President Biden’s commitment to providing billions of dollars per year in international climate aid for poor countries to mitigate the effects of climate change has largely dried up.
Only $1 billion of the $11.4 billion he pledged for foreign climate programs annually by 2024 — or less than 10% — is included in a bipartisan $1.7 trillion government funding package that Congress must pass by Friday to avoid a shutdown, delivering another gut punch to Mr. Biden’s green agenda. [emphasis, links added]
No money was included for the United Nations Green Climate Fund, for which Mr. Biden requested $1.6 billion, that helps developing countries address climate impacts and switch to clean energy.
The U.N. fund is part of an endeavor for wealthy nations to contribute $100 million each year in climate reparations that have yet to come to fruition.
The failure to secure more international funding under a Democratic Congress underscores the abysmal chances it will occur soon, given Republicans taking control of the House.
The latest setback to Mr. Biden’s climate priorities comes just weeks after pledging at an annual U.N. climate conference in Egypt that the U.S. was “putting our money where our mouth is” back home in order “to strengthen accountability for climate risk and resilience.”
“The climate crisis is hitting hardest those countries and communities that have the fewest resources to respond and to recover,” he said last month at the U.N. Conference of the Parties, known this year as COP27. “I am going to fight to see that this and our other climate objectives are fully funded.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Democrats and environmentalists, meanwhile, fumed over the funding shortfall.
“Congress just bankrolled an $857 billion defense bill but failed to provide a single penny to meet our commitments to the Green Climate Fund — a step that would truly help us defend our country and our planet from chaos and instability,” said Sen. Ed Markey, Massachusetts Democrat.
Jake Schmidt of the green advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council described the lack of funding as “a failure for international climate finance.”
“The U.S. invests less money for international climate finance than Spain, [which] has an economy 16 times smaller,” he said. “This will damage the ability of the U.S. to spur greater climate action outside its borders and continue to put the most vulnerable on the front lines of climate damage. The U.S. must do better if it wants to be a climate leader.”
Forced to strike a deal with Senate Republicans to achieve enough votes to overcome a 60-vote threshold and avert a government shutdown, Democrats’ leverage was limited, even with control of Congress.
Read rest at Washington Times
One billion dollars on this fraud? That’s two billion dollars too many!
China recovered from one of the most repressive governments in the history of the world to become an economic power house. The nations of the third world could have and should have developed their own economies. They would then be on same footing with similar emissions. These nations did not do so, and this failure should not be rewarded.
Today, economic development in the third world is being repressed by financial institutions refusing to issue loans for fossil energy. This energy is vital to power a modern industrial society. In the future it will be legitimate to say that these institutions should pay reparations to the poor nations for refusing to issue loans to develop the only economically viable energy. Unlike the claims of damage from climate change, the economic damage from these institutions is very real.
Damage from climate change is not real. There have always been extreme weather events but these are not increasing. A one degree increase in temperature can not have much impact. What is very real is the increase in agricultural production due to higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Transferring the wealth of the industrial nations to the developing ones is an agenda hitchhiking on the climate change movement because it can not make it on its own merit.