Essay by Eric Worrall
Everyone agrees the USA should be looted, but China and India want to be recipients of funding, not contributors.
COP28: Should India and China receive or pay climate damage fund?
By Navin Singh Khadka
Environment correspondent, BBC World ServiceChina is the top emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and India comes at number three.
The two countries also have major economies, so then why is there a disagreement over whether they should contribute to a fund to tackle the damage caused by climate change?
…
What is the loss and damage fund?
The fund aims to provide financial assistance to poorer nations that have been hit by climate-related disasters – for example, communities displaced by floods or rising sea levels – so that they can rebuild and be rehabilitated.
…
Who should pay for it?
The US – a developed country and the second largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world – and other developed nations say China and India should join them in not only making significant cuts in emissions for meaningful global climate action, but also contribute to the fund.
But China and India disagree, arguing their high levels of emissions are a recent development when compared to the historic emissions of developed countries like the US and the UK.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-67610621
This is shaping up to be the funniest COP to date.
The leader of COP28 Sultan Al Jaber appears to want to cash in on last year’s $150 billion investment in more capacity.
Now participants can’t make up their minds who gets to loot who, with intractable disputes about whether India and China should be looters or victims.
I doubt China will budge on their refusal to pay up. China is in the middle of a multi-trillion dollar property and banking crisis which has tanked a third of their economy, problems which are rapidly getting worse thanks to the already deeply indebted Chinese government policy of propping up failed enterprises with public money. China has bigger problems than worrying about looking bad at a climate conference.
India is also in the middle of a Chinese style housing bubble, which could easily burst if fear generated by the Chinese collapses affects consumer confidence in India. While India’s finances are currently buoyant, thanks to Prime Minister Modi’s growth oriented policies, the economic winds in India could change very rapidly in the face of a global slowdown.
I can’t help thinking the only winner from COP28 will be the COP 28 President, Sultan Al Jabber, who will likely find lots of buyers for his nation’s rapidly expanding natural gas capacity.
The BBC and green groups are very concerned at the number of fossil fuel delegates at FLOP 28. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67607289
Highly amusing!
and 94,500 representatives of ruinable energy, activists, politicians and other hangers on
94,500? I hope there are enough ladies of negotiable affection to go around..
And Sadiq Khan in one of the worst cases of political overreach I have ever heard of.
What an utter *#*#*#….
Does that word begin with’cluster’?
His parents showed some prescience when they named him Sad IQ..
I thought it was Sad Dick.
I see he was an MP for Tooting. Must have caught the disease.
It undermines the integrity of the process.
I didn’t know the process had that.
China has emitted more C02 in the last 6 years than the entire amount that the UK has emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah, and what difference does it make if China started producing CO2 later than the UK or the US?
How long does a parcel of CO2 emitted stay in the Earth’s atmosphere? That is the question.
The next question is what difference does it make how much CO2 is emitted or when, seeing as how there is no evidence CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth?
Reputedly, 2.8 years, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s man-made, or natural.
CO2 flows, which are at least 100 times greater than human flows, are between sources and sinks.
The atmosphere is slowly storing more, but is near a 600 million year low, which is bad for flora and fauna,
The land stores more, which is good for flora and fauna
The oceans store the most, by far; the CO2 is turned into other chemicals that are used by marine life
I have serious question (perhaps answered in prior years)… How is the “near a 600million year low” arrived at? Or, is that some sort of ‘guess’.?
From Dr. Patrick Moore – one of the Founders of Greenpeace
Today, at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much</b> as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.
But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks.100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate.
During the last glaciation, which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180 ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die. Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there was a severe restriction of growth as plants began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2 rebounded to 280 ppm. But even today, with human emissions causing CO2 to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000 ppm.
Here is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would begin to die.
The oceans hold about 70 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. The oceans have been warming, probably from increased solar irradiance over decades, which reduces the amount of CO2 they can absorb.
The CO2 remains in the atmosphere until the plants, land or sea based, use it, or until it gets absorbed into the oceans.
While in the atmosphere it is a stored resource for the world’s biosphere.
The atmosphere is by far the best place to store the small amount, relatively, of human release CO2…
… that is where it has the best potential for reuse.
What COP clearly needs is more Climate Delegates jet-setting in from around the world to argue about how to spend my tax dollars.
COP needs to accept the fact that the reflection it sees in the mirror of The Ugliest Woman in Creation will never end up as prom queen.
Some will never get it…
UK would be a climate leader again under Labour, vows Starmer
Exclusive: Labour leader tells Guardian at Cop28 that Britain is wanted back in ‘leading role’ as he accuses Sunak of retreating
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/04/keir-starmer-vows-to-make-uk-climate-leader-again-labour-cop28-rishi-sunak
And Packham goes to court.
Still as bonkers as ever, here.
Britons should stock up on torches and candles in case of power cuts, says Dowden….
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/05/britons-should-stock-up-on-torches-and-candles-in-case-of-power-cuts-says-oliver-dowden
I have done, just in case. We’ve had 3 or 4 mini power cuts (lasting only a moment each) in the last few days, might be a warning of more problems to come.
All torches have new batteries and at the back door plenty of firewood and smokeless briquettes for the baxi fire which can take either a soup pot or a frying pan.
Must be a first time for the Guardian to suggest something sensible, though.
The Grauniad isn’t suggesting it, they’re using it to support an attack by a Labour MP on the government for a lack of resilience and preparedness. It was a bit of an own goal by Dowden, though, as he said it during a UK ‘risk and resilience’ program.
It’s difficult to disagree with; the UK has lost most of it’s resilience due to reliance on wind and solar as well as reducing gas stockpiles to a ludicrously low amount.
“ reducing gas stockpiles to a..” just in time delivery system…
Times will vary especially now maritime trade appears to be embracing wind power.
I didn’t actually read the Guardian piece, Richard, so I retract, and subtitute “print” for “suggest”.
substitute.
Grrrrr.
I got it.
Our torches make plenty of smoke and serve as ignition sources, and instead of candles, pitchforks are more effective in getting the attention of politicians.
I had forgotten that ‘torches’, in some countries, meant ‘flashlights’.
Plant more trees. You’ll have something to burn to keep from freezing to death come winter. This should also count as Net Zero, right? Burn a tree, plant a tree has to be carbon neutral.
Coal is just old trees that mother nature has heated and compressed for easy storage.
Don’t forget your battery powered radio so you can listen to the government messages telling you how to survive this weeks blackout!
The UK was far more interesting when it was a macho nation.
It was never intended to seriously get India and China to pay up, it’s intention was to curb unrealistic demands for trillions of US dollars and, if that failed, to kick the whole idea into the weeds for a while. The US, or rather the Biden/Obama regimes, were willing to stump up a few billion of US taxpayers hard-earned cash to support third-world leaders in the luxury lifestyle they’d come to expect, but stopped way short of the demand for trillions. This was always going to happen at one COP or another, ever since the demands were tabled in Glasgow.
Yes it is over for now.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/12/04/un-cop-28-have-we-dodged-the-loss-and-damage-threat-again/
Empty talk.
But China and India disagree, arguing their high levels of emissions are a recent development when compared to the historic emissions of developed countries like the US and the UK.
Yes, Three Card Monte in action.
Quickly shift the debate away from the tonnage countries are emitting to (in this case) their historical emissions. Then argue that China and India must be free to match the West on historical emissions.
In other cases must be able to match the West on per capita emissions, whoops, that won’t work, China already did that….
OK, maybe they should be able to emit as much as they want as long as they install a lot of wind and solar?
Or as much as they want as long as they do it for exports?
The climate activists claim to believe that the total tonnage of current and future emissions is the driver of the climate and unless reduced will destroy human civilization on earth. They then drop this to endorse an argument that China and India are right to do emit enough they claim to believe will destroy human civilization on earth. Because its only fair, or something.
All the signs are that no-one believes any of this. Not China and India, for sure, but not even the activists either.
What a fine mess Michael Mann and Phil Jones, and fellow travelers have created.
This is what Mass Delusion and Greed looks like in the Western World. it wouldn’t be possible without a bogus Hockey Stick chart.
Add the 97% consensus folks to your Mann & Jones list.
I think more folks have gone with the “97” than with “the stick”.
Why? Because weather is amazingly variable and any warming
is unnoticeable by people. Well, at least I haven’t noticed any!
I do know people that believe there is a consensus and have heard
of the 97%.
I have a bit on this.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/10/31/will-china-pay-climate-change-loss-and-damage/
China and India are officially developing countries.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/12/04/un-cop-28-have-we-dodged-the-loss-and-damage-threat-again/
Nobody is required to pay anything.
All just noise.
Nobody except the Western World is required to do anything.
The politicians of the Western World are putting onerous constraints on the people they govern. Meanwhile, the rest of the world’s CO2 emissions make the Western World’s reduction efforts meaningless.
We can see the trainwreck coming. Things are going from bad to worse when it comes to accomplishing Net Zero. Net Zero will not happen. Western politicians should give it up and get back to the real world, where China and India live.
Russia provides less fossil fuels to the slow-growing US/EU world, and more to
fast-growing BRISC, etc., world
Control will shift more and more
Were developing countries at the point when, I think, it was the Kyoto protocols. That point has never been updated to reflect their changing status (surprise, surprise, both countries have resisted all attempts to update their status) and so the farce continues.
“All just noise.”
I’d go as far as to call it ‘white noise’….
Note for the woke: white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies.
I kid you not and as everyone here can see this whole shemozzel gets more ridiculous every single year. For heavens sake why can’t everybody see how stupid they look with everyone trying to appear to be more virtuous than than everybody else.
From the article: “The fund aims to provide financial assistance to poorer nations that have been hit by climate-related disasters”
That should read “human-caused climate-related disasters since this is all about human-caused climate change/global warming.
The problem for rational people is there is no evidence that humans are causing the Earth’s climate to change. So why should we be paying money to other nations for weather-related problems we did not cause?
Historians in the future will call our time today the “Era of Mass Delusion”. No doubt, many scientific papers will be written about the mindset of this era and how it came to be.
Historians in the future will call our time today…
Given that the now woke establishment and its many tentacles are busy re-writing history – history after all, is written by the winners – I’m not sure that future historians will be worth listening to. One of the latest ‘culture war’ fronts to open up is archaeology. The trick is to put on your woke tinted glasses.
You only have to go back 2000 years and you are in the pre Christian era. Christianity took up to three centuries to get going. So, forget all the values you hold. They did not exist at that time as they do today. They had… different cultures, gods, social values and morals.
“This attempt to stop the sex identification of skeletal remains, dating hundreds or even thousands of years old, probably sounds like a slightly absurd academic squabble – of concern only to archaeologists and anthropologists. But it has far-reaching implications.
There are always exceptions to the norm, but most individuals can be classified, according to biological characteristics, as either male or female. Trans activists in the archaeological community are now rejecting this mode of classification. And they are doing so for a reason: they are trying to erase the reality of biological sex in the present by erasing it in the past. They want to make it look as if the natural human condition is nonbinary.
Anthropologists, such as Chelsea Blackmore at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have admitted as much. Blackmore argues that ‘queer archaeology’ ideas are ‘powerful tools for changing the past and the present’. This is reminiscent of the party slogan in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/10/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-nonbinary-skeleton/
Never underestimate just how freakin absurd the modern left can get( and self destructive) The scariest thing to me is that many of them actually believe their absurdities.
And also from Spiked “ safe debate means no debate”!
When the world reduced CO2 by 6%-8% during the 2020 covid epidemic the rate of CO2 increases didn’t change one bit. That shows it isn’t humans that are causing the increases in CO2.
https://www.co2.earth/monthly-co2
— from first sentence in Eric Worrall’s article above
While I appreciate the thrust of that comment in context, the US government has gone so woke over “climate change” that even looting may no longer be required.
The current Biden administration has pledged to hand over $3 billion (yes, billion!) to the Green Climate Fund*. The latest pledge would be in additional to $2 billion previously delivered by the United States. However—yes, you might be able to breathe somewhat easier—according to some sources this latest pledge may be subject to Congress authorizing the funding for the pledge. We can only hope so.
*N.B.: the Green Climate Fund is an organization that (supposedly) provides a means for wealthier nations to pay money to poorer nations to assist them with “responding to the challenges of climate change”, including payoffs for asserted past damages for “climate impacts” created “unfairly” on those poorer nations, with no evidence of such being required to feed at the trough. IMHO, it’s tantamount to the “bag man” of a shake-down enterprise, with the nations that are paying money hoping that such will keep the recipients from barking too loudly. Here’s just one indication of how the “contributed” monies are actually being spent, this from the GCF’s own website (https://www.greenclimate.fund/about/secretariat ):
“Today, GCF has around 220 staff members at its headquarters, in addition there are a number of consultants who support the staff. Some limited support is being provided offsite, in other countries.
With close to a 50/50 balance between men and women, 61 nationalities, and many more languages spoken, GCF’s diversity reflects the global nature of the climate challenge.”
At this risk of causing some readers to continue to vomit outright, here are some key excerpts of the official White House announcement of VP Harris’ statements that were to be delivered to COP28 attendees on December 2, 2023:
“Since day one, President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration have treated climate change as the existential threat of our time. After spearheading the most significant climate action in history at home and leading efforts to tackle the climate crisis abroad . . . (blah, blah blah) . . .
“As part of the Vice President’s remarks at COP28, she will announce a series of initiatives outlined below, including a $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund as the United States works with international partners to mobilize finance at the pace and scale required.”
The full announcement is available at
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/12/02/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-leverages-historic-u-s-climate-leadership-at-home-and-abroad-to-urge-countries-to-accelerate-global-climate-action-at-u-n-climate-conference-cop28/
Read it at your own peril to your mental/emotional well-being.
But remember, the
existential threattruth is out there.No one should get his hopes too high that the money pledged for such a fund will actually reach the recipients that supposedly need/deserve it most. Weren’t similar pledges made at earlier conferences and the money never came close to the promises? So with India and China balking at making any contributions, what motivation is there for many or even any other countries to follow up their pledges, especially if there are more urgent domestic needs and may of these developing world recipients have had bad records in the honest distribution of foreign aid?
I have to side with China and India on this one, I don’t think they should have to hand out money to other nations but then again I don’t think the United States should either. Hand outs accomplish exactly nothing.
Nor is there any evidence that the “climate” has caused any harm.
“Bad weather” is not “caused by climate change,” because a warmer climate leads to BETTER weather, NOT worse weather.
The warmest climate during the current epoch, the Holocene, was not called The Holocene Climate OPTIMUM for nothing.
It makes no sense to judge a country on anything other than a per capita basis. And on that basis neither China nor India are large emitters compared to Western countries. I’m not pro China or India, I just think people need to think through their beliefs.
Also it’s a good thing CO2 emissions aren’t proving to be net bad for the planet so we can and should continue to use FF as needed.