Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
When President Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he also pulled us out of paying any additional money to the so-called “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Sorry, no more green for the greenies’ fund. This is the fund which has been given $7.2 billion dollars of taxpayer money from a variety of countries. It is the fund that countries around the world have been pushing hard to get their hands on. It is also the fund that was supposed to be given $100 billion, so they could parcel it out for corrupt third world politicians and greedy UN rent-seekers to swim around in for decades … dream on.
So let me start with the basics of the GCF. In 2017, all of the countries around the globe emitted a total of about 33 gigatonnes (“Gt”, 10^9 tonnes) of CO2. However, those countries that emitted just under two-thirds of the total CO2 contributed a total of zero dollars to the GCF. Not one penny.
Yep, that’s right. The countries currently emitting almost two-thirds of the total CO2 aren’t putting up a penny for the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Not China. Not India. Not Brazil. Not Russia. Not a host of countries. Only the lucky few have to pay, because … well, “because history” seems to be the favored explanation …
Next, as has often been the case until recently, the US was among the biggest suckers on the planet. Three countries, the US, Germany, and Japan, have put up nearly half of the $7.2 billion dollars that the GCF is currently wasting … but no more. We’re out of that money-losing game.
To see just how bad the GCF waste is, I took a look at the Green Climate Fund “mitigation” projects. These are the projects that are supposed to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted. To date, there have been 22 of them, with a total funding (GCF + other public and private) of $6.9 billion dollars.
And according to their undoubtedly rosy predictions of CO2 saved by windmills, solar panels, building insulation, and the like, all of the projects together will save just under two gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2. Two billion tonnes! That’s a huge weight of CO2 … but what does that all mean?
To understand it, let’s convert that to parts per million by volume (ppmv) of CO2. At present, we’re at 410 ppmv. Back in 1750, we were at about 278 ppmv of CO2.
And according to the UN IPCC, that increase in CO2 is claimed to have caused a temperature increase of 2.0787°C. The reason for the number of decimals will become apparent in a moment.
Now, to increase the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 1 ppmv, you need to emit about 16.8 Gt of CO2. The Green Climate Fund has avoided the emission of 2 Gt of CO2 … so IF their estimates are correct, and IF we got all of the savings today, instead of 410 ppmv it would make the CO2 concentration 409.88 ppmv.
And in turn, this would make the claimed temperature increase caused by CO2 to be smaller … at 2.0771°C.
So IF their estimates are correct, and IF we got all the savings today, and IF CO2 actually were the secret temperature control knob for the planet … if all that were true, the total of all the projects funded by the GCF would cause a temperature reduction of … wait for it … 0.0015°C.
How small a temperature change is this? Well, if you walk up a flight of stairs, which is about ten feet (three metres) vertically, there is a temperature difference due to the change in altitude. How big a difference? Well, temperatures drop about one degree C for every hundred metres you go up in altitude. So in climbing a flight of stairs, you’d experience a temperature drop of about 0.03°C. Three-hundredths of one degree. Far too small to detect without special instruments.
But that’s still twenty times the possible temperature reduction from the $6.9 billion dollars wasted on these GCF mitigation projects, a reduction which was only 0.0015°C. So we’ve spent $6.9 billion dollars for a POSSIBLE decrease of about the temperature difference from the floor to half-way up to your knee … be still, my beating heart …
Or we could look at it another way … how much would we have to spend to drop possible temperatures by one measly degree? Since we are spending $6.9 billion for a possible theoretical drop of 0.0015°C, that would mean that a drop of 1°C would cost us a mere $4.6 TRILLION DOLLARS … with absolutely no guarantee of success.
And people are still whining about the US pulling out of this cockamamie Green Climate Fund??? Does the phrase “Don’t throw good money after bad!” still mean anything these days?
w.
PS—QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. I get grumpy if you don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is, without an exact quote, nobody (possibly including you) is clear just what you are referring to.
Willis,
According to Bloomberg, the head of the Green Climate Fund, a former Australian diplomat called Howard Bamsey has just resigned after a “ disappointing” meeting of the Fund in which no new projects were approved.
One commentator says this is “ a low point “ for the organisation but hopes this is the “ canary in the coal mine” and not “ the nail in the coffin”!
But, but, doesn’t it feel good to be saving the planet, as long as it’s not my money. Oh wait it is! This is really about global government, so who gets the most votes, and the money?
Robber
Ah!
You spotted the fatal flaw in their plan.
No one gets to vote, that’s how Christina Figueres’s new political system works, not that she’s described how her new global politics works, but she want’s to scrap Capitalism.
“Don’t throw good money after bad!”
Hi Willis, couldn’t agree more with the above statement . Here’s some other spending that could go to a better cause.
” In the decade following Sept. 11, 2001, military spending increased 50 percent, adjusted for inflation. In comparison, spending on every other non-military program – things like education, health care, public transit, and science –grew by only 13.5 percent over the same time period”
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/how-military-spending-has-changed/
“The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.
U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.”
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/
Willis, When America is at war who runs the show, the military or the government?
jmorpuss
Are you suggesting democracy isn’t worth defending?
And whilst there is no evidence whatsoever that justifies spending a penny on climate change, it’s clear that military spending is justified by radical Islamic aggression around the world, which the USA takes seriously.
HotShot
Democracy meaning “Rule of the people” sounds like the people are in control , but wait, if you look up the meaning for the word “rule” it means “to control” So what democracy really means is “control of the people”.
And what do you think happens to all the out of date weapons the US military has produced over the years???
“When President Obama announced US airstrikes in Iraq, most observers understood that the US would be bombing members of ISIS. What many did not know was that, in a twist of such bitterly symbolic irony that it could only occur in the Middle East, the US would also be bombing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.
Here’s why: in the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more. ”
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/5982501/the-us-is-now-bombing-its-own-military-equipment-in-iraq
One thing the US military needs is conflict to justify it’s spending and i put it to you that the US military create conflicts around the world so their people wont question their spending .
“This is a list of the world’s largest arms manufacturers and other military service companies who profit the most from the War economy, their origin is shown as well. The information is based on a list published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for 2015.[17][18][19][20][21] The list provided by the SIPRI excludes companies based in China.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry
jmorpuss
Irrespective of your demented interpretation of democracy, it’s the manifestation of it that’s important, you know, real life stuff. You might want to read Samuel Adams Speech to help you understand.
Why look! Imagine that, Anthony posted a copy of it yesterday: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/04/199977/
And there you go, off on the tired old conspiracy theory that America creates wars in order to send Haliburton in and profit from international aid to reconstruct. Then go in and bomb the equipment they provided to the Iraqi army to get more money, somehow?
The Americans undoubtedly bombed their own equipment, which is what the Russians should have done in Afghanistan, but didn’t. They just left untold equipment there which the Mujahideen put to good use, then Al-Qaeda, to turn the region into a poverty stricken wasteland.
To ship all the American equipment out of Iraq would have taken a huge logistical effort, over an extended period of time, during which much of it would have been pilfered. With the expense and risk involved, it was deemed prudent to destroy rather than recover the equipment. Perhaps not demonstrably economical on a spreadsheet, but then a spreadsheet doesn’t account for the wholesale damage that equipment would have caused had it fallen into the wrong hands. Not to mention the opportunity to be sold to, and reverse engineered by, opportunistic foreign governments.
Frankly, your contention that America deliberately wages war to profit from destruction is utterly preposterous. WW2 would have been an ideal opportunity, yet the US refused to join the UK in Europe fighting Hitler, until RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U Boat with 128 American citizen deaths. And the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, remember?
Then there was the lend – lease program. At it’s own risk, and with only the principles of civilisation as justification, America lent the UK $31.4 billion (equivalent to $427 billion today) which was only paid off in 2006.
Your treacherous beliefs insult the memory of every ally soldier who fought to defend your right to make insane propositions.
And there’s a much easier way of generating wealth to cover military spending, it’s called Capitalism, and free trade, which America used to be very good at.
“the US refused to join the UK in Europe fighting Hitler, until RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U Boat ”
Eh?
Roger Knights
“Eh?” what?
The sinking of the Lusitania brought the US into the first world war.
Hitler was only a corporal at that time.
It was the bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the US into WWII.
And even then we probably wouldn’t have gotten involved in the European theater if Hitler hadn’t declared war on us.
MarkW
Yep, my mistake. My two brain cells tripping over each other.
“The sinking of the Lusitania brought the US into the first world war.”
Nope, that occurred in 1915. What got the U.S. into WW1 was the release of the Zimmerman telegram (intercepted and decoded by the Brits) in 1917, which offered Mexico assistance in regaining its lost lands in the U.S. SW.
Saved me some time there…
HotShot Ends his rant with
And there’s a much easier way of generating wealth to cover military spending, it’s called Capitalism, and free trade, which America used to be very good at.
“The ties between slavery and capitalism in the United States weren’t always crystal clear in our history books. For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity. ”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2017/05/03/the-clear-connection-between-slavery-and-american-capitalism/#445d95d07bd3
Debt, Underemployment, and Capitalism
The Rise of Twenty-First-Century Serfdom
“Working classes, en masse, have been corralled into legalized systems of education debt with false promises of “middle-class” lifestyles, only to be tossed into a job market that can no longer keep up with the system’s inherent deficits and inability to provide a living wage to the masses. Massive inequality and unprecedented wealth accumulation and concentration have paralleled uncontrollable costs of living and widespread housing insecurity for the working-class majority.”
http://newpol.org/content/debt-underemployment-and-capitalism
Serfdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
jmorpuss
Oh dear. You deem to drag the subject further off topic to make a point, then introduce a magazine article to reinforce that point.
There’s a clue there, magazine articles don’t go down very well on this blog. It is devoted to science after all.
However, I will respond by saying that, it’s my understanding that the Klu Klux Klan was the brainchild of the Democratic party. That benevolent institution you seem to apportion with generosity and moralistic values. That socialist institution you admire which conforms to the same values as Venezuela, and innumerable other poverty riven countries who imagine that the state spending Other Peoples Money is a good idea. States that are internationally renowned for government corruption and citizen subjugation.
But that’s OK, because my parents and grandparents fought for your right to express your opinions. But try going to Venezuela and expressing those sentiments and I expect you would return to a free democracy a humbled man, if you returned at all.
I’m not sure about your country (I assume you’re American) but one of the greatest contemporary leaders of the UK, Margaret Thatcher, and her Conservative successors, left our country with a positive bank balance. The socialist government, which followed her, headed by Tony Blair, not only spunked all that money in his term as PM, but spunked much, much more, so much so that the whole country was groaning under immense debt.
Your term “Debt, Underemployment, and Capitalism The Rise of Twenty-First-Century Serfdom” defines the left, not the right. Witness Zimbabwe; Mugabie, a self proclaimed Marxist kicked out the colonial style white farmers and embarked on his destructive way. In, from memory, 1998, inflation was at a horrendous 35% (or so, exact figures escape me) and by 2015 inflation had risen to 11,000,000%. Yes, you read it right, eleven million percent. Today, there is 80% unemployment.
Please describe to me, or illustrate, where capitalism has ever done that badly?
Your description of working class servitude has been drawn from an amateurish, far left website you should realise, is extreme.
Evidently, you haven’t even read the description of Serfdom, from your own link, the first lines describe it thus:
“Serfdom is the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage, which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.”
Read on and you will find: “The United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery also prohibits serfdom as a form of slavery.”
I don’t know whether you noticed or not, but the western world abandoned feudalism as a bad idea many years ago.
You are tossing about terms you don’t understand in the hope that some will stick, and you look clever.
And a little advice. If you want to insult me, the means by which to do so is to win an argument. Then I’ll be forced to apologise to you.
I could refer to you as jmorpussy, but I couldn’t possibly be that crass. It demeans me more than you.
I thank you for your indulgence.
That’s ridiculous nonsense, jmorpuss. The U.S. military doesn’t “create conflicts around the world,” and certainly didn’t create the wars in and around Iraq.
The main reason that American-made weapons found their way into ISIS hands is by ISIS capturing them from the retreating Iraqi Army. That happened because, when ISIS invaded Iraq, our leftist leadership, i.e., President Obama, refused to provide our Iraqi allies with the air support that they desperately needed, to repel the invasion.
Under President Bush, the United States had spent a fortune building up a modern Army to defend the nascent democracy in Iraq. However, we didn’t build them an air force to support their army. That’s because they wouldn’t need an air force, since if their army ever needed air support they’d get it from the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Fifth and Sixth Fleets.
But they didn’t get it, because our pothead commander-in-chief refused to authorize it.
My mind is still boggled by the fact that in 2014, when ISIS was overrunning much of Iraq, and the headless bodies of our friends and allies were piling up along streets in conquered towns, and the retreating Iraqi army desperately, desperately needed American air support, Obama… took a vacation. As the ISIL blitzkrieg progressed, Obama jetted to North Dakota, where he visited a Sioux Reservation. Then it was on to a California fundraiser, and a visit and golf with some gay friends in Palm Springs. Then he weighed in on the argument over how to pronounce “gif.”
Apparently, no crisis was severe enough to make Obama take his job seriously. What could account for such astonishing dysfunction? That’s when I began to wonder whether he ever really gave up the choom.
The US spends more for defense than do other countries because we have more to defend.
First you have to convert Gt CO2 to Gt C.
2 GtCO2 / 3.67 = 0.545 Gt C
$6.9 billion / 0.545 billion tonnes = $12.66/tonne
What’s a tonne of carbon worth?
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/OMB%20Circular%20No.%20A-4.pdf
(We generally use a 10% discount rate to value proved oil reserves.)
At a real world 7% discount rate, a tonne of carbon is worth…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/03/15/discounting-away-the-social-cost-of-carbon-the-fast-lane-to-undoing-obamas-climate-regulations/
Or less.
Brilliant, Willis! As somebody else pointed out, Bjorn Lomborg has made similar calculations in the past and used them to highlight the profligate waste and stupidity of this whole CAGW scam. However, your numbers and comparisons really nail the issue and gave me a good start to my day. I wish Clare the best in producing her video and hope it will find its way to WUWT for us all to enjoy…..and to the wider world, so more people can see what this UN sponsored theft is all about! Great article!
Thanks, Phil. If I’m allowed to post them here on WUWT, then I will – got a few more weeks on my current doc to finish first
Willis, if you’re ever in Eastern Ohio, you need to stop by. We gather around the lakeside fire pit seeking answers to the great questions. You’d be a hit. Oh, and bring Anthony.
Mods getting that ” page can not be displayed” message again-thought you should know.
To Whom It May Concern
I received an email notification about a reply to a Comment I had posted yet oddly I don’t see the original reply to my post in the comment section (am I being a bit dumb?) so I don’t who it was but they asked me…
Are you thinking of something like the PragerU series, but with longer run-times? – Yes
What tool(s) do you use to make your videos?
MAYA (for character modelling & rigging – a control system so the character can be animated) plus Redshift for GPU rendering
3D COAT (UV & texturing – basically the coloring-in bit)
VUE (realistic 3D landscape/environments)
Adobe CC Suite (After Effects/Prem Pro/Potatoshop, etc)
Affinity Designer (because I hate Potatoshop)
What’s your YouTube channel? Currently I’ve just posted a few technical rigging tutorials which are of no relevance or interest to anyone here. But, once I’ve finished my doc (my first) then I’ve got to figure out what to do – create a channel solely about Gorebal warming, etc because I’ intend to create a long running series of them or post them along with all the other vid’s I intend to make on random topics such as Off-grid life-hacks, soap-making, etc.
” a drop of 1°C would cost us a mere $4.6 TRILLION DOLLARS “
Well, if this actually worked, if we really could control climate and temperature, $4600 billions dollar is certainly huge, but a fair price. I mean : $500 per inhabitant, which could be invested in a few decades ? What bargain.
Where to I sign to INCREASE temperature. 5° seems fair to me.
At the contribution ratio of the Green Climate Fund so far, how much of that would come from the US? Some people credit President Reagan with precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union by forcing them to undertake new military spending they couldn’t afford. I think the communists of the world learned their lesson and are returning the complement.
Alan Watt from, THE Alan Watt from Cutting through the Matrix?
If so, many thanks for all your incredible work!
Sorry; I don’t understand the reference, so almost certainly not.
Years ago an editorial in the WSJ noted that the Kyoto accords would cost an estimated $10 Trillion. The benefit would be a six year delay in the temperature trend. That is, we would hit the same temperature level, but it would be six years later.
This is a better way to frame the discussion than in talking about “degrees of temperature reduced.” We have a natural warming trend that is going to continue, driven by both natural and man made causes. When you frame the discussion this way, it becomes more obvious how futile are all these proposed expensive gestures. Even if someone accepts all the bad predictions of the most fearful CAGW proponents, that still doesn’t mean that we should take any expensive steps to prevent or to mitigate our own contributions to warming, whatever they may be.
If adjusting to a warming world will be expensive, then we can’t afford to have expended all our resources on expensive measures that were doomed to be futile and ineffective from the start. All these green energy prevention initiatives are illogical, even if you accept the mantra of AGW.
I wonder if the calculations of changes in CO2 emissions included the entire supply chain of the new projects? If these new projects replaced existing facilities, which are now idle, then the entire CO2 production of the supply chain needs to count. If the new projects are new capacity, then the difference in CO2 production in the supply chain vs. CO2 production in the supply chain of the, for example, fossil fuel, alternative count. Since renewable power generally costs more than fossil fuel power (or nuclear), and since the price of things often is closely related to the energy needed to make it, one wonders.
How could we spend $7B to raise the CO2 levels to 800-1200ppmv? We know that will have a positive impact on agriculture and food security.
lol.
4 Jul: ClimateChangeNews: UN climate fund chief resigns for personal reasons while board meeting collapses
In a dramatic conclusion to a meeting that failed to approve any finance for the developing world, Howard Bamsey announced his exit from the Green Climate Fund.
By Megan Darby
Howard Bamsey resigned as executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) with immediate effect on Wednesday, in a bombshell finish to a fraught board meeting…
It came as the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea collapsed with no decisions on 11 funding bids worth nearly $1 billion, or on how to top up the flagship climate finance initiative’s dwindling resources…
US representative Geoffrey Okamoto said it should be “donor-driven”, to the chagrin of development campaigners.
President Donald Trump is refusing to honour an outstanding $2bn US pledge to the fund.
“The gall of the Trump guy to say #GCFund replenishment process should be donor driven. Guess he’ll just sit down and shut up then,” tweeted Action Aid’s Brandon Wu…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/07/04/un-climate-fund-chief-resigns-personal-reasons-board-meeting-collapses/
Wow, sure makes me want to reach for my wallet and “help out.”
Reminds of the famous direct mail offer: Double your IQ or none of your money back!
Or, alternatively, the mad carpenter: “I’ve cut this board three times, and it’s still too short.”
$4.6 TRILLION DOLLARS
≠=============
That estimate is probably much too low because it assumes costs are linear. But they are likely exponential as the UN fund is likely going after the low hanging fruit first.
The cost to eliminate CO2 completely is likely 10 K to 100 K per person. With pop projected to peak at 10 billion people we are looking at 100 to 1000 trillion dollars to decarbonize the world.
That would take between 1000 and 10,000 years if the 100 billion per year UN climate fund was fully funded and on the job.
Given that actual funding is just a tiny fraction of what was promised the job can be expected to take even longer.
Excellent post Willis!
It seems that you have dropped a “nuclear dry ice bomb” on the Green Climate Fund. How can there be any chance of survival?
The Left has long been into wealth redistribution. Internal redistribution in many western democracies are a variety of social programs. Today most of that money is redistributed from those that work and produce to those that don’t but a large percentage to government bureaucrats. The other form of wealth distribution, international redistribution, starts with the belief by those on the left that every western democracy got wealthy exploiting and taking advantage of third world or less economically advanced countries. There have been many international wealth redistribution programs, e.g., the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, the UN, etc. Today it is unfettered technology transfer, allowing countries like China to move from 1930s technology to 21st Century tech in a few decades instead of centuries. Yet the big one today is of course “fighting” the evils of global warming. The Left in the west see such wealth redistribution as deserved or proper punishment of the west due to the evil doings of the past and as an opportunity to bring capitalism to its knees.
But there is a simple solution to the 0.0015°C problem which was pointed out at a Paris Accord follow-up meeting in Berlin; much more money.
However the devil is in the details, it is so tedious (the exact word they used) to set up a system for the distribution of this huge amount of money. But this brilliant committee had a simple solution to this unfortunate challenge:
They would simply give the money to the green NGOs, because they had the organization required to solve this vast problem.
“They would simply give the money to the green NGOs, because they had the organization required to solve this vast problem.”
Kinda like the wolf guarding the hen house …D’OH !
Willis, that essay was just too good!
Great. A change that you can calculate but never measure, the climate warrior equivalent of counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. Once again, you demonstrate that this is a religious rather than a scientific argument. Think of payments to the Green Climate Fund as modern day indulgences to the Church of Global warming. Cheers –
So if the outside temperature drops by 0.0015 C for climbing 1/20 of a flight of stairs, will the greenies give me $6.9 billion the next time I take a step up?
This could become very lucrative for mountain climbers!
Thanks for pointing out the futility with such simplicity. I had not worked out the numbers the way you have, but my intuition has informed me that the Green Climate Fund was, and has always been, a green crock.
Send a copy of your figures to the UN, with a note to have some of their “experts” confirm the numbers. Yeah, right, like anybody will pay any attention to that. When a mission statement requires human fault, too many jobs and too much status stand to be lost by going against that mission statement.
Clearly, the whole scene has veered far, far away from sound reasoning, moving ever more furiously towards sound bites to reinforce those jobs and status.
Robert,
I have spent a great deal of time trying to get my Provincial (Ontario) and Federal governments to tell me what numerical relationship between emissions and temperature they are using to cost-justify and monitor the effectiveness of ‘environmental’ programs.
No state secret is guarded more carefully than this!
Hello Willis, You wrote an article years ago that I still reference….it was called something like “How much would you buy”….if my memory serves me correctly you estimated in that article that it would cost 1200 Trillion dollars to mitigate 2 degrees Celsius…now though, quoting from above numbers it is roughly 9.2 Trillion to mitigate 2 degrees Celsius,
How has this number changed so dramatically?
Gaelan, every one of these plans (Kyoto, the California climate laws, the claimed EU reductions, the Paris Agreement, and the Green Climate Fund) has a different amount of money that they claim it will cost. They also each have a different amount of CO2 that they claim will be “avoided” if we follow their goofy ideas.
Of course, the costs are always underestimated and the CO2 avoided is always overestimated, but in any case, that’s why the numbers are different in each case.
w.
Thank you Willis….so many thimbles, how in the heck do we keep our eyes on the pea(s)?!?!
Good people like you, Mr Watts, Mr McIntyre…..the list has been getting longer and longer since 2006…
Thank you sirs and madams
One can look up the Green Fund salary structure – minimum is $75K running to six figures and they complain about being short handed. Me me me …. I’m here!!