Guest essay by By David Wojick
In Cop 29’s “Finance agreement” diplomacy is truly the art of agreeing to nothing. There is no agreement of substance here because there is no substance to this agreement. Each side gets its number someday and that is all there is to it.
Let’s look at the actual text to see the nothing. But first recall what was supposed to happen. The Paris Agreement committed the developed country members to providing $100 billion a year to the developing countries through 2025. COP 29 was simply supposed to revise that annual payment up beginning in 2026. That did not happen, not even close.
The fiasco started when the developing countries demanded huge impossibly sums centered on $1.3 trillion. That set in motion a series of side steps leading to the present agreement which is very different from the intended goal.
To begin with the $1.3 trillion annual payment is there but it is “by 2035” so ten years from now not in 2026. I can see delaying it until a few years after Trump leaves office but these folks are wedded to their five year plans.
Moreover this money need not come from the developed countries and certainly not from their governments. First it is to come “from all public and private sources.” Second the eligible sources have been expanded to include all the developing countries as well as the developed ones.
These two provisions have fundamentally changed the concept of climate finance. It used to just include mostly government money going from developed to developing countries. Now it sounds like any climate related investment or contribution that winds up in a developing country counts.
Working this out will be supremely challenging. For example if China builds itself an offshore wind array, and they are building plenty, is that climate finance? How about if they build it in Indonesia?
Oh and it looks like coal fired power plants count too. In early drafts of the agreement counting coal plants was ruled out because people were doing that in the name of adaptation. Having electricity certainly helps when extreme weather hits. But that prohibition does not appear in the final agreement so the practice looks allowable.
Then there is the other big number, the $300 billion a year. This is widely assumed to replace the $100 billion a year mandated by the Paris Agreement through 2025. For example CBS has a headline that yells “deal reached at UN’s COP29 climate talks for $300 billion a year (up from $100 billion).”
This is incorrect as here too the new agreement says the goal is “by 2035.” Nor is all (or any) of this distant sum necessarily coming from developed countries as the yearly $100 billion had to. The new agreement just says “with developed country Parties taking the lead.” (Parties means to the Paris Agreement.)
“Taking the lead” is an extremely vague concept. It might mean paying over half say $151 billion. Or just being the biggest donor at say $20 billion. Or even just running a bunch of promotions to get private investors to invest, which might only millions.
The overall fiasco becomes clear when we ask what the finance requirement or goal is for 2026? There is none, nor for any other year ahead until 2035. Nor is anyone responsible for meeting those far distant goals.
In short this is a huge mess and nothing like what the Paris agreement called for. Regulatory confusion is a many-year field of mine and this is as bad as I have ever seen. But this is what you get when a complex big money deal is struck at 2:40 am Sunday by people who have not slept much for days.
Surely the next few COPs and many lesser meetings will be spent trying to straighten out this hopelessly vague and seriously misstated agreement. Or if they want to wait until 2035 with no finance before then, that is fine with me.
A fascinating sidebar is that the developing countries reportedly have something like a combined cost of $10 trillion in official climate plans through 2030. These are all contingent on getting finance which under this agreement need not happen.
The big money game has just opened and it is wall to wall confusion. Stay tuned to see how it plays.
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Probably won’t stop Starmer handing over our funds to make himself feel good and virtuous.
Still got a few more islands to give away (and rent back) too. Old 2TK knows how be a good Marxist. The destruction of capitalism is a never ending campaign for him.
The big money need to come from those that have made a motza from the scam and are still pushing the scam..
eg, Soros, Schwab, Gates, Guterres, all the third world dictators and bureaucrats etc. etc..
I’m sure people can name many other AGW-cult billionaires that should be paying up, instead of sucking on the climate trough.
It’s the only ‘net-zero’ agreement that is ever likely to become actual fact.
Politicians don’t mind making vague promises which only come due in 2035 because they know that they won’t be in office then.
Okay, Johnny! What do we have for the contestants?
We have 1.3 trillion… Zimbabwean dollars! Everyone’s a winner!
Make it in rubles and you have a deal.
If they want to lower emissions they could do so by stipulating that the climate grift Fund will be used for energy infrastructure in all nations that donate to the fund except for the Top 10 emitting nations
COP meetings have morphed from endless pronouncements about future climate conditions, imagined by alarmists to be a real potential that must be stopped. To, an annual UN money seeking effort needed to fund their (the UNs) future as the world government/assembly. The UN is unwittingly but knowingly being aided in that fund seeking effort, by small UN member nations. They are willingly engaged on the premise, they will receive the $billions and now suddenly $trillions of dollars being sought. They could not be more wrong.
The question must be asked. Who exactly will the cheques be made out to? If the answer is they will be made payable to the UN offices i.e. the UN itself, then what detail planning is in place to ensure the money actually goes anywhere, other than into the UN’s own bureau/operating costs?
Latest score…
2,561,212 signatures and still rising.
2,576,430
Coming in 10 years is a leftist tradition
Usually a bad boogeyman
And the only cure is more government, windmills and solar panels.
Each ten year warning gets an automatic ten year extension. The global warming crisis coming in 10 years is on its fifth ten year prediction since `1975. In a few weeks we’ll have number six.
UN: “We want to believe” is now “We NEED to believe” – and is evidence of irrelevance. UN has made itself irrelevant. It will be the last to realize this.
FWIW, Google AI informs me that, shockingly, some/many countries failed to live up to their commitments under the Paris Agreement. It adds that it’s difficult to come up with a number.(I find THAT credible) but that at least some countries were 50% or more short of delivering on their promises.
My guess would be that compliance with this new agreement will be even worse.
Funny how non-payment has no penalty.
BRICS+ will deliver real benefits to billions of people much sooner than any colonialist, western, rules-based, COP love fest
First it is to come “from all public and private sources.”
What public sources? Oh, you mean tax revenues which, of course, all come from private sources which, in turn, means the middle class, because there aren’t enough wealthy people and the working class folks don’t have any money.
Wealth redistribution by any other name and probably to support the world wide push for Marxism as the main recipient. I have yet to see how past funds were used and I suspect most of it went to “administrative costs” like most charities today. How come no one has demanded an accounting of how the money is spent and exactly how they expect to spend this money? You’d think by now there would be a lot of questions.
Marxists and socialists generally claim they are responsible for all charitable activities. In the real world, people who became wealthy by proving some item to society so beneficial that others were willing to pay for it, are actually the ones who start and support charities.