FA Note: The brouhaha about climate change has ALWAYS been about wealth redistribution: THEFT.
United Nations climate negotiators found themselves at an impasse during a ten-day conference in Lima, Peru this month when the world’s second-largest economy — the United States — refused to subsidize the carbon dioxide emission reductions of the world’s largest economy — China.
Yes, there is some dispute about which of those two countries really has the larger economy — it’s all in how you measure it — but reverse them if you want and it still won’t make any sense.
The basic fact of the matter is that delegates to the conference will be unlikely to reach any sort of agreement unless it includes a jaw-dropping amount of wealth redistribution.
“We are upset that 2011, 2012, 2013 – three consecutive years – the developed world provided $10 billion each year for climate action support to the developing world, but now they have reduced it. Now they are saying $10 billion is for four years, so it is $2.5 billion,” India delegate to the U.N. Prakash Javadekar told The Guardian, according to a report from Eagle Rising.
Javadekar has obviously taken a page from the liberal playbook — whatever unearned charity you’re given, complain that it’s nowhere near enough.
Similar negotiations in Warsaw, Poland, last year to find a way to limit “warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100″ ended with no agreement, and for similar reasons when the U.S. and other nations argued against climate “reparations.”
That caused delegates from China and other nations to participate in a “massive walkout,” according to the report.
Which was probably the best thing that could possibly have happened to those negotiations, in retrospect.
Apparently, “some observers” were actually dumb enough to think that this year’s conference might end differently because “the U.S. and China (had already) pledged to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the coming years.”
Except that that hasn’t happened.
President Barack Obama promised China that the U.S. would reduce emissions by at least 26 percent in the next ten years and China promised to keep increasing emissions until 2030.
Seriously. That was the agreement. China’s emissions would “peak” in 2030, implying that five years after the U.S. had met its goal, China might be willing to talk about reducing its own carbon dioxide emissions.
Only among leftist diplomats could such an agreement ever be considered a “reduction.”
Meanwhile, other delegates are basically saying to the West, show me the money.
“How many CoPs (Conference of the Parties) will it take for us to really see any tangible results? We have been going from CoP to CoP and every time we are given so many assurances, and expectations are raised, but the gaps are getting wider,” Maldivian diplomat Ahmed Sareer whined.
“There has been a clear commitment of $100 billion a year but how are we really being offered?” he told The Guardian. “Even when they make those pledges how do we know how much is going to materialize? There is no point of knowing that behind the wall there is a big source of funds available unless we can reach it.”
In other words: money first, reduced emissions later.
As the old joke says, I think we’ve established what Sareer is. Now we’re just haggling over price.
Meanwhile, according to Eagle Rising, the conference is likely to end “without having made any real progress toward a treaty to reduce global warming.”
For the United States, that might be the best news of all.
