UN's new reparations fund is that it is up to the West to compensate poorer nations for damages due to climate change. At the same time, those nations are encouraged to shift away from using fossil fuels.
But that is exactly the wrong approach. What poor countries need above all is to climb out of poverty. They require more growth, more technology, more infrastructure — all of which require more access to the fossil fuels that remain, overwhelmingly, the source of the world's energy. The surest way to expand resilience to climate change is to first expand economic development. The United States today leads the world in reducing carbon emissions in large part because it earlier led the world in building an industrialized economy.
That is the pattern for the developing economies to emulate. First let them work on getting rich. Then they can work on getting to zero emissions.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26615/what-poor-nations-need-is-wealth-not-climate
********************************************************Jane Fonda: climate change and the UN’s ‘racial sacrifice zones’
Actress Jane Fonda is trending on social media for the hilarious anti-science belief that racism and misogyny are causing climate change.
Today’s trend was sparked by a video on MSNBC in which Jane Fonda said: ‘If there was no racism, there’d be no climate crisis. If there was no misogyny, there’d be no climate crisis. It’s part of a mindset.’
At which point she holds her fingers against her head, pointing at her mind. ‘It’s the mindset that looks at a woman and says, “Nice tits!”’
As Tucker Carlson says on Fox News following the video: ‘In other words… “My ex-husbands caused climate change!” In addition to everything else, it’s all about her.’
We shouldn’t be surprised.
These are not original scripts penned by Fonda, they are lines recited from the United Nations who have put out headlines like: The global climate crisis is a racial justice crisis: UN expert in which the article says:
There can be no meaningful solution to the global climate and ecological crisis without addressing systemic racism, and particularly the historic and contemporary racial legacies of colonialism and slavery, a UN human rights expert warned.
“Climate justice seeks historical accountability from nations and entities responsible for climate change and calls for a radical transformation of the contemporary systems that shape the relationship between humans and the rest of the planet. The status quo is that global and national systems distribute the suffering associated with the global ecological crisis on a racially discriminatory basis,” said Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, in her report to the General Assembly.
Which is obvious nonsense. Where’s the justice for victims of third-world perpetrated slavery and human rights violations going back before the dawn of the West? Where’s the global justice for Asian, African, and South American nations which rank as the world’s worst climate polluters? Their actions aren’t a result of ‘colonialism’ – they were made by governments in full control of their actions looking for a moral escape for their ‘climate crimes’ that doesn’t involve personal responsibility.
It’s worth reading just how depraved the thinking at the United Nations is, because this is what our Prime Ministers and Presidents are nodding along to on their five-star private jet climate conferences.
The UN expert said that “global ‘sacrifice zones’ – regions rendered dangerous and even uninhabitable due to environmental degradation – are in effect, ‘racial and ethnic sacrifice zones’.” It is the peoples and territories who have been subject to the worst forms of historical and contemporary racial and ethnic subordination that are the primary inhabitants of these sacrifice zones. These are the same peoples most affected by climate-induced migration, and who are confronting, in the case of Small Island Developing States, impending disappearance of their entire territories.
‘Global sacrifice zones’ – tell me again this isn’t a death cult. The UN expert describes sacrifice zones in the report more formally as:
“Sacrifice zones,” as illustrated in this report, are more accurately described as “racial sacrifice zones.” Racial sacrifice zones include the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples, territories of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS), racially segregated neighborhoods in the Global North, and occupied territories facing drought and environmental devastation. The primary beneficiaries of these racial sacrifice zones are transnational corporations that funnel wealth, towards the Global North, and privileged national and local elites globally.
Can you imagine Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton standing up before the people and admitting that they follow the UN science and now believe in sacrifice zones? Who knows, maybe that is on the agenda for 2023. We might see supporters of the Voice (aka those who want to enshrine racial supremacy into Parliament) classifying Australia as a racial sacrifice zone in order to extract reparations, as the UN report recommends.
The Tendayi Achiume UN report lists the ‘racist colonial foundations of the ecological crisis, transnational environmental racism, and climate injustice’. If Achiume had looked further, far from ‘race’ being the cause of poverty and poor land management, what these governments have in common is collectivism – be they socialist, Marxist, or communist. And if they’re not collectivist governments destroying the prosperity of the third world – the remainder are made up of hyper-religious Islamic military despotic tyrannies. There is definitely a common link to poverty and pollution, but it’s not race – it’s despotism.
Celebrities in the West are affluent and vacuous enough to buy into this UN emotional blackmail, which forms the perfect marriage between the two great religions of the West: Woke and Climate Catastrophe.
One is revamping of last century’s ‘feel good’ racial supremacy which the media and celebrity class embraced (only this time, instead of white supremacy we have black supremacy duct-taped to a modern ‘white saviour complex’). The other is a death cult that uses fear of an existential crisis (although the ‘experts’ can’t decided if the world is going to end in a flood, ice age, or with a Biblical fire and brimstone affair) and then offers salvation to the guilty so long as they advocate for policies that make life miserable for the poor.
Given the saturation of the West with these twin idiocies, it was only a matter of time before they were short-handed by celebrities looking to resurrect their careers with a bit of cheap social virtue.
On December 6, Fonda shared a video of herself ‘rocking the climate boat’ by standing in front of various Greenpeace paraphernalia in an outfit that’s probably worth more than the average third-world mother makes in their lifetime. It’s part of Jane Fonda’s three years of Fire Drill Fridays in which she demands Joe Biden lean heavily into the rhetoric of climate emergency.
‘Organising does not stop after an election, does it? We must hold the folks we got into office accountable to us, not to oil companies, because the fossil fuel industry does not stop, so we can never stop.
‘Time is running out. Scientists are telling us we are in our last decade of action. What we do or fail to do in the next 8-10 years to cut our fossil fuel emissions in half will determine how much of a livable future we have.’
Obviously, no one has told Jane Fonda that over 95 per cent of the medical and pharmaceutical industry is directly reliant on fossil fuels via petroleum products and if she gets her wish to ‘end oil and gas’ she’ll effectively ‘end modern medicine’.
Or perhaps she missed the memo that the renewable energy industry is built on the bones of coal, where hundreds of tonnes of coal is used to build wind farms, in addition to the largest mining boom in modern history – which includes tearing the ocean floor apart in pursuit of rare earths for batteries and solar panels.
This sort of celebrity lop-sided science is rotten to its core, fashioned out of a few activist hashtags and propped up by people who have money to burn in exchange for the last fleeting look at the camera before irrelevancy sinks in. Meanwhile, third-world regimes are cashing in on climate money, pretending to wallow on the edge of ‘apocalypse’ while quietly lining their Swiss bank accounts with gold.
Jane Fonda is right about one thing, time is running out for the third-world – but only because of the United Nations Sustainability Goals which demand an end to modern agriculture, forcing nations to massacre their farming sectors, swiftly creating an artificial global famine.
No doubt, the United Nation will blame this in-house famine on ‘climate change’ and demand more money to fix it.
‘They chose pollution of their children. They chose profits over our future,’ screeched Fonda, whose politics will ensure that tomorrow’s children are fed a steady diet of cockroaches and lab-printed meat.
But if you were hoping for citizens to judge Fonda’s words on merit, rather than celebrity nostalgia – you’d be wrong. Veterans are prepared to go along with Fonda, regardless of the obvious failings in her logic, because they enjoyed her political views in the 70s.
Fonda, who keeps getting arrested and warned over disruptive climate protests, appears to relish the attention. And that is the problem. Climate activism has become a performance, frequented by actors and social media influencers who’d rather stick themselves to things or throw soup over artwork than go out and spend a few months planting trees on a farm.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/jane-fonda-climate-change-and-the-uns-racial-sacrifice-zones
**********************************************************Texas Takes Action to Expose ESG-Pushing Asset Managers
Republican legislators in Texas are taking action to get to the bottom of the world's largest asset management firms' work to advance ESG — environmental, social and governance — policies to the detriment of their customers and the larger economy.
The latest development in the right's fight against woke policies being forced via firms like BlackRock and Vangaurd comes from Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes, who is now issuing subpoenas for information the firms have withheld in previous disclosures and announced a hearing to require an explanation from representatives from the firms trying to enact their will by circumventing the will of Americans.
"In August, the Senate Committee on State Affairs asked four financial firms, BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors, The Vanguard Group and Institutional Shareholder Services, to produce specific documents related to their ESG practices," Hughes explained this week. "The Committee needs these documents to uncover the extent to which these firms have been playing politics using Texans’ hard earned money," he added.
"Next week we will hold a hearing where each firm will appear and give account to the people of Texas," Hughes continued. "While each firm has produced documents, some have provided more than others. BlackRock in particular has refused to provide documents it considers internal or confidential," he noted. "Accordingly, we have issued a subpoena to BlackRock for the production of additional documents the committee needs to complete its work. We will not allow these firms to continue to use Texans’ money to force a narrow political agenda," Hughes pledged. "They have a legal duty to put their investors’ interests first, and we intend to make sure they do."
The push for accountability from Texas legislators comes as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and other ESG-advancing asset managers come under increased scrutiny and face divestments ordered by state financial officers in Missouri, Louisiana, Florida, and other places.
"We are witnessing a reckoning for these asset management firms that have until recently thought they could take hardworking Americans’ money and use it to drive their progressive agenda, and in some cases send those dollars to the Chinese Communist Party, with no consequence for their malfeasance," observed Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers' Research. "Now you can’t turn on the TV or read the news without BlackRock claiming to be a good steward of the assets they’re mismanaging via their ESG charade," he noted. Indeed, BlackRock especially has been running aggressive TV advertisements across cable news channels including Fox News.
"It is clear they’re on the ropes, and it’s leaders like Sen. Hughes that are going to make all the difference by doing what’s right for the American people and standing up to megalomaniacs like Larry Fink," Hild added. "This action from Texas will uncover much of what these firms have tried to hide – their agenda is driven by politics, not profits."
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Solar panels are eating up huge Expanses of Farm Land
Wedged in the southern flank of Virginia, Charlotte County is home to some 11,500 people who live amidst rolling hills and family farms, pastures and sawmills, a historic Civil War battlefield, and four townlets tinier than many suburban subdivisions.
But this pastoral tableau will be swept up in the green revolution when construction begins here on the nation’s largest solar power facility east of the Mississippi River. The planned 800-megawatt Randolph Solar Project in Charlotte County will replace a commercial lumber farm of loblolly pines with 1.6 million photovoltaic panels covering an area equivalent to seven square miles.
State and federal officials see in solar energy the potential to counteract global warming with an infinite natural resource. With the 2020 passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the Old Dominion is among a growing number of states committed to “decarbonizing” its power grid by replacing natural-gas and coal-fired power plants with solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage.
Federal policy is about to inject a massive funding to incentivize similar transitions nationwide. The New York Times characterized this year’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act as the “the largest package of subsidies ever granted to the industry” – a $220 billion package of tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives for the electric utility sector to invest in solar power, battery storage systems, and other carbon-free technologies.
The momentum behind solar energy could make sunshine the nation’s dominant source of electricity, supplying up to 45% of the nation’s electricity by mid-century, from a meager 2.8% of U.S. electricity generation now, according to a Department of Energy forecast.
But converting to solar has ancillary costs that will become more apparent as time passes. Solar energy facilities require vast stretches of land, converting farms and fields into geometric rows of indigo panels. The South Atlantic region has led the country in newly installed solar generating capacity for the past three years, according to a study from Virginia Commonwealth University, but little information is available on how these facilities are altering the landscape.
And the rapid buildout exposes a moral paradox for the climate change movement: Although done in the name of fighting global warming, some amount of deforestation will be the inevitable result of clearing land for ground-mounted solar panels. Environmental groups say they hope to steer solar farms to disturbed land and rooftops, but those options are often expensive and impractical.
“We’re going to change the character and characteristic of rural Virginia if this goes unchecked,” warned Martha Moore, senior vice president of governmental relations at the Virginia Farm Bureau. “My main concern is the long-term viability of the agriculture and forestry industry in the state of Virginia.”
Moore pointedly avoids using the euphemism solar “farm” when referring to a solar energy facility. She is concerned that replacing agriculture with sprawling solar projects will not only take out valuable land from production but also undercut local farming by reducing business for local sawmills, livestock markets, and farmers’ cooperatives.
This year the American Farmland Trust said that expanding solar power could gobble up as much as 3,900 square miles nationwide, and predicted that many Eastern states could lose between 1.5% and 6% of their undeveloped land to solar facilities – mostly on farmland that’s flat, cleared, and near to existing transmission infrastructure. A Princeton University study this year forecast that achieving a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050 could directly impact a cumulative land area the size of Virginia, with forested lands the most directly impacted by solar deployment in Eastern states.
The environmental groups that have launched waves of lawsuits and press releases to fight oil and gas pipelines, natural gas fracking activity, and power plant ozone violations have largely been absent on this issue.
Instead, solar land conversions have triggered local resistance and lawsuits in Charlotte County and other communities in an attempt to stall or block the projects. Local governments in nearly every state have enacted restrictions, moratoriums, or bans on renewable energy facilities, according to a 2021 study by Columbia University Law School. A study this year on opposition to renewable energy said the most common concern is environmental impacts, including harm to wildlife. As an example, the researchers cited the denial of a state permit to a proposed solar farm in Maryland that would have required clearing trees in an area over 200 acres, or 1/3 square mile.
Virginia will likely require 200 to 250 square miles of land for solar development, based on projections by the state’s two utilities, to add more than 16,000 megawatts of solar power. While that’s not a huge amount of real estate for a state of nearly 43,000 square miles, solar development is often clustered in areas where land is available and farmers are eager to trade up from harvesting soybeans to sunbeams.
Sunny Money
John “J.A.” Devin, whose family holdings and relatives will lease land for the Randolph Solar Project, said he could lease for $35 to $40 per acre to a farmer growing soybeans, or as much as $100 per acre to a farmer growing corn. Instead, the Devins are opting to go with solar developers who pay landowners between $800 and $1,000 per acre, with a 2% annual escalator.
“You can’t argue with economics – it’s just so much more money,” Devin said. “I told my brother: We’ll put solar panels on this land, and we’ll take that money and turn around and buy some more land. We’ll take advantage of this solar while we can.”
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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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