Green Climate Fund GCF

1219 belated?

see climate debt justice?

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see trump paris bail speech "redistribution" we got cheated at negotiations, those 3rd w countries stole our jobs by tricking us to get off coal?!

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COP 28 12 23

12 23

Biden Pledges $3 Billion To Neocolonialist ‘Green Climate Fund’

pix of poor afr kids]

vice President Kamala Harris announced that the United States will send $3 billion to the “Green Climate Fund,” an organization financed by rich countries committed to keeping underdeveloped countries poor and vulnerable. The announcement was made this week at the United Nations (UN) COP28 climate summit in Dubai. This $3 billion comes in addition to the $2 billion the U.S. has already contributed to the fund.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a UN organization that claims to promote “climate action in developing countries.” The GCF collects billions of dollars from developed nations and supposedly invests said funds into green energy projects in poor nations. The organization is known for its lack of public transparency, and its higher-ups have been accused of victimizing employees via abuse of power, racism, sexism, harassment, and inappropriate relationships.

But it isn’t just secrecy and alleged workplace harassment that should worry the American taxpayers who are bankrolling and expanding the GCF. Indeed, the GCF is part of a neocolonialist movement to prevent developing countries from using the life-saving fossil fuels the Western world obtained decades ago.

Contrary to what UN climate cultists would have us believe, green energy is unreliable and insufficient. Additionally, fossil fuels improve the lives of billions of people by providing them with heating, air conditioning, weather warning systems, mass irrigation, and durable buildings. It is largely thanks to fossil fuels that climate-related disaster deaths have reduced by 99 percent compared to 100 years ago.

In his 2018 book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, climatedepot.com founder Marc Morano included a speech delivered by South African development activist Leon Louw at the 2011 UN Climate Conference. During his speech, Louw explained how the GCF is hurting the citizens of poor nations. “Government to government aid is a reward for being better than anyone else at causing poverty,” stated Louw. “It enriches the people who cause poverty. … The UN is saying to poor countries: ‘Those of you who adopt more anti-prosperity, anti-jobs, and anti-growth policies—under the pretense of environmentalism—we will enrich you.’”

According to Louw, crooked leaders in Third World countries, who are supposed to be investing in green energy projects, instead often spend the funds “on themselves, meaning various government projects, creating bigger departments—bigger bureaucracies, it’s called big bureaucratic capture. They build empires, they build conference centers, and they buy political support. They go and distribute the money to communities where they want support and votes.”

“Climate policies have a cost, and these predominantly hurt the poor,” explained Danish political scientist and statistician Bjørn Lomborg in Morano’s book. “So in choosing to spend that $10 billion on renewables, we deliberately end up choosing to leave more than 70 million people in darkness and poverty.”

The UN doesn’t just promote pointless green energy projects and corrupt politicians. Western nations, including the U.S., collectively and purposely conspire to squash fossil fuel energy projects in developing nations. For instance, during the UN’s COP26 conference, 25 wealthy nations pledged to either stop or radically limit financial support for international fossil fuel projects.

Eco-Imperialists Say ‘Let Them Eat Cake’

In his book, Morano recounted how, at the 2002 UN Earth Summit, he asked then-Democratic California governor Jerry Brown if he thought citizens from poor nations did not want to develop economically. Brown responded, “Many do, but it’s not viable … the developed model cannot work without another five planets.”

Likewise, in 2013, then-President Barack Obama told a group of young African leaders during a town hall in South Africa that “If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”

In other words, rich, eco-imperialist countries, like the U.S., have decided poor nations are not allowed to increase their quality of life. “The developed world is denying a billion people of color in the developing world—Asia, Africa, South America—the coal, natural gas, and other carbon-based energy that they need to pull themselves up out of dire poverty, as the wealthy Western world has already done,” wrote Morano. “There is an unmistakable racial component to this: black and brown people are essentially being told they can never be allowed to have the same standard of living [] the predominantly white Western world has enjoyed since the industrial revolution.”

The consequences of green colonialism are dire. “Only one in three Africans has access to electricity,” reports the World Bank, and the limited available electricity tends to be unreliable. In Sub-Saharan Africa, “31 out of 49 countries experience daily power outages.” Meanwhile, the life expectancy in Africa is generally around a decade shorter than in the rest of the world. “No number of solar panels on top of huts made of animal dung is a long-term solution for grinding poverty,” Morano pointed out. “A simple fact needs to be recognized: carbon-based energy has been one of the greatest liberators of mankind.”

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuelsand Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less, has spent his career explaining how fossil fuels are largely responsible for the developed world’s lower poverty rates, longer life expectancies, and lower infant mortality rates. As Epstein wrote in his book, thanks to fossil fuels, “We don’t take a safe environment and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous environment and make it far safer.”

Not only do COP28 attendees not care about the inhabitants of poor nations, but they also clearly do not care about the environment. By promoting poverty in poor countries, the UN is actively harming the earth because wealthier nations are proven to have cleaner environments and put less strain on natural resources. Moreover, the world’s wealthiest 1 percent account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent. So, if Kamala Harris and everyone at COP28 actually cared about the planet, they would show it by amending their own behavior. (Perhaps they begin by canceling all future UN climate summits, which attendees travel to every year on private jets).

“This is an administration that brags about equity,” Morano told The Federalist, pointing out the hypocrisy of the “equitable” Biden administration preventing poor countries from benefiting off the fossil fuel energy production we enjoy here in the U.S. “What these poor nations need is free markets, innovation, economic growth, and infrastructure,” Morano added. “They don’t need handouts from people who say, ‘Hey, don’t make the ‘mistakes’ we did as we live our lavish lifestyle.’”

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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REF AUGUST 25 2020 COMPARED TO TESLA?

https://www.ft.com/content/d04de053-9b73-4010-b9a5-adcfe12e70ee

UN-backed climate fund faces wave of abuse allegations from staff

Former and current employees describe incidents of sexism, racism and harassment at Green Climate Fund

The Green Climate Fund building in Songdo, South Korea, where employees allege that misconduct has been rife © Newscom/Alamy

UN-backed climate fund faces wave of abuse allegations from staff on x (opens in a new window)

Edward White in Wellington and Leslie Hook in London AUGUST 25 2020

The UN-backed Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest climate finance institution, is facing a wave of internal misconduct complaints including allegations of sexism and harassment in the workplace, and criticism over the death of an employee from coronavirus.

Seventeen current and former employees told the Financial Times they had witnessed or been the victim of misconduct, including abuse of power, racism, sexism, harassment and inappropriate relationships at the fund’s 330-person headquarters in the South Korean city of Songdo. All of the individuals who spoke to the FT asked to remain anonymous.

The GCF has raised more than $17bn and financed more than 140 projects. It is the main funding body to help poor countries achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris climate change accord but has faced previous criticism over its board-level decision making and project selection.

A group of current and former staff, calling themselves the “Re-Green Initiative”, has written to some employees to collect testimony about the new allegations.

“The management of the GCF will be held accountable for their actions,” the group said in the letter seen by the FT. The fund’s mission had been “jeopardised”, the letter said, “by the personal interests of a handful of persons, embedded in the system, who have literally no limit to what they can do”.

Founded in 2010 by UN member states, the fund was conceived to operate differently from traditional aid bodies. It has a rotating board, composed of 24 country representatives: the founders hoped it would provide a new model for how rich nations could help poor nations address climate change.

The allegations of staff misconduct, which span the past three years, come against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement that has spurred women across the world to speak out against harassment and abuse, including in professional environments.

In a written response to questions from the FT, the fund said: “GCF has zero tolerance for racism, sexual harassment or any other forms of discrimination, and is committed to creating a respectful, professional working environment for all its personnel.”

The GCF has had several leadership changes since its formation. The current executive director, Yannick Glemarec, a longtime UN official, took up the post in April 2019. He declined to be interviewed for this story.

Delegates arrive at a GCF pledging conference in Paris last year. A colleague’s recent death from coronavirus has heightened distress and anger among fund staff, say employees © Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

The GCF’s own internal documents show complaints to the fund’s Independent Integrity Unit nearly doubled to 40 last year, from 21 the previous year. The unit investigates allegations of fraud or misconduct relating to the GCF’s internal operations or its projects.

Among last year’s complaints, 24 were categorised as staff misconduct, including eight claims of abuse, six of harassment and two of sexual abuse and harassment. The unit’s 2018 report included complaints about alleged inappropriate relationships and a hostile work environment.

In its written response to the FT, the GCF said the number of complaints made to the Independent Integrity Unit “does not necessarily indicate an increase” in acts of staff misconduct. “Increased reporting is also a testimony to GCF’s well-functioning and credible grievance mechanism system,” it said.

Only two of the 2018 and 2019 misconduct cases had been substantiated, the fund said, with 15 still in progress.

But six of the current and former employees who spoke to the FT said the internal complaint mechanism was not sufficient and called for an independent inquiry.

One former staff member who left the organisation this year described sexism and racism at the fund as “systemic”, adding that certain managers had a reputation for “intimidation and bullying”.

Three of the people told the FT they had been sexually harassed by a colleague while working at the GCF and reported it through the internal complaint mechanism.

Some of the current and former employees used the words “toxic” and “hostile” to describe the working environment at the GCF and detailed incidents involving verbal abuse and bullying.

In June, a series of organisation-wide emails which began as a farewell to two colleagues turned into a rant against management. The email chain — a copy of which was seen by the FT — alleged that the fund’s treatment of one of the departing employees had been unfair and racist. It was then deleted from the servers and disappeared from staff inboxes the following day.

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The fund told the FT the emails had been taken off servers and archived. “The GCF has zero tolerance to all forms of harassment, including using the all staff email list to make unfounded accusations and defamation of character,” it said.

Many of the current and former employees who spoke to the FT said they continued to support the fund’s mandate and believed it was uniquely placed to help poor countries battle climate change.

The secretariat has more than 200 employees from at least 61 different nationalities. The diverse staff body represented a particular challenge for management, the people said, especially given the GCF’s isolated location, not in a cosmopolitan capital city but in Songdo — a satellite business district of 50,000 people built over the past 20 years on reclaimed land about an hour south-west of Seoul.

Staff morale has deteriorated further this year over the organisation’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, current and former employees said.

The GCF held a board meeting in Geneva from March 10 to March 12, days before European countries began to impose lockdown measures.

Following the meeting, four attendees fell ill with Covid-19, including Leonardo Paat Jr, a widely respected environmental expert from the Philippines, who tested positive for the virus after the meeting. He died in early August.

The fund described Paat’s death as “a tragedy for GCF and for the global climate community”. The board meeting had been moved from South Korea to Switzerland in order to protect the health of attendees, it said. “Switzerland was selected as the new venue at a time when there were no reported cases in that country.”

The GCF issued a public statement in response to this article after publication, which can be viewed here.

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guk ref 2

no lnx

ENVIRONMENT

JUL 25, 2023

Amid Heat Wave, GOP Adds Climate Denial To Spending Bills

House Republicans are helping their fossil fuel donors with legislative fine print that would block climate action.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook

David Sirota

House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger, R-Texas, speaks with House Rules Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

As scientists warn of a mass extinction and ecological tipping points, congressional Republicans are helping their fossil fuel industry donors by quietly inserting provisions into annual spending bills designed to bar the American government from combating and researching climate change, according to the fine print of legislative text reviewed by The Lever. Some provisions also require the leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas development, while potentially limiting such leases for wind power.

In all, Republican leaders have added at least a dozen such environmental provisions to four annual government spending bills as property damage and death tolls mount from historic heat waves, floods, and wildfires.

By adding the provisions to annual must-pass spending bills, Republicans who control the U.S. House are attempting to force Senate Democrats to choose between either accepting them or blocking the spending bills and shutting down the government.

For his part, President Joe Biden has declined to issue a climate emergency declaration, which could provide his administration new authority to circumvent at least some of the Republicans’ tactics.

The GOP bills are currently in the House Appropriations Committee, chaired by Texas RepublicanRep. Kay Granger, who has received nearly $1.2 million from the oil and gas sectorover the course of her career in Congress. Her second-largest career campaign contributor is the oil and gas industry, and she brags on her government website that she has fought to prevent spending to combat climate change.

Granger’s congressional district has been grappling with a heat-related public health crisis.

Blocking Fisheries Research As Oceans Boil

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One of the most aggressive Republican climate provisions moving through Granger’s panel is buried in legislation funding the government’s science agencies. As waters around South Florida set records for the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded, a line in the bill would bar the Biden administration from spending any money on “climate change fisheries research.”

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The move comes just weeks after tens of thousands of dead fish washed ashore in Texas due to high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, following other recent mass die-offs in Australia. The Center for Biological Diversity notes that intensifying ocean acidification triggered by climate change “could disrupt the entire marine ecosystem.”

The subcommittee that originally authored the fisheries legislation is headed by Republican Rep. Hal Rogers,who hails from the coal-rich state of Kentucky and whose top career campaign contributors include donors from the mining and fossil fuel industries.

Rogers has raised more than half a million dollars from the mining industry over the course of his career, and $390,000 from the oil and gas industry, according to data from OpenSecrets. In the 2019-2020 cycle, Rogers’s campaign paid $66,000 to his wife Cynthia.

The science funding bill also zeroes out funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program at the National Science Foundation, which coordinates research across the federal government “to understand the human-caused and natural processes that influence our planet,” and would additionally block the government from using any funds to carry out climate-related Biden executive orders.

The bill targets a Biden order issued in January 2021 that directed the federal government to use the procurement process, in which it acquires goods and services from the private sector, to mitigate carbon emissions as part of a broader federal effort to address climate change.

The order also specifically directed the Commerce Department to “to collect input from fishermen, regional ocean councils, fishery management councils, scientists, and other stakeholders on how to make fisheries and protected resources more resilient to climate change, including changes in management and conservation measures, and improvements in science, monitoring, and cooperative research.”

The GOP legislation also moves to defund a separate Biden order from April 2022 that sought to enhance the federal government’s forest stewardship and promote “climate-smart stewardship of mature and old-growth forests.”

Requiring Offshore Oil/Gas Leases, Slowing Wind Power Leases

The Republican spending bills contain several more efforts to undermine the Biden administration’s ability to meaningfully respond to the worsening global climate crisis.

That includes the bill authorizing funding for the Department of Interior, which oversees public lands. The legislation contains a provision mandating, “None of the funds made available by this act may be used to consider or incorporate thesocial cost of carbon.” The bill also permanently rescinds $1.3 billion in grant funding under the Clean Air Act to mitigate the effects of air pollution, as more than a quarter of all Americans now live in areas with dangerous levels of such pollution.

The Interior spending bill also includes provisions requiring “the Secretary of the Interior to conduct quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales” as well as fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, according to the bill report

At the same time, the legislation bars the government from issuing leases for offshore wind development in Florida until the completion of a study about windmills’ impact “on military readiness and training, marine environment and ecology, tourism, and other uses of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

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The latter rider is in response to Florida Republican lawmakers’ complaint that “people travel from around the world to see our pristine beaches — not windmills.”

The Department of Interior funding bill has been spearheaded by Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Id.), who has received nearly $900,000 in campaign contributions from electric utility interests during the course of his career, as well as roughly $440,000 from oil and gas industry donors. In the last few years, climate-intensified wildfires have caused billions of damage in Simpson’s state.

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Defunding Global Climate Investments

Then there’s the bill funding the Department of State and foreign aid. That legislation would bar funding for the Green Climate Fund — one of the entities charged with fulfilling the mandates of the Paris Climate Accords — which received a $1 billion deposit from the Biden administration in April.

Likewise, the bill prohibits the federal government from financing theClean Technology Fund, which helps developing countries transition away from dirtier energy sources, and also explicitly rejects the concept of climate reparations, decreeing that none of the funds may be used “to pay compensation to any country, organization, or individual for loss and damages attributed to climate change.”

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The bill also prevents the funding of an August 2021 Department of Treasuring guidance calling on multilateral development banks like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to limit financing of fossil fuel projects.

The State Department and foreign aid bill is being overseen by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who has received nearly $430,000 in campaign contributions from the energy and natural resources industry during his time in office. His district includes locales that a recent climate study said are among the most likely to soon be underwater due to rising ocean levels.

The House bill for funding the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), meanwhile, seeks to bar the agency’s proposed climate disclosure rule, which would mandate that publicly traded companies provide a full disclosure of their climate risks.

The subcommittee overseeing the SEC bill is headed by Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) who has received more than $175,000 from oil and gas interests during his career. Womack’s home state has recently experienced deadly tornadoes and flash flood warnings.

Finally, the GOP bill funding the Department of Labor will maintain a ban from 1976 that has been reapproved annually under both Republican and Democratic control of Congress that bars the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from investigating deaths at farms that employ less than 10 people, including deaths related to extreme heat. (Due to mass automation in the agriculture industry, this exemption includes many farms that are quite large and profitable.)

While OSHA has yet to issue a standard governing excessive heat in the workplace, the agency is tasked with investigating deaths or injuries in cases of extreme heat. At least 436 people died from extreme heat on the job from 2011 to 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The OSHA bill originated in a subcommittee headed byRep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL), whose top career campaign contributors include donors from agribusiness and the fossil fuel industry. Nearly a quarter of the Alabama labor force is outdoor workers, and the state recently experienced temperatures above 100 degrees.

The bills will now move to the full House for approval, and then the final bills must be negotiated with the Senate and passed again through both houses of Congress. If the provisions are kept in the text and Biden vetoes the spending bills, parts of the federal government could shut down.

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https://www.greenclimate.fund/

19b$ committed 3/22

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nrdc:

Mobilize support for climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing nations.

Recognizing that many developing countries and small island nations that have contributed the least to climate change could suffer the most from its consequences, the Paris Agreement includes a plan for developed countries—and others “in a position to do so”—to continue to provide financial resources to help developing countries mitigate and increase resilience to climate change. For instance, India’s pledge includes the need to eradicate poverty in parallel with decreasing emissions and increasing renewable energy, such as addressing energy poverty and access in remote villages that rely on diesel generators. With technological and financial help from wealthier countries, important equity-focused goals such as these can be within reach.

The Paris Agreement builds on the financial commitments of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which aimed to scale up public and private climate finance for developing nations to $100 billion a year by 2020. The Copenhagen pact also created the Green Climate Fund to help mobilize transformational private financeusing targeted public dollars. The Paris Agreement established the expectation that the world would set a higher annual goal by 2025 to build on the $100 billion target for 2020 and would put mechanisms in place to achieve that scaling up. Unfortunately, collective contributions continue to fall short, reaching approximately $79 billion in 2019.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-explain-why-the-wealthy-struggle-with-empathy/

matt r salon

a new study reveals that people from higher income backgrounds struggle with certain aspects of empathy when compared to individuals who have lower incomes, who are better at reading people’s emotions.

The research paper, which was published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” asked individuals from different class backgrounds to infer others’ emotional states by looking at images of their eyes and to attempt to assume the visual perspective of other people.

The findings suggest that our socioeconomic status may affect the way we see and interact with other people.

Researchers know that there are many things can make it difficult for one person to effectively empathize with another, including neurological conditions like autism and psychological illnesses like schizophrenia. In their study, researchers Pia Dietze of the University of California, Irvine and Eric D. Knowles of New York University attempted to better understand how social class specifically influences Theory of Mind.

"[Theory of Mind] encompasses a range of competencies that together enable people to solve problems in a world full of other minds,” the authors explain. “Examples of ToM include our ability to infer people’s emotions, understand others’ visual perspectives, trace behavior to actors’ underlying intentions and desires, and grasp the fact that others’ beliefs might misportray reality. We focus on two facets of [Theory of Mind] in this work: emotion perception and visual perspective taking.”

The authors concluded, both from their research and by analyzing previous research (some of which they felt was unreliable), that “higher social class is associated with attenuated [theory of mind] performance,” with individuals from higher income backgrounds struggling more to ascertain the emotions and empathize with the visual points of view of other people. One possible explanation for this is that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”This would also help people from lower classes to “spontaneously calculate other people’s perspectives.”

Dietze and Knowles also point out that their conclusion “stands in clear contrast to the common discourse concerning neurocognitive deficits among the lower classes.” They also note that “decades of research documents that lower-class individuals are more likely to exhibit attentional deficits and display impaired working-memory performance. The evidence provided here suggests that these deficits may be domain-specific. Indeed, we show that lower-class performance outcomes are reversed in the social realm.” The term “domain-specific” refers to the theory of learning which holds that there are multiple forms of intelligence rather than a single way to assess where one has cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses.

This is not the only new research which sheds light on how being wealthy can lead to harmful psychological behaviors and personal habits. In July a different study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals from affluent backgrounds would often deny their class privilege by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes,” the authors wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”

Another study, this one published in June in the journal Nature Communications, argued that the consumption patterns of the affluent are so egregiously unsustainable from an ecological standpoint that only a concerted effort by the wealthy to consume less can prevent catastrophes like global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions,” the authors wrote, adding that “existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.” They advocated “a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity,” pointing out that “theworld’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact” while “the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/08/27/qanon-conspiracy-naomi-seibt-climate-science-deniers

Back in December 2019, two conspiratorial worldviews collided as, for the first time, QAnon’s Q suggested his followers should question anew a topic that, by now, has been considered, and reconsidered, for decades: climate change.

“The Paris Agreement on Climate is Another Scam to Ripoff Taxpayers and Enrich the Politicians,” the Q-Drop (the term QAnon followers use to refer to messages they believe come from some sort of government insider who signs messages with the letter Q) claimed, labeling climate action a “con.”

In May, a second Q-Drop riffed on climate change, with a link to a snarky tweet about science and the Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg by a would-be House Republican who’d lost her primary race in March.

Both of those Q-Drops were picked up by a report commissioned by a coalition of environmental groups and conducted by the research firm Graphika, which found that a group of vocal climate science deniers began using QAnon hashtags in May — and they haven’t stopped since.

“The QAnon movement hasn’t traditionally covered climate change, but in May, when an influential QAnon account tweeted about climate denial, there was a notable and sustained increase of QAnon content shared within the climate denial group,” Michael Khoo, an advisor on disinformation for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, and Melissa Ryan, CEO of CARD Strategies and author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete weekly newsletters, wrote in an article published today on Medium.

[pix] Asked and Answered

The questions that Q advanced on climate change have been asked and answered — as essentially all of the burning questions on climate science still churning around in climate denial circles have been.

And today, as the impacts of a warming climate are accelerating, it is very clear that we collectively have little time to spare waiting until those who haven’t been keeping up with, or who refuse to acknowledge, the scientific consensus are convinced. The longer the world waits to slash greenhouse gas pollution, the less chance we collectively have to calm the worst impacts of a warming world, according to the world's top climate experts, and if we don't, climate change could make all of the calamities we’ve faced in 2020 soon pale in comparison.

Q, however, raised different concerns about climate action.

“Who audits where the money goes?” the December Q-Drop asked, linking to an article about the Green Climate Fund, which provides funding to help developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to help them meet their Paris Agreement goals.

Nevermind that if you want the audits of the Green Climate Fund alluded to in the Q-Drop, the answer is extraordinarily unmysterious and unglamorous: the audited financial statements are posted online and they’re done by accountants. Nevermind also that the Paris Agreement itself was never fundamentally about the movement of money, but instead involves countries promising to regulate pollution inside their borders — something we’re still continuing to fail to do, both in the United States and worldwide.

And nevermind that the U.S., whose politicians the Q-Drop implies are pocketing money somehow along the way, has nearly walked away from both the Paris Agreement and the Green Climate Fund. That's despite the glaring fact that the U.S. has been the world’s worst climate polluter since 1750, meaning that this country has played the single largest role in causing the very problem that the global climate pact attempts to (somewhat) address.

To turn Q’s question around, one very basic question Q has never answered is who exactly they are — and to what extent, if any, they’ve sought to monetize the power and influence they’ve been busy amassing. “At this point, who's behind it is speculation more than anything,” Ryan told DeSmog.

Another key part of the problem — as ever — is that climate science deniers publicly talk a lot more than others. Whereas in years past, mainstream media was faulted for giving climate science deniers a misleading amount of airtime, today, they’re using social media to achieve the same ends. Graphika’s research found that for every social media post by the vocal climate scientists and environmentalists they studied, the vocal climate science deniers they studied posted four times.

“On average, they observed that the Climate Denial group was about four times ‘louder’ (number of tweets relative to the group size) than the Climate Science group,” Khoo and Ryan, both advisors to a coalition of environmental groups that commissioned Graphika’s research, wrote.

Clutching at Q’s Coattails

Not only is QAnon taking up climate denial, but prominent climate deniers have been taking up QAnon.

“The other thing we see is that the right needs QAnon more and more to amplify their messaging,” said Ryan.

Take, for example,Naomi Seibt, a young German YouTuberwho has questioned climate science and who has worked with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate science denial.

“So do you want a beautiful planet that you can stare at but that’s it? It’s just like looking at a TV screen,” the Express, a UK newspaper, quoted Seibt as saying in May. “As a climate realist, I don’t deny that we don’t have some negative impact on the planet. But I don’t think that it’s related to CO2 emissions.”

Seibt briefly rose to broader prominence following a Washington Post article about her in February — though she remains far less well-known than Greta Thunberg, the young environmental activist who the Heartland Institute has sought to compare with Seibt. “She reportedlychose not to renew her contractwith [the] Heartland [Institute] in April 2020 after facing potential fines from a regional broadcasting authority,” DeSmog’s profile on Seibt notes.

In addition to speaking about climate, Seibt has publicly spoken about her views on race and religion. “Seibt’s rise as the young face of climate skeptics has drawn scrutiny of her past remarks. On Friday, video circulated of Seibt’s remarks after a shooting at a German synagogue,” Bloomberg reported on February 28. “'The normal German consumer is at the bottom, so to speak. Then the Muslims come somewhere in between. And the Jew is at the top. That is the suppression characteristic,' she said in comments first reported by The Guardian.”

In July, the trial of that synagogue shooter, charged with murdering two people and the attempted murder of dozens more, began with the accused shooter stating that he felt he was “on the bottom rung of society” and that he was “superseded,” as he sought to justify horrific crimes.

As in Germany, white supremacists in the U.S. have increasingly engaged in racially motivated “mass shooter” armed attacks on unarmed people. And QAnon followers have also begun committing violent acts. “I think it's also important to remember that the FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat,” said Ryan, “and QAnon has inspired kidnappings, it has inspired at least one murder, it has inspired arson, there is a real danger from these folks who are drawn to this and become just embroiled in it.”

Naomi Seibt speaking at a Heartland Institute event. pix]

The teenage Seibt has previously denied allegations of anti-Semitism and her mother, an attorney whose clients have reportedly included politicians from the far-right German AfD party, previously told The Guardian that Naomi is not a supporter of the far-right. “'In fact, I was commenting that I think it’s wrong to comment on different races and to view them differently,' Seibt said,” in response to questions about her views on race, The Guardian reported. “'We should just all be regarded as the same.'”

More recently, in addition to talking about climate change and other topics, Seibt has begun posting about QAnon. “As of right now, I don’t consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement,” Seibt said in a YouTube video posted earlier this month and whose title refers to two QAnon themes, “but I am on the side, watching and evaluating for myself what I think is verifiable and what to me seems too far out there.”

“I do not consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement, nor will I ever attach a label to my activism,” Seibt said in response to a question from DeSmog about whether her position had since changed, adding that she also does not identify as a white nationalist, part of the far-right, or an anti-Semite. “But as long as the QAnon movement continues its peaceful protest against matters of injustice, I consider it a positive contribution to the global political discourse.”

“I do not view any ethnicity or religion as superior,” she said, adding that she identifies as a libertarian. “I promote a reduction of centralised state power so that individuals may act freely. The premise for that freedom, of course, is that the individual does no harm to his or her fellow citizens.”

Social Media Fail

Khoo and Ryan pointed to the ways that social media companies for years failed to conduct the most basic scrutiny of information that they publish online and allowed all sorts of demonstrably false information to be repeated in an endless rumor mill online.

“Facebook has policies that let Trump lie uninterrupted,” they wrote. “And when climate deniers get a simple fact-check on Facebook, members of Congress themselves have sent letters to company executives to complain.”

All of this can, of course, have significant policy consequences in the real world.

“The danger for environmental advocates and for the planet is that QAnon could be the energy that stops a big push for any meaningful climate action,” Khoo told DeSmog. “If a Green New Deal is the next thing, we could see QAnon followers serving as the foot soldiers in that war.”

There’s also the risk that fossil fuel companies and trade organizations might jump on the QAnon bandwagon, inspired by the conspiracy theory's popularity. Last week, President Trump praised the movement, claiming not to know much about it except that “they like me very much.”

“If QAnon becomes more mainstream,” Ryan said, “I could see a scenario where industry groups that are invested in climate denial and fossil fuels and such will be incentivized to embrace QAnon or rely on those tactics and networks.”

The other risk is that conspiracy theorizing, when mixed with social media, can not only bring in adherents, it can also raise money.

“The new addition to this history of climate capitalism is the capitalism behind the clicks, the monetizing of disinformation that happens on all the platforms,” Khoo and Ryan wrote. “Virality is central to the profit model, as are ads. Whether or not they’re true is secondary, from a business perspective.”

And the reality is that QAnon has been growing, with NBC News reporting earlier this month that Facebook discovered QAnon accounts and pages have attracted over 3 million member and follower accounts.

Last week, Facebook removed nearly 800 QAnon groups and took some steps to restrict QAnon hashtags and other social media. That follows moves by Twitter to take down roughly 7,000 Twitter accounts and designating QAnon as “coordinated harmful activity.”

Some see that as far too little, far too late. “They’ve had three years of almost unfettered access outside of certain platforms to develop and expand,” Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project, told MIT Technology Review in July.

As of press time, Facebook and Heartland have not responded to questions from DeSmog.

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DEC 13, 2019

COP25: Developing Countries Charge Ahead with Bold Climate Plans as Rich Countries Drag Their Feet

this year’s United Nations climate summit wraps up in Madrid, Spain, many activists, scientists, indigenous and grassroots climate leaders say that rich countries most responsible for the climate emergency have spent the talks dialing back ambition and blocking progress. This comes as deadly droughts, flooding, cyclones and wildfires rage around the world. This week, more than 70 developing countries have announced they will accelerate their climate plans, and 72 countries have signed onto goals to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But major emitters Australia, China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia have made no such promises, while the U.S. is slated to pull out of the Paris Agreement entirely by next year. For more on the negotiations at COP25, we speak with Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He is advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate talks.

GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we broadcast from inside the U.N. climate summit here in Madrid, Spain, in its final days.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “While deadly droughts, flooding, cyclones and wildfires rage outside the conference center, the rich countries most responsible for the climate emergency have spent the talks dialing back ambition and blocking progress. That’s what activists, scientists, indigenous and grassroots climate leaders are charging in the last days of this year’s climate conference as two weeks of negotiations wrap up without crucial commitments from the countries most responsible for global emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: This week, more than 70 developing countries have announced they’ll accelerate their climate plans, and 72 countries have signed onto goals to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But major carbon emitters Australia, China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia have made no such promises, while the U.S. is slated to pull out of the Paris Agreement entirely by next year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Meanwhile, a new study finds that the climate crisis is already leading to a massive increase in the number of refugees being displaced around the world.

In Berkeley, California, we’re joined by a policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s the co-author of the new report, “Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied.”

AMY GOODMAN: And here in Madrid, Spain, we’re joined by Saleemul Huq, climate scientist, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate negotiations.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Saleemul Huq, let’s begin with you. I mean, you have, as so many have said, these climate emergencies taking place around the world right now. You have got the wildfires in Australia. You’ve got the floods. You’ve got the droughts. You’ve got climate migration at a level we haven’t seen. What is happening here? Is this a cop-out? And what role is the U.S. playing?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, I think the year 2019 will, in hindsight, be seen as the tipping point, when human-induced climate change became reality. We can now attribute many of the things you just said, the magnitude of them being way over anything we’ve seen before. And that can now be attributed to the fact that we have already increased global temperature by well over 1 degree centigrade, and that is already having impacts. And we’re headed for 3 degrees and nowhere near the one-and-a-half degrees that we want to do.

So, what we are seeing in reality is that the impacts are causing damage. They’re causing loss of life, loss of biodiversity. And what we need the Conference of Parties to do is step up to that challenge that has been given from the rest of the world, particularly the young children of the world who were out here in Madrid, a half a million of them last Friday. But I don’t see a lot of signs of the negotiators responding to that. And the U.S. has been particularly difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the U.S. doing? I mean, on the one hand, Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the climate conference. But they are also, as each day goes by, working to dilute any kind of lead-up to next year, the evaluation of the Paris climate accord.

SALEEMUL HUQ: So, the specific technical point here in Madrid, in the 25th Conference of Parties, is something called the review of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage. The developing countries have a united front here. We want that review to take it forward with an implementation arm and a finance arm. And the finance part is something that the United States is completely against. And so far we haven’t got a decision on that.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain finance.

SALEEMUL HUQ: Funding for loss and damage, as opposed to funding for adaptation and mitigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Right. That’s a lot of U.N. speak.

SALEEMUL HUQ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Most people don’t really get it.

SALEEMUL HUQ: All right. So, basically,giving some funding to the victims of the impacts of climate change that we are now seeing,allowing funding to be raised for the victims.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, you know, Saleemul, if you could just give a broader sense? I mean, we’ve been coming to the climate summit for many years, as indeed have you. Many people argue that even though the pace of change is very, very slow, it’s an important venue for developing countries to be able to express, in solidarity, their position to the richer countries. What do you see is the significance of these annual meetings, where it seems every year very little gets achieved that’s in the interest of the people who have been suffering the most from the effects of the climate crisis?

SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, we live in an unjust and unequal world. And as the vulnerable poor countries, the Least Developed Countries, that I advise — 47 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including my country, Bangladesh — this is the only game in town where we have a seat at the table, where we can actually say something and hope that the other side will listen. A lot of the time they don’t listen, but sometimes they do. We’re hoping in Madrid we will get them to listen within the next few hours that we have left here.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe what’s happening in your own country of Bangladesh.

SALEEMUL HUQ: So, my country, Bangladesh, is one of the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We are a delta — live on a delta of two of the major rivers of the world, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. We have a population of 160-plus million people living in less than 150,000 square kilometers, so a population density of over a thousand per square kilometer — very vulnerable, very generally poor, but nevertheless one of the most resilient countries. We have found — we have one of the best cyclone warning and shelter systems in the world. We can warn and evacuate more than two-and-a-half million people. We recently had a major cyclone where we did that. And so, we are struggling, but we are rising to the challenge of dealing with the impacts of climate change. But there’s a limit to what we can do. One-and-a-half degrees, we can manage. Three degrees, we can’t.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to a break, and then we’re going to come back to this discussion, and we’re going to talk about this massive crisis of climate migration. We’re talking millions and millions of people, the numbers only promising to grow. We’re with Saleemul Huq from the Bangladeshi climate movement, a climate scientist. Joining us also will be Hossein Ayazi at the University of California, Berkeley, who just left [sic] but did a report here on climate refugees.

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/why-a-green-new-deal-might-not-be-enough-and-we-could-leave-developing-countries-with-an-ugly-choice/

Why a Green New Deal might not be enough — and we could leave developing countries with an ugly choice

Written by Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute December 3, 2019

In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference—known as COP25—began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. What prevents a transfer from carbon-based fuel to other fuels is not the stubbornness of this or that country. The main problems are three:

The right wing that denies climate change;

Sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in the continuation of the use of carbon-based fuels;

The refusal by the Western advanced countries to admit both that they have caused the problem and that they should use their vast wealth to finance the transfer from carbon-based fuels to other fuels in countries whose wealth has been siphoned off to the West.

The first two blockages—the right wing and sections of the climate industry—are related, since it is often money from the climate industry (the Koch brothers, for instance) that finances the climate deniers and sows confusion about the immense reality that confronts us.

The third blockage is serious, and it has prevented the United Nations process from bearing fruit. At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the countries of the world negotiated a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In that document—which was ratified at the General Assembly two years later—the governments agreed to a key principle, namely that the impact of colonialism cannot be divorced from discussions of the climate crisis.

“The global nature of climate change,” the parties wrote, “calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.”

Common and Differentiated Responsibilities

The main phrase here to consider is “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This means that the problem of climate change is something that is common to all countries, and that no one is immune to its deleterious impact; at the same time, the responsibility of countries is not identical, and some countries—which benefited for centuries from colonialism and carbon fuel—have a greater responsibility for the transition to a less damaging energy system.

There is little scholarly debate on the fact that certain countries—the West—benefited inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel. A look at the data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center’s Global Carbon Project shows that the United States of America—by itself—has been the largest dispenser of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely European states and the United States of America. From the 18th century, these countries have not only dispensed the bulk of the carbon into the atmosphere, but they also continue to exceed their share of the Global Carbon Budget.

Carbon-fueled capitalism—enriched by the wealth stolen through colonialism—enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations. The extreme inequalities between the standard of living for the average European (742 million people) and the average Indian (1.4 billion people) is as stark as it was a century ago. The reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon—particularly coal—is high; but even this use of carbon has not raised the per capita emissions of China and India above that of the United States, whose per capita emissions are almost twice as much as China’s per capita emissions.

Green Climate Fund

The Framework Convention recognized the importance of colonialism, the geographical divergence of industrial capitalism, and its impact on the carbon budget. That is why the countries at Rio agreed to create a Green Climate Fund. The West was asked to make substantial contributions to the fund, whose capital would then be used to assist developing countries to “leapfrog” carbon-fueled social development.

It was hoped that the fund would draw in $100 billion—at a minimum—by 2020. The United States pledged $3 billion but has only contributed $1 billion. Trump has blocked any further contributions to the fund (Bernie Sanders, in contrast, said he would pay $200 billion into the fund, while the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn pledged to use his country’s leverage over the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds toward “climate justice for the Global South”). Australia and Russia have also paused contributions. No real appetite exists to expand this fund; there is little expectation that it—or the concept of leapfrogging—will be taken seriously at COP25.

The $100 billion figure is very conservative. The International Energy Agency suggests each year in its World Energy Outlook that the actual figure is in the trillions. None of the Western powers has intimated anything like a commitment of that scale to the fund.

Attack on Coal

It is far easier to attack China and India, and other developing countries.

In early November, UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the press after his participation in the UN-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) meeting in Bangkok, Thailand. He mentioned neither the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility” nor the Green Climate Fund.

Tellingly, the secretary-general made three proposals, each of which says nothing to the main principle of “differentiated responsibility”:

Taxes must be placed on carbon emissions.

Trillions of dollars of subsidies for fossil fuels must end.

Construction of coal-fired power stations must end by 2020.

None of these proposals per se would raise eyebrows. In fact, given the gravity of the reports coming in from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is no doubt that action is necessary.

But what kind of action? These three proposals would directly strike at the energy sources for countries that have not yet provided electrification for their populations, or where their people are far from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Southeast Asia, where Guterres made these remarks, only anticipates full electrification of the region by 2030.

Advanced industrial states—such as the United Kingdom and Germany—have said that they will phase out coal by 2040. These are countries that have created the Powering Past Coal Alliance (backed by the Bloomberg New Energy Finance, one of the major capital funds that seeks to make money off the Green New Deal). There is money to be made here for venture capitalists; they are not going to contribute the billions needed for the Green Climate Fund. No philanthropy by the billionaires will be willing to donate their money into the fund; the tax-free money they make on the “green transition” will eclipse the tiny amounts of money they will donate for a non-carbon future.

Ugly Choice

Meanwhile, developing countries have an ugly choice before them: to forgo carbon, the cheapest fuel, and then forgo social development for their populations; or to continue to use carbon and threaten the planet. These are the only choices if the advanced industrial states refuse to fund the Green Climate Fund, and if they refuse to transfer technology for wind and solar to countries without any financial obligation.

A Green New Deal in the West is not going to be sufficient if this deal does not include trillions of dollars into the UN’s Green Climate Fund and the transfer of technology as a social practice and not for profit.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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context: 3 22

aviva chomsky

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/dark-side-of-american-exceptionalism/

... exceptional, but not in a good way]

Today, the situation has shifted — at least a bit. With approximately 4% of the world’s population, the United States still holds about 30% of its wealth, while its commitment to over-consumption and maintaining global dominance remains remarkably unshaken. To grasp that, all you have to do is consider the Biden White House’s recent Indo-Pacific Strategy policy brief, which begins in this telling way: “The United States is an Indo-Pacific power.” Indeed.

In 2022, the relationship between wealth, emissions, and climate catastrophe has become ever clearer. In the crucial years between 1990 and 2015, the global economy expanded from $47 trillion to $108 trillion. During that same period, global annual greenhouse-gas emissions grew by more than 60%. Mind you, 1990 was the year in which atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) first surpassed what many scientists believed was the level of safety — 350 parts per million, or ppm. Yet in the 22 years since then, more CO2 and other greenhouse gases have been emitted into the atmosphere than in all of history prior to that date, as atmospheric CO2 careened past 400 ppm in 2016 with 420 ppm now fast approaching.

Inequality and Emissions

Growing global wealth is closely associated with growing emissions. But the wealth and responsibility for those emissions are not shared equally among the planet’s population. On an individual level, the wealthiest people on Earth consume — and emit — far more than their poorer counterparts. The richest 10% of the world’s population, or about 630 million people, were responsible for more than half of the increase in greenhouse-gas emissions over the last quarter-century.On a national level, rich countries are, of course, home to far more people with high levels of consumption, which means that the larger and wealthier the country, the greater its emissions.

In terms of per capita income, the United States ranks 13th in the world. But the countries above it on the list are mostly tiny, including some of the Persian Gulf states, Ireland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Switzerland. So, despite their high per-capita emissions, their overall contribution isn’t that big. As the third-largest country on this planet, our soaring per-capita emissions have, on the other hand, had a devastating effect.

With a population of around 330 million, the United States today has less than a quarter of either China’s population of more than 1.4 billion or India’s, which is just under that figure. Four other countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan — fall into the population range of 200 to 300 million, but their per-capita gross domestic products (GDPs) and their per-capita emissions are far below ours. In fact, the total U.S. GDP of more than $19 trillion far exceeds that of any other country, followed by China at $12 trillion and Japan at $5 trillion.

In sum, the United States is exceptional when it comes to both its size and wealth.I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn then that, until 2006, it was also by far the world’s top CO2 emitter. After that, it was surpassed by a fast-developing China (though that country’s per capita emissions remain less than half of ours) and no other country’s greenhouse gas emissions come close to either of those two.

To fully understand different countries’ responsibilities, it’s necessary to go past yearly numbers and look at how much they’ve emitted over time, since the greenhouse gases we put in the atmosphere don’t disappear at the end of the year. Here again, one country stands out above all the others: theUnited States, whose cumulative emissions reached 416 billion tons by the end of 2020. China’s, which didn’t start rising rapidly until the 1980s, reached 235 billion tons in that year, while India trailed at 54 billion.

Having first hit 20 billion tons in 1910, U.S. cumulative emissions have only shot up ever since, while China’s didn’t hit that 20 billion mark until 1979. So the U.S. got a big head start and, cumulatively speaking, is still way ahead when it comes to taking down this planet.

The U.S. Climate Action Network (USCAN) argues that excessive emitters like the United States have already used up far more than their “fair share” of this planet’s carbon budget and so, in fact, owe a huge carbon debt to the rest of the world to make up for their outsized contribution to the problem of climate change over the past two centuries.Unfortunately, the 2015 Paris Agreement’s voluntary, non-enforceable, and nationally determined limits on emissions functionally let rich countries continue on their damaging ways.

In fact, nations should be held responsible for repaying their carbon debt. The world’s poorest people, who have contributed practically nothing to the problem, deserve access to a portion of the remaining budget and to the sort of aid that would enable them to develop alternative forms of energy to meet their basic needs.

Under the fair-share proposal, it’s not enough for the United States just to stop adding emissions. This country needs to repay the climate debt it’s already incurred. USCAN calculates that to pay back its fair share the United States must cut its emissions by 70% by 2030, while contributing the cash equivalent of another 125% of its current emissions every year through technical and financial support to energy-poor nations.

Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal proposal adopted the concept of the “fair share.” True leadership in the global climate fight, Sanders has argued, means recognizing that “the United States has for over a century spewed carbon pollution emissions into the atmosphere in order to gain economic standing in the world. Therefore, we have an outsized obligation to help less industrialized nations meet their targets while improving quality of life.”

On this subject, however, his voice and others like it sadly remain far outside the all-too-right-wing mainstream. (And if you doubt that, just check Joe Manchin’s recent voting record).

Are We Making Progress Thanks to New Technologies?

In 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report on our chances of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade — the goal that the countries involved in the Paris Agreement, including the United States, accepted as their baseline for action. It concluded that, to have a 50% chance of staying below that temperature increase, our future collective emissions couldn’t exceed 480 gigatons (or 480 billion tons). That, in other words, was humanity’s remaining carbon budget.

Unfortunately, as of 2018, global emissions were exceeding 40 gigatons a year, which meant that even if they were flattened almost immediately (not exactly a likelihood), we would use up that budget in a mere dozen years or so. Worse yet, despite a Covid-induced decline in 2020, global emissions actually rebounded sharply in 2021.

Most scenarios for emission reductions, including those proposed by the IPCC, rely optimistically on new technologies to enable us to get there without making substantive changes in the global economy or in the excessive consumption of the world’s richest people and countries. Such technological advances, it’s hoped, would allow us to produce as much, or possibly more energy from renewable sources and even possibly begin removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence to support the likelihood of such progress, especially in the time we have left. No matter how much new technology we develop, there seems to be no completely “clean” form of energy. All of them — nuclear, wind, solar, hydropower, geothermal, biomass, and perhaps others still to be developed — rely on massive industrial operations to extract finite resources from the earth; factories to process them; facilities to create, store, and transmit energy; and, in the end, some form of waste (think batteries, solar panels, old electric cars, and so on). Every form of energy will have multiple dangerous environmental impacts. Meanwhile, as the use of alternative forms of energy production increases worldwide, it hasn’t yet reduced fossil-fuel use. Instead, it’s just added to our growing energy consumption.

It’s true that the world’s wealthiest countries have achieved some gains in decoupling economic growth from rising emissions. But much of this relatively minor decoupling is attributable to a shift from the use of coal to natural gas, along with the outsourcing of particularly dirty industries. Decoupling has, as yet, made no dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and seems unlikely to accelerate or even continue at a meaningful enough pace after these first and easiest steps have been taken. So almost all climate modeling, like that of the IPCC, suggests that new technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will also be needed to counter rising emissions.

But negative emissions technologies are largely aspirational at this point. Instead of counting on what still to a significant extent remain technological fantasies, while the wealthy continue their profligacy, it’s time to shift our thinking more radically and focus, as I do in my new book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, on how to reduce extraction, production, and consumption in far more socially just ways, so that we can indeed begin to live within our planet’s means. Call it “post-growth” or “degrowth” thinking.

Make no mistake: we can’t live without energy and we desperately do need to turn to alternatives to fossil fuels. But alternative energies are only going to be truly viable if we can also greatly reduce our energy needs, which means reconfiguring the global economy. If energy is a scarce and precious resource, then ways must be found to prioritize its use to meet the urgent needs of the world’s poor, rather than endlessly expanding the luxuries of the wealthiest among us. And that’s precisely what degrowth thinking is all about: scaling back the mindless pursuit of production, consumption, and profit in favor of “human wellbeing and ecological stability.”

Abandoning Exceptionalism

In April 2021, President Biden made a dramatic announcement, setting a new goal for U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — to reduce them 50% from 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. Sounds pretty good, right?

But given that this country’s CO2 emissions had hit a high of 6.13 billion tons in 2005, that means by 2030 we’d still be emitting three billion tons of CO2 a year. Even if we could reach net-zero by 2050, our country alone would, by then, have used up one-quarter of the entire remaining carbon budget for the planet. And right now, given the state of the American political system, there’s neither a genuine plan nor an obvious way to reach Biden’s goal. If we stay on our current path — and don’t count on that if the Republicans take Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024 — we would barely achieve a 30% reduction by 2030.

At this point, there’s no guarantee we’ll stay on that path, no matter the political party in power. After all, consider just this:

In 2010, about half of the new vehicles sold in the United States were cars and half were SUVs or trucks. By 2021, close to 80% were SUVs or trucks.

In 2020, more than 900,000 new houses were built in this country, their median size, 2,261 square feet. Most of them had four or more bedrooms and 870,000 had central air conditioning.

President Biden’s infrastructure bill, signed in November 2021, included $763 billion for new highways.

And let’s not even talk about the military-industrial-congressional complex and war. After all, the Department of Defense is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and emitter of CO2 in the world. Between its worldwide bases, promotion of the arms industry, and ongoing global wars, our military alone produces annual emissions greater than those of wealthy countries like Sweden and Denmark.

Meanwhile, in the run-up to the climate-change meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, in the fall of 2021, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry insisted repeatedly that the United States must work to bring China on board. Joe Biden too kept his attention focused on China. And indeed, given its greenhouse gas emissions and still-expanding use of coal, China does have a big role to play. But to the rest of the world, such an insistence on diverting attention from our own role in the climate crisis rings hollow indeed.

A 2021 study shows that almost all of the world’s remaining coal, not to speak of most of its gas and oil reserves, will need to stay in the ground if global warming is to be kept below 1.5 degrees centigrade. Back in 2018, another study found that even to meet a 2-degree centigrade goal, which it’s now all too clear would be catastrophic in climate-change terms, humanity would have to haltall new fossil-fuel-based infrastructure and immediately start decommissioning fossil-fuel-burning plants. Instead, such new facilities continue to be built in a relentless fashion globally. Unless the United States, which bears by far the greatest responsibility for our climate emergency, is ready to radically change course, how can it demand that others do so?

But to change course would mean to abandon exceptionalism.

Degrowth scholars argue that, rather than risking all of our futures on as-yet-unproven technologies in order to cling to economic growth, we should seek social and political solutions that would involve redistributing the planet’s wealth, its scarce resources, and its carbon budget in ways that prioritize basic needs and social wellbeing globally.

That, however, would require the United States to acknowledge the dark side of its exceptionalism and agree to relinquish it, something that, in March 2022, still seems highly unlikely.

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