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Climate Reparations? Nah.
Protesters take part in the Walk for Your Future climate march ahead of COP27 in Brussels, Belgium, on Oct. 23.
To win “this battle for our lives,” round tables galore were held, coalitions were formed, roles for youth and even children in the crusade were created. Curiously, no actions were taken that would directly limit greenhouse gas emissions, possibly because the much-ballyhooed Paris Agreement had proved worthless, with almost no nations honoring their commitments.
The signal achievement of the meeting was instead a comprehensive agreement on “loss and damage,” which is essentially code for reparations. Rich nations are to pay trillions to poor nations to atone for the doleful effects of industrialization.
China and India, the world’s foremost polluters, took a powder. The US, the nation that has reduced pollution the most since 1990, was at the front of the line volunteering to bankroll the effort.
Americans have traditionally contributed generously to international aid efforts. Yet the notion of climate reparations is problematical.
It’s not clear, in spite of the persistent claims in the media, that weather events are related to emission-caused climate change. But we do know that the human cost of disasters is much smaller today than in years past.
Stephen Koonin, formally in the Obama Energy Department, in his book Unsettled points out that weather-related deaths were actually 80 times more frequent a century ago, before the technological improvements in infrastructure and mitigation provided by industrialization.
Much of the insistence on reparations is rooted in resentment over the colonial past. But take Pakistan, a leader in the reparations movement. Pakistan claims its devastating floods are the direct result of climate change.
North America and Europe have seen significant recent reforestation. But since Pakistan left colonial status in 1947, its forests have shrunk from 1/3 to 1/20 of its total area. Water and silt run straight off the mountains causing the massive flooding.
Britain, the former colonizer of Pakistan, has cut its carbon emissions in half since 1990, mostly by closing coal mines at great expense. Meanwhile, Pakistan has over 100 operating coal mines and can still afford to develop nuclear weapons. But you can’t go wrong blaming the colonialists.
UN climate change proposals in the past were more modest. They mostly financed specific infrastructure programs in poor countries, often bypassing local governments. But COP27 was written in a UN now dominated by aggressive socialist dictatorships with appalling human rights records.
As a result, the COP27 plan would call for $1.3 trillion in annual retribution payments that would go not to the practical needs of poor countries but to the kleptocratic governments which plague foreign aid efforts. The effect would be to further strengthen the petty tyrants and save them from forces of reform.
The notion that the West should pay damages for the Industrial Revolution is poppycock. It was the capitalist democracies that produced the ideas, the economic system, and innovations that have produced previously unimaginable income growth around the world.
Deadly diseases have been eliminated, infant mortality reduced, and life expectancy extended. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of hunger and poverty, and for this, we should pay?
There’s one more problem with paying reparations: we don’t have the money. The US is the deeply indebted con man living on borrowed funds who continues to make extravagant gifts to adoring friends. And why not – it’s not really his money anyway.
If the socialist autocrats demanding compensation were the least sincere about creating more prosperous nations on their own, the guiding principles are well known: free markets, secure property rights, low and fair taxes, independent courts, and reasonable regulation. But don’t expect the dictators to sacrifice their power and privileges any time soon.
“Loss and damage,” is based on feel-good morality, false history, and imaginary economics. It would do nothing to improve the environment of our planet. We can in good conscience just say no.
Published in Environment
If the Biden clown show wants to fund grifters, let them do so out of their personal accounts.
Whether you believe in climate change or not, is irrelevant. Another quasi religious ideology, based on Theory, and dreams and wishes. Those dreams and wishes are irrelevant to reality, that reality being humans cannot change the climate in any meaningful way. Unless we choose to live under a dome, we will simply have to adapt to what this planet decides to do with its weather. With over 3 trillion dollars spent in the last 20 years and counting, what has actually been done to solve a crisis that doesn’t exist? I guess we haven’t spent enough money, or spent enough time self-flagellating ourselves. As long as these awesome get-togethers of virtue signaling Nations, keep happening, we will keep spending our great, great,great, great, great, great-grandchildren’s money to find out.
Let the free market solve “climate change.” These bozos are gambling with house money. If they think this is a great need, then let them invest their own money in the projects.
If history is even somewhat honest, it will record the global response to COVID as the worst example of an acute public policy misfire, a global catastrophe motivated by everything except common sense and honesty.
That history, if it is allowed to be written, will also record Climate Alarmism and the policies that spring from it as the worst example of chronic public policy misfiring, a gathering catastrophe that, unless checked by that same common sense and honesty that seems so wanting, will cause incalculably greater damage and suffering than COVID, ending the decades-long trend of increasing global prosperity for no plausible reason.
Climate Alarmism, by derailing the engine of prosperity, has the potential to be the biggest unforced error in human history.
If history is allowed to be written truthfully.