Pirate's Cove

Climate cultists who won’t give up their own money or modern lives have a question

How much does the US owe the rest of the world for climate change?

John Kerry, America’s special envoy on climate change, is on a whirlwind global tour to drum up support for a climate “leaders summit” on Earth Day next week. He’s hoping to re-establish the US as a climate leader and extract more serious ambition from his peers, but has been dogged by a familiar complaint from officials in developing economies: the global race to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions is fundamentally unfair.

Every country needs to reach net-zero emissions no later than 2050 to avert catastrophic climate change, according to the UN. Not all countries have contributed to the problem equally. Historically,  the US and Europe have emitted more than half of cumulative global emissions, and still produce far more climate pollution per capita than other countries. Should the countries most responsible for climate change pick up the bill for everyone else? Politicians in China, and emerging big emitters like India or Brazil, argue they shouldn’t be asked to lift their citizens out of poverty or recover from the pandemic while phasing out the fossil energy resources that Americans and Europeans continue to take for granted. (snip)

Kerry and his colleagues should be prepared to buy back US credibility on climate change with cold hard cash, argues Mohamed Adow, director of Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “International equity is a fundamental tenet of the UN convention on climate change, but most rich countries refuse to pull their weight,” said Adow. “They have to be dragged kicking and screaming simply to adopt [climate commitments] that fully reflect their responsibility for the climate crisis.”

Tell you what: how much does the world owe the U.S.? We’ve saved it twice in world wars and again from the menace of the Soviet Union. Some of the biggest developments in the modern era have come from the U.S., from cars to planes to computers to medical, and so on. We’ve given more than enough of the taxpayer money to all these 3rd world shitholes developing nations who never seem to develop. We fund all sorts of groups under the United Nations and such more than any other nation. How about they repay the U.S.?

The US can raise climate capital from other sources as well. A first step could be for the US to emulate European countries by doubling its Green Climate Fund commitment. It could also make first-time contributions to other internationally-managed funds like the Adaptation Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund, and increase its provision of low-interest loans for clean energy projects, especially in situations where a country’s only financing alternative is China-backed fossil fuels.

We’ve been funding these nations for over 50 years, and they rarely do anything, and rarely say “thanks.”

But US climate policies run the risk of harming developing countries’ economies. The drive to quickly phase out fossil fuels, without cheap clean energy to replace them, could cost poorer countries. A proposal to end US financing for fossil fuel projects abroad, for example, could leave hundreds of millions of people without reliable and affordable access to electricity. On April 9, officials from India, China, Brazil, and South Africa complained the EU’s plan to tax high-carbon imports was “discriminatory” against low-income exporting countries, because customers in importing countries bear responsibility for the emissions, but the economic pain falls on exporting nations. “The scale and speed of climate finance from developed countries has to increase considerably,” they wrote.

The hell you say!

We have people with their own problems, even before the COVID pandemic. Let’s take care of our own first.