Alarmists play long game at COP30

By David Wojick

Climate alarmism has been seriously stalled by a combination of President Trump and unfavorable economic conditions. So, the diplomats laboring at COP30 are working on long-term issues, hoping for better “weather,” as it were. They are still very busy negotiating the future.

Major policy initiatives often take a decade or more, so while subdued, the work has not slowed down. Rumors of the death of alarmism are greatly exaggerated. The greens are just biding their time.

Most of the issues are about money, of course, although the call for increased 2030 emission reduction targets is also on the table. The money issues mostly have to do with long-term objectives and mechanisms. This includes various global taxes such as on shipping emissions and airfare.

An unavoidable, immediate money issue is raising the supposed $100 billion annual payment by “developed” countries to “developing” countries. (This distinction between donor and recipient countries is based on two lists from 1992 that are long out of date.)

But even here, what was once talk of trillions has moderated to a mere hundreds of billions in the short term. Instead, they are supposed to develop a roadmap to get to $1.3 trillion a year some time from now.

On the new emission targets, there has been a distinct lack of ambition. Many developing countries have yet to submit theirs. One reason may be that these grand plans are all written as being contingent on funding from the “developed” countries. Raising these numbers could be a bad move politically.

The EU just squeezed its new target in. It increases the loopholes more than the target. Even at that, several member countries objected to it.

One of the biggest things happening is likely to fly under the news radar since it sounds vague and small. The new “Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD)” has a mere $250 million, but COP30 will see the formal launch of the Fund’s first call for project funding requests.

These loss and damage response requests will be from developing countries hit hard by bad weather supposedly caused by climate change, or maybe by sea-level rise, or even by wildfires. The thing is that, at this point, we have no idea what qualifies as climate loss or damage. That vagueness makes this first proposal process a very big deal even if the money is next to nothing.

If every bit of big bad weather is a “climate event,” as they are now called, how do you decide which deserves a cash response? If only certain events qualify, then which are they? These are very difficult questions which the FRLD is launching at COP30.

Also, which countries qualify? It is sometimes said that this funding is intended for just the poorest countries. If so, then what is the qualifying threshold for compensation? How poor does a country have to be?

Ideally, these questions will be addressed in the call for funding proposals, but maybe not. For that matter, does the COP membership have a say in the answers? If not, then why is the call being made at the COP? If so, then it could produce some serious infighting.

As an aside, a recent study reported an interesting problem with countries taking FRLD funding. Some say they do not want to do it because their populace would then want to be funded for all weather-related loss and damage, not just what the FRLD funded.

Note that the FRLD could get sizable because developed countries already put a lot of money into disaster assistance. They could run it through the FRLD as a feel-good exercise, maybe even counting it toward the annual payment. A lot of foreign aid is already counted that way.

In summary, the popular idea that COP30 is a dead end is false. They will just give the busy-work program a future focus. Diplomats do that all the time.