Essay by Eric Worrall
“… The only word I can use to describe it is brutal. …”
Fears Pacific climate change “not on the agenda” for US aid funding
Donald Trump’s 90 day pause on all USAID funding threw the sector into chaos. As the administration assesses which programs are considered suitable use of funds, it’s clear one area doesn’t fit that brief: climate change. It’s also the biggest issue in the Pacific.
…
“I was shocked. Well, I shouldn’t say shocked, because we knew Donald Trump was going to do radical things. So, it wasn’t a shock in that respect, the fact that he actually did it, and when we saw the scale and the rapidity of the pause, that’s what was really shocking. The only word I can use to describe it is brutal. It was a brutal, abrupt stop, which has all sorts of implications for people’s lives and their welfare around the world.”
…
Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, and expert say as many will lose their lives.
…
Those programs help communities adapt to extreme weather changes, through education and training.
Residents are advised on skills including which crops to grow that can withstand extreme weather, how to develop disaster-readiness plans for households and improve water and food collection and preservation.
…
Read more: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/podcast-episode/rnf-fears-pacific-climate-change-not-on-the-agenda-for-us-aid-funding/1scjuhlyh
Can you imagine anything more absurd than a bunch of US funded Western bureaucrats trying to tell subsistence farmers who have worked the land for dozens, perhaps hundreds of generations how to farm? These are people about as connected to the land as it is possible to be, their very survival depends on thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and skill.
One of our close family friends is a Pacific Islander who grew up in an island farming community. “Green thumb” doesn’t cover her deep understanding of tropical gardening.
What will happen to the recently unemployed is an interesting question.
I doubt anyone will die, that’s just alarmism. My guess is the unfunded foreigners will leave, either immediately or when their money runs out. The natives they used to employ will probably go back to farming. After all, their already formidable native skills have allegedly been enriched by all this foreign expertise, and hopefully they saved some of the money they were paid. They should be well placed to become very successful farmers.
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It is all a dream come true to me! Freddie Freeloader now must go get a real job, and stop sucking on the gooberment teat.
They’ll be looking for another teat. Maybe drop to the junior leagues (the state teats in places like MA, NY, CT, CA).
I know I must be a terrible person, but hooray for Trump! The less money we spend on climate change the better in my opinion. It’s an excellent point that the soon-to-be climate unemployed should be in an excellent position to apply their knowledge to the field. This may be the first time many of these people have actually had to work for a living.
“The less money we spend on climate change the better”
or foreign aid.
You mean that you call what they do / did is work?????
a lot of effort goes into applying for these grants, which involves printing a sheet that says “gimme mine”.
But… but… but… who is going to employ all those otherwise unemployable globalists with advanced degrees from prestigious universities who have no actual useful skills? Who will pay them 6 figure salaries so they can then pay off the $150k of student loan debt they incurred to pay tuition to employ another bunch of otherwise unemployable social ‘science’ academics and their bureaucratic cadre? If they had STEM or hard science degrees they could get real jobs… but I’m guessing that ain’t the case.
Shovels fit a lot of hands…
They can learn to Code
What should coders learn to do? Those jobs are drying up as more and more are outsourced.
Missing sarcasm font…
It is amazing what Grok can do with coding. Just amazing. It is like the introduction of power tools into a wood working shop. All you need now is a small number of true software engineers to design the system and a small number of coders to clean up coding issues that the AI cannot do. A truly different world.
Starbucks is recruiting!
Starbucks is rejoicing!
Or maybe rejecting (research applicants).
On the count of three repeat after me, “Do you want fries with that?”.
I’m sure Wokeachusetts will be happy to hire many of them- it still being immersed in the climate cult. If they happen to be female, their chances will improve and if they happen to be lesbian, job assured.
Write code.
The Gutmacher Institute, the ‘Do-gooder’ Institute. You couldn’t make it up.
The irony becomes bitter when you realize that what they consider to be “Good” is the culture of death in all its forms.
IIRC, the Gutmacher Institute is a pro-abortion organization. I’m all in favor of cutting funding for them.
“Those programs help communities adapt to extreme weather changes, through education and training.
Residents are advised on skills including which crops to grow that can withstand extreme weather, how to develop disaster-readiness plans for households and improve water and food collection and preservation.”
Just think how much better off these ignorant natives and farmers will be when they have very own fully staffed and funded versions of FEMA.
…
Somehow I’m stuck on the idea of AOC lecturing the natives on using the right pronouns to allow the crops to flourish—and the dangers of using fertilizer.
Saw this on Daily Wire, fits in with this piece=====>
https://www.dailywire.com/news/fmcs-slush-fund-abolished-by-trump?utm_medium=email
I had no idea that the US Government is so corrupt.
What gets me is how I used to develop detailed networked schedules and earned value management plans where the government could question our every move because the implicit underlying assumption was that we’d be goofing off without their oversight. And then I read this article.
Yes, some good hard working people might have been canned by Trump, but what some of these people were doing is downright criminal.
The career bureaucrats who oversaw all these scams were complicit.
And they MUST have known that at some stage there would be “collateral damage” in the forms that it’s currently taking.
So sympathy for the affected personnel, but nothing but disdain for the complicit career bureaucrats.
This is kinda what I’m talking about –
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/03/22/globalist-aussie-pm-in-panic-as-trump-cuts-foreign-grants-n4938171
Eric has no doubt seen this report already.
You should live here, in the US, and look at the shock on the average citizen’s face about the corruption…except for the Dems and the swamp creatures.
If they have records of these “personal” spending, those involved should either have to pay the money back, or face embezzlement and/or fraud charges.
They can learn to farm, mine, or drill for oil and gas. Learning useful skills is never a waste of time.
We were fed a “climate change” narrative on the LA wildfires and I saw this on
RCI=====>
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/03/19/how_los_angeles_is_getting_scorched_by_its_homeless_problem_1098372.html
The LA Times had an article on how effective vegetation was at consuming CO2 in the LA Basin. And it makes sense when we know deserts are greening due to CO2. But if you live in a state that doesn’t believe in fuel management, it would make sense that this could lead to worse wildfires. It makes the state’s failure to remove brush near in the urban rural interface a more serious problem.
It makes it criminal, not just a problem.
The above article showing homeless caused fires in 2024 at nearly 17,000 in
the LA area. That boggles my mind.
I harvest firewood every year and found a method from a book published many years ago on pulp wood production before mechanization. It uses gravity and a high tensile wire stretched out down hill kinda like a cable type of operation without the winches, cables and such.
I use a Simpson rope winch at the upper landing to drag the firewood logs to a landing then
buck ect , The wire is stretched out running up hill from a spinning jenny at the bottom and the usual chainsaw ect. The trick is how the firewood goes out down the wire. A #12 common nail is driven into the wood 1/2 way then bent 90* with the hammer claw which allows the wood to be hung on the wire. The wood flies out very fast, as in 50-60+ mph. A tire or small log hung between two trees at the bottom knocks off the log chunks coming out off the wire. A heads up whistle before launching of course.
A carpenters belt with a couple of handfuls of nails & claw hammer. This system is said to be used in the 3rd world today. I’ve shared this with some FS techs and they’ve never heard of it, I bet this could be used along the coastal range to clean up the fuel load very
well and affordable. A video would explain this better than my description. With
a buddy we can get a couple of loads of firewood very quickly .
LA is not sane with their overall management IMO.
“ect” , You should see a doctor about that.
PSE’s are hopefully for that
My Wisconsin dairy farm is steep, but not that steep, I long ago cut hunting/logging roads along the contours (some following professional forester ‘roads’. Is easy, cut something up or down the contour, then use long logging chains to snake it out. At most 100 meters. Shorten the logging chains by doubling up on logs, the bring them to the central drying wood pile. Has always worked with oak boles up to about 18 inches. After that, my compact 4WD tractor dies before the old log bole budges. OK, forest compost.
I always have said you owe it to yourself to get the right tool
for a job if your are doing it yourself. I’m a small player but
do have a Fransguard skid winch and a Woodmizer mill, both small.
I don’t do any commercial work just around the farm. I got
them after the beetle kill during the mortgage crash and cleaned
up and used the wood on farm projects. The timber market at that
time was dead…
The winch is on an old MF135. The skid winch doesn’t make the
tractor a skidder but it can skid and bring in 6 good sized pine
at a time.. always skid within 15* of the centerline of the
tractor so if the log gets hung up it won’t flip the tractor it
will only slip the winch clutch.
Fransgård V 4000 Winch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSi6l5EX06c
Forestry harvest is by far the most dangerous work
I’ve ever done, it’s for the quick and dead it’s been said. I have
used a local with a feller/buncher when he’s in the area. The
commercial guys have some cable equipment that is amazing
on steep hills.
Yes, I had an exchange recently with an inner-city denizen of a major “progressive” city who was decrying how Trumpian policies were “degrading our environment”.
I pointed out that her inner-city environment had already been rendered disgusting, unfit for civilized people (homeless, sidewalk toilet habits, drugs, overdoses, garbage, fires, assaults, etc etc), all through the policies and inaction by the “progressive” administrations she and her side keep electing.
There ended the conversation.
Promises made, promises kept. Simple. Elections have consequences.
These were always handouts, not jobs.
…
/malfunction
In the UK a green job is redundancy – hey presto; emissions down.
The Secretary of the U.S. Treasury said the other day that there were currently about 10 million jobs available in the United States.
If you want a job, you can probably find a job.
Nope.
I fear that the Western bureaucrats will have erased the generations of subsistence farming knowledge.
I hope I’m wrong.
As usual, the alarmists will pull out all the stops if actions take place that they can use to denounce any countries or agencies that supposedly affect the well-being of any region or country that climate change could adversely impact. In reality, these same alarmists have actually been profiting directly or indirectly from the subsidies, taxes, mandates and laws that currently exist, and now that they see the free ride ending, they turn up the volume of their protests and doomsday scenarios.
I was shocked to the core to discover that such pinko hegemonic appropriation of brown peoples culture was still going on in this day and age. Viva the Orange Revolution!
Several individuals have greatly helped people farm better, n the past few centuries.
One was Norman Borlaug.
But they were not bureaucrats, they worked with farmers.
Agriculture is sensitive to local conditions, so some variations should be tested on a small portion of a farm.
Changing production can take time, as it did for Brazilians to grow soybean well (probably floated during that time by Japanese interests).
And research, a new variety of corn can be grown commercially in southern Alberta because it needs fewer ‘heat days’ to mature.
In the US farmers make more money from crops that are not subsidized or discouraged by pay-not-to-grow mis-use of land.
In the 1950s lives improved greatly in one East African country when restrictions on types of crops were removed.
His was one of the most deserved Nobel Peace prizes.
its just incredible how much of the lefts agenda is being funded by our government. And the have just barely started cut if the slush funds.
Also all the”caravans” of people stopped as soon as USAID was shut down
Meaningless make-work
GOOD!!!!! Screw them!!!!!
The work being done by team Trump is awesome and effective. What a wonderful time to be alive and able to watch the new world evolve in real time.
I’d call that a decent start.
“Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs ….”
So what. Who among us has never lost a job? They’ll survive.
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
A real application of indigenous knowledge.