Essay by Eric Worrall
If the climate cash doesn’t arrive on time, demand more money?
Brazil climate summit confronts gap between finance goals and reality
Soumya Sarkar
18 Nov 2025
- The aspirational climate finance target of $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 falls short of needs, with developing countries requiring $2.4 trillion by 2030, rising to $3.2 trillion by 2035, a new report shows.
- The loss and damage fund established to help vulnerable countries has received only $788 million in pledges, a fraction of what nations like Bangladesh and Pacific islands require.
- Current global climate finance flows total just $190 billion each year. Reaching the $1.3 trillion target would require a nearly sevenfold increase within a decade.
When world leaders gathered in Belém on November 10 for the annual climate summit (COP30), they faced what the host, Brazil, called the “COP of Implementation.” That phrase captures both aspiration and urgency. After decades of climate negotiations and 10 years since the landmark Paris Agreement was signed to limit global warming, the focus has shifted from promises to delivery, particularly in the area of finance. At the centre of discussions lies a number that sounds impressive yet falls troublingly short.
This aspirational target of $1.3 trillion each year represents a historic moment reached at last year’s summit. Developed countries have pledged $300 billion per year by 2035, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal, with the remainder expected from other sources, including emerging economies and private investors.
But a report released two days into the summit laid bare the gap between ambition and reality. Developing countries, excluding China, will require $2.4 trillion annually by 2030, rising to approximately $3.2 trillion by 2035, according to the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) of the London School of Economics, as calculated in its fourth report, published on November 12. The difference between the agreed-upon target and actual necessity could not be clearer.
“Getting to the target is feasible, but it is not easy,” said Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the IHLEG report. That understatement masks an enormous undertaking. Current climate finance flows to Emerging Markets and Developing economies or EMDEs (excluding China) total roughly $190 billion in 2022, according to the IHLEG report. Reaching even the $1.3 trillion mark would require nearly a sevenfold increase within a decade. Reaching what is actually needed demands even more.
…
Read more: https://india.mongabay.com/2025/11/brazil-climate-summit-confronts-massive-gap-between-finance-goals-and-reality/
Can’t you see these climate activists are doing it tough?
$1.3 trillion divided by say a hundred thousand activists is only $13,000,000 / year / activist. Barely enough to cover the air miles climate activists clock up while campaigning against flying.
I think the referenced report is available here, though there appear to have been some last minute multi-hundred billion dollar adjustments to the numbers. The rest of the quoted article is mostly a long complaint about how slowly the money is being delivered.
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If I were a masochist, it would be interesting to read the report and see how they come up with such precise figures.
I think reading that much absolute nonsense would be far too much for even the most hard core masochist.
For the trillions mentioned we ought to be outright owners. But never mind. A non-changing climate has nothing to do with their problems.
That isn’t the real problem a fact left out of the article is that 90% of this money is debt in the form of market-rate debt and equity. The irony is to save the planet for the kids we are going to saddle them with a bill they can’t ever pay back 🙂
They will have nothing and they will be happy.
And we wouldn’t be “saving” anything since their proposed policies wouldn’t change a thing EVEN IF a warming climate compared with The Little Ice Age was a “problem” as opposed to being 100% GOOD NEWS, which it is.
Aren’t most developed countries drowning in unsustainable debt since covid? Isn’t this a bit like asking a housewife struggling with credit card debt, doing the weekly shopping, for a massive donation to some dodgy undocumented charity? Without even the benefit of a tax deduction?
Our response should reflect this.
You don’t understand. That housewife built her fancy dancy lifestyle on the back of the dispossessed and downtrodden. She owes the dispossessed and downtrodden.
Dispossessed and downtrodden = her husband?? 😄
Paraphrasing “The Firm:”
This is like, I would say EXACTLY like, asking a housewife struggling with credit card debt for a massive donation to some dodgy undocumented charity.”
This is what the racket is all about, climate is merely a pretext.
Back in 2009 at COP-15 in Copenhagen the demand was a mere US$100B by 2020.
These demands plotted on a time-series graph would form a startling ‘hockey-stick’ far more convincing than Mann et al.
If I were a kleptocratic leader of some shithole country, I’d be at the trough as well.
Oh, not all. Only most of it.
The UN Crusade of John Holdren et al seems to be another part of it. Note he started it back when it was Global Cooling, but this little reversal did not seem to affect the important parts.
Or, the classic post-millennial sect dilemma: to immanentize eschaton or to monetize eschaton?
A “three card monte” dealer is more convincing than Michael Mann’s multitude of “Hockey Stick” temperature reconstructions.
And the three card monte dealer will cost you a lot less money than Mann and his minions too.
So where has all the money gone that was delivered so far? “Administrative costs”? Any accountability?
Enough with that patriarchal corporate crypto racist anti-trans capitalism. These are greens demanding the money. You measure results by their expressions of sincerity, not by their achievements.
They lose by either method.
Answers:
1) Laundered to some Caribbean Bank [in charity funding circles this is known as “leakage”,
aka graft & corruption]
2) Nope
[There is never any accounting of the Good Intentions Paving Company. See Eric’s post below]
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
Not even a dollar to international organizations. If I wanted my money wasted I would waste it myself.
These money demands are ridiculous. Where could the money possibly come from? The USA has made it clear that it’s not coming from them. Britain is effectively bankrupt and Europe isn’t much better. Who else is left to pay these demands?
The answer should be obvious – China!😀
Also up to their eyeballs in debt!
I did not know, but it makes sense.
“China’s public debt-to-GDP ratio reached an estimated 88.3% in 2024 and is projected to continue rising in the coming years. This ratio has increased significantly, reaching a record high compared to its historical average of around 40%. The increase is due to various factors, including the government’s response to COVID-19 and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), say analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”
Yeah.
“The increase is due to … COVID-19” Wow. I wonder whether people would react differently next time?
From the article: ““Getting to the target is feasible, but it is not easy,” said Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the IHLEG report.”
Getting to the target will never happen.
The Net Zero effort has no future. It’s running on fumes now.
*********************************
Why does the movie “Jerry McGuire” keep coming to mind? (Caution: profanity)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rm91AwRI6kE?feature=share
The climate scammers have made a big mistake. They have waited too long to hold the begging bowl while holding a cuddly polar bear cub because the governments they want to pay them are bankrupt. A big cause of the lack of money is economies strangled by….environmental regulations and subsidies to pay to save the planet.
I was waiting for the punchline to be that the cuddly polar bear cub grew up to be an adult polar bear and ate them up like an old Brothers Grimm Tale.
Why does “the planet” need to be “saved” from AN IMPROVING CLIMATE?!
Oh yeah, IT DOESN’T.
And conflating NATURAL DISASTERS with “climate change SUPPOSEDLY (but NOT really) caused by human activities” is utter nonsense with NO EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT. The reverse is, in fact, true.
Only in the fantasy “model world” does “bad weather” get worse in a warmer (global) climate.
Let’s see the value of stripping nonprofit status from 2.5 million entities.
“…with the remainder expected from other sources, including emerging economies and private investors.”
What sort of “private investor” is going to pour money down this rat-hole? And what is an “emerging economy” and how are they going to extract money from it?
Oh, and “FEASABLE?!”
MY ASS! Where do these idiots think they’ll find suckers ripe enough to pay the over a trillion dollars ONCE, much less EVERY YEAR?!
LMFAO
This is COP 30. 30 years. Someone’s been paying. If you’re American, someone includes you.
Regarding the above article, it’s not so much how slow the money is flowing as it is “why is the money flowing at all?”.
Take this quote from the article:
“The loss and damage fund established to help vulnerable countries has received only $788 million in pledges, a fraction of what nations like Bangladesh and Pacific islands require.”
Most basic question: Require for what purpose?
Bangladesh , the Pacific Islands, and likely a hundred or more economically and geographically small nations in the world, in total, don’t contribute more than a tiny blip in the total annual human releases of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Since CO2 is plant fertilizer and even NASA has been forced to admit the fact that both increasing CO2 and a “warming Earth” have resulted in measurable global greening over the last 30 or so years, perhaps small nations like Bangladesh and Pacific islands should be paying a small token fee of thanks to first-world nations for reaping the benefits of such. Hah!
So, to answer my own rhetorical question posed in my first sentence: the “climate reparations” money flows to the smallest nations to (a) keep the natives from becoming too restless, and (b) feed the corruption that exists at the highest levels of many such nations, thereby buying their silence/cooperation at the UN.
Climate Finance (noun): A reverse investment scheme where bankrupt nations donate to a planetary fund they can’t audit, to solve a problem they can’t measure, in exchange for moral absolution and zero returns.
Better yet, what’s anyone going to do about it if the money’s not forthcoming? The answer is that governments will ignore these demands, there will be will be more doomsday forecasting which no one pays any attention to, and in the end no money will be raised, so that nothing will get done, and these climate action initiatives will continue to die a slow death.
IEA reports, gleefully, $2.5+ trillion a year already. Is this an additional $1.3T?
Did someone mention reparations? Why are we running the gauntlet of lewd advertisements?
In your dreams MFers……..