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Climate Debt Reparation

expanded 11 22 cop 27 cairo

see also GCF

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COP 28 12 23

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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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More than 30 media organizations in more than 20 countries have come together with a simple but daring proposal: world leaders should tax big fossil fuel companies to help the most vulnerable nations respond to the climate crisis.

The editorial, spearheaded by The Guardian, was published in conjunction with the COP27 UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has appeared in an international array of outlets including  Hindu in India, Tempo in Indonesia, the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, Haaretz in Israel, Rolling Stone in the U.S., El Espectador in Colombia, La Repubblica in Italy and Libération in France.

“My hope is that in speaking with one voice, we remind people that this is a global crisis, threatening all of us,” head of environment at Guardian News and Media Natalie Hanman said in a Guardian article about the initiative. “It’s now imperative that world leaders listen, and act.”

[twt]

the editorial outlined the stakes of the moment. The most recent UN Environmental Programme Emissions Gap Report found that amped up national pledges following last year’s COP26 climate crisis still put the world on track for 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. The editorial noted that this meant national pledges were delivering only one fiftieth of what is needed to reduce emissions in time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. At the same time, many nations are hurrying to start new fossil fuel projects in a short-sighted bid to wean themselves off Russian gas in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine.

“All this underlines that humanity has to end its addiction to fossil fuels,” the editorial said. “If renewable energy was the norm there would be no climate emergency.”

The editorial also highlighted the injustice of the climate crisis.

“Rich countries account for just one in eight people in the world today but are responsible for half of greenhouse gases,” the editorial said. “These nations have a clear moral responsibility to help. Developing nations should be given enough cash to address the dangerous conditions they did little to create — especially as a global recession looms.”

Yet so far this money has not materialized. In 2009, developed nations pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations both adapt to and mitigate the climate crisis, money that was never paid in full. Now, a new report published in conjunction with COP27 found that developing nations excluding China needed more than $2 trillion a year by 2030 to both reduce emissions, adapt to climate change and repair the inevitable loss and damage from the crisis.

One way to help with this gap between unmet needs and insufficient spending would be to tax the profits of major fossil fuel companies.

“As a bare minimum, a windfall tax on the combined profits of the largest oil and gas companies — estimated at almost $100bn in the first three months of the year — needs to be enacted,” the editorial authors wrote.

In this, they are echoing the words ofUN Secretary-General António Guterresduring his opening remarks to the UN General Assembly in September, who called for a windfall tax on fossil fuel prices to help both poorer nations reeling from the climate crisis and individuals everywhere struggling with the energy and cost of living crises.

“[T]he fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns,” Guterres said at the time.

Such a tax has also been endorsed by California Governor Gavin Newsom and U.S. President Joe Biden threatened such an act if oil and gas companies did not work to reduce prices.

The editorial said that a windfall tax should not replace climate finance from richer to poorer nations, but it was something that countries could pass on the national level without the need for an international deal. The authors also argued that the debts of developing countries recovering from extreme weather events should be forgiven.

Finally, the editorial called the climate crisis the “moonshot of our times” and argued for daring financial solutions such as the purchasing of government bonds undertaken by central banks in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is no time for apathy or complacency; the urgency of the moment is upon us,” the editorial authors wrote.

The call to action comes as another report underscored the media’s failings on climate messaging, BusinessGreen noted. A six-nation Yougov poll commissioned by the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) and the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) found that people who listened to, read or watched the news five times or more per week were more likely to believe common climate falsehoods — such as the idea that natural gas is a “greener” choice — than those who did not.

“This suggests that news outlets’ reporting regularly includes misinformation narratives, which are adversely influencing their readers’ opinions,” CAAD wrote in a press release.

The Guardian, however, has long been a leader in climate coverage. In 2019, for example, it updated its style guide to use the terms climate crisis, breakdown or emergency instead of climate change to accurately convey the urgency of the situation.

mma 11 22

The COP27 climate summit hosted by the Egyptian government concluded on November 20 with a hard-fought agreement to compensate countries that are most vulnerable to climate disasters. Before the ink was even dry on this landmark “loss and damage” deal (considered a step forward in both acknowledging and addressing global climate injustices), Fox News personalities and guests began attacking it.

As the conference concluded on Sunday, Fox News turned its attention to attacking climate reparations.Fox & Friends Sunday co-host Pete Hegseth described the fund as a “sin tax,” saying, “Ultimately, it's self-loathing. It’s the belief that the West's success was premised on pollution, so now it's our turn to pay developing countries … because we built the world based on their backs.” On The Big Sunday Show, Fox contributor Sean Duffy bizarrely criticized the fund because it doesn’t allow recipients to use the allocations to invest in fossil fuels.

Since Sunday, at least 9 programs on the network have discussed climate reparations. Much of the coverage is largely in line with the lines of attack we predicted from right-wing media ahead of the conference. It consisted of misleading attacks suggesting that these payments would hurt the U.S. economy and further empower China; represent a form of wealth redistribution; or are unfair to the recipients because they can’t use the funds to develop fossil fuels.

What is loss and damage financing and why it matters

After 30 years of pressure from developing nations, world leaders agreed to create a new fund through which rich countries will help pay for vulnerable countries to recover from climate-fueled disasters. The concept, known as loss and damage or climate reparations, was a point of contention at COP27 specifically among richer countries like the United States.However, the U.S., among other nations, has agreed to contribute to the fund while not accepting any liability for loss and damage caused by climate change.

G20 countries, which represent about 80% of global economic output, are also responsible for about 75% of toxic greenhouse gas pollution. Yet small and poorer countries, particularly island nations, bear the brunt of those impacts in the form of drought, sea-level rise, and other disasters resulting in enormous economic losses. The African Development Bank estimates that the continent has already lost between 5-15% of its GDP growth due to climate impacts.Climate-fueled flooding in Pakistan that killed more than 1,000 people and displaced or otherwise affected more than 30 million this summer gave urgency to loss and damage negotiations this year. In a September segment on CNN’s New Day, correspondent Clarissa Ward reported on the flooding and the comments from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on the need for climate reparations for these types of climate disasters, while noting that Pakistan emits less than 1% of global emissions but suffers disproportionate harm from climate impacts such as flooding.

However, almost none of the details of the fund, such as which countries will contribute, who exactly will get the money, and how much will be offered up, have been discussed. The U.S. and the European Union are pushing to ensure that China would not benefit from the funding and that it would eventually have to contribute, though it is defined by the U.N. as a developing nation. China’s position as the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter may throw that label into question with regard to this particular fund in the coming months. The country has voiced its opposition to being treated like a developed nation.

Despite the importance of this historic agreement, Fox has wasted no time in demonizing the fund and using the deal to discredit global action on climate change:

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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:

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 insistedrepeatedly 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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With his time in the White House coming to an end and amid promises by the incoming Trump administration to defund international climate action, President Barack Obama transferred $500 million to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), a key mechanism for climate change adaptation and renewable energy projects in the Global South.

The move follows weeks of international pressure for the Obama administration to make good on its commitment to the fund, which has found itself in the crosshairs of Trump’s policy agenda. The GCF is a primary vehicle for climate finance and is largely seen as the lynchpin of climate action and fulfilling the commitments made under the Paris Agreement. President-elect Trump has made advancing the fossil fuel industry’s agenda a central focus of his team, including by stacking his Cabinet with climate deniers and corporate CEOs, such as recently retired Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson.

“The Obama administration is refusing to let President-elect Trump’s posse of oil barons and climate deniers dictate how the world responds to the climate crisis,” said Tamar Lawrence-Samuel of Corporate Accountability International. “Tens of thousands of people around the world called on President Obama to step up before Trump takes the keys of our government and tries to reverse decades of climate progress.  This victory is the climate justice movement’s opening salvo to the Trump presidency. And we’re not going away.”

Over the last several weeks, 129 organizations led by Corporate Accountability International, including 350.org and Center for International Environmental Law, joined more than 90,000 people incalling on the Obama administration to fulfill the U.S.’s commitment to the U.N. climate treaty’s Green Climate Fund by transferring $2.5 billion.

In 2014, the U.S. committed $3 billion to the GCF for its initial resource mobilization period of 2015–2018—and in March of 2016 transferred its first $500 million. Obama will now leave office having contributed $1 billion to the fund, but with serious doubts looming over whether additional funding will come from a Republican-controlled government.

Established as part of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the GCF is the primary vehicle through which Global North countries, responsible for the vast majority of historical global greenhouse gas emissions, can provide the resources due to Global South countries so that they may adapt to the already devastating effects of climate change and transition to renewable energy sources. In March of 2016, understanding that climate deniers in Congress would refuse a direct appropriation, the Obama administration made good on $500 million of its commitment to the GCF through a State Department fund called the Economic Support Fund (ESF).

While this move is a significant victory in the face of the looming Trump administration, the GCF provides only a minute fraction of the total funding needed to comprehensively address the climate crisis, including adaptation and loss-and-damage, as well as the global transition to renewables. Indeed, recent analyses estimate the adaptation and mitigation costs for Global South countries in the trillions of dollars in just the next 13 years alone.

“Money is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to addressing climate change, especially in poor countries,” said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth U.S. “President Obama’s action sends a powerful signal to the world that the Trump administration’s anti-science, anti-justice, pro-corporate approach to climate does not mean the people of the U.S. aren’t going to continue standing up and demanding climate action.”

The coalition that called for the Obama administration to take this step is part of a global movement of environmental and human rights groups dedicated to protecting a critical international commitment made by the U.S. and resisting Trump’s looming assault on climate policy, human rights and equity during his term. Not only do most of Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments have long histories of dismantling and attacking environmental policies, 16 of them also own more wealth than one third of American households combined. They owe much of their wealth to years in the upper echelons of corporate America, confirming the fears of many that this administration will represent only the interests of corporations and the wealthy.

Jesse Bragg is the media director at Corporate Accountability International.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/environmentalists-hail-obamas-final-climate-hail-mary-leaving-white-house

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http://www.amazon.com/What-Were-Fighting-Each-Other/dp/0807088404

loe 11/28/15

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Big polluter nations give fossil fuel companies 10 million dollars a minute,but claim they don't have funds to aid the most vulnerable countries dealing with floods, drought and storms.

Now poorer nations say if they can't count on the aid, they can't sign up to a global climate deal. It is a deadly deadlock, but if enough of us demand they stop giving public funds to dirty energy right now, we could shift the finance to help those most in need.

Next week, 80 ministers from across the world meetto try and find a solution. Let's get one million of us behind this push -- Avaaz staff will deliver our call directly to the UK, US, Canada, Australia and others to expose the lie and shame them into action: 

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/finance_100_clean_sls/?botEzdb&v=67464

Industrialised governments have made commitments to switch to 100% clean energy, to stop funding fossil fuels, and to provide $100 billion in climate funding per year by 2020. Butif these promises aren’t tied down now, there will be no global climate deal in Paris.

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infographic?

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/this-map-shows-who-owes-the-most-for-burning-all-that-coal/

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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/08092015/everyone-knows-carbon-debt-big-10-trillion

countries most responsible for global warming owe the rest of the world a tremendous debt, with the author of a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change putting the figure at $10 trillion.

The author came up with that number by calculating how much CO2 each country emitted per capita since 1960, generally recognized as the onset of the worst of human-caused global warming.  Countries with high per capita emissions carry a carbon debt while countries with lower per capita emissions have a carbon credit.

"We in the rich world have over-contributed to the problem and consequently there is a debt associated with that that needs to be honored in some way," said lead author Damon Matthews a researcher at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

That was the purpose of the Green Climate Fund, established in 2010 by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to help vulnerable countries address the challenges of climate change. So far wealthy nations have pledged $10.2 billion to the fund, a fraction of the debt, according to the new study.

The United States is responsible for about 40 percent of the debt.

The study concludes  the carbon debt of high-emitting countries totals 250 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since 1990. The U.S. government calculates the social cost of CO2 emissions --including property damage from increased flooding, reduced agricultural productivity and adverse effects on human health-- is about $40 per metric ton of CO2.

Multiplying the two figures  produces the $10 trillion figure.

Others, however, say Matthews’ accounting may be overly simplistic. According to Jan Fuglestvedt research director of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, Norway, the dates chosen to calculate the debt are arbitrary. Emissions since 1960 account for about 66 percent of CO2 emissions since  the start of the industrial era in 1750; emissions since 1990 are 36 percent.

Counting earlier emissions could change the debts owed by different countries, although Fuglestvedt admitted deciding when to start counting is more of a policy choice than a scientific one.

"When should we know and when should we start counting the emissions that change climate?" Fuglestvedt asked. "That goes beyond natural sciences."

Another issue with the study is counting emissions only by country, said Liane Schalatek, who has attended Green Climate Fund board meetings on behalf of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, where she is associate director.  

"The biggest polluters in absolute terms are not necessarily countries but entities within countries, that is very often large corporations," Schalatek said. "If you put their pollution together [they] actually make up the majority of the pollution."

A 2013 study funded in part by the Böll Foundation found nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s can be traced to the 90 largest fossil fuel and cement producers, most of which are still operating. 

Although the Green Climate Fund does not address corporate responsibility, Schalatek said it is time to stop haggling about where this money will come from and time to start giving larger sums.  In its initial launch, the fund committed $100 billion a year in public and private funds beginning in 2020.

"They should really just say 100 billion is the minimum and we should be thinking about how we can scale that up post 2020," Schalatek said.

Karen Orenstein, an international policy analyst for Friends of the Earth, said, however, that studies like this don’t address the real reason the carbon debt exists.

"A lot of this isn’t really about what science says or academics say," Orenstein said. "It's political."

See Also:

Global Climate Fund on GOP's Budget Hit List

More 'Green Bonds' Needed to Fund the Clean Energy Revolution

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