Poorer Nations Must Be Transparent Over Climate Spending, Says Cop29 Leader (theguardian.com) 49
Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance, the president of global climate negotiations has said. From a report: Mukhtar Babayev, the ecology minister of Azerbaijan, who will lead the Cop29 UN climate summit in November, urged governments in developing countries to draw up reports showing their progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and their spending on the climate crisis. "It's very important to build this correct, good and honest trust between the parties," he said in an interview in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. "It's a very, very important step, the creation of a transparency mechanism between the countries."
At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year. These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance -- such as the private sector -- is still in question.
At Cop29 in Baku, countries will be expected to come up with a new global goal on supplying climate finance to poorer countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of extreme weather. Some governments from the global south are calling for the sums to reach more than $1tn a year. These pledges are expected to be subject to bitter wrangling at Cop29, as rich countries are unlikely to agree to provide anything like such sums from their taxpayers but the role of other sources of finance -- such as the private sector -- is still in question.
Haha. (Score:3)
Hahahahaha. Oooh, that was so funny, it hurt.
Re:Haha. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some of these governments don't even distribute the food aid they get to their starving population. Most of these countries have negligible impacts compared to the rest of the world and having them spend any money on climate change instead of fixing more important problems seems rather silly,
You misunderstood the question. They're not talking about accounting for how they spend their own money. They are saying that the poor countries have to account for the money given to them by rich countries to deal with climate change.
particularly when some leaders would consider exterminating part of their population as a valid form of CO2 reduction.
Nobody is proposing to kill people to solve the climate problem except for right-wing provocateurs trying to pwn the libs. That's a strawman.
Re: Haha. (Score:1)
Exactly, they can't be trusted at all
Comedy - one percenters tell third world countries (Score:2)
Pure comedy, a bunch of 1% elites telling the rest of the world what to do, how to spend their money and demanding that the first-world countries
fund the 1% elite jobs program at UN and NGO environmental agencies,
fund the graft in third-world countries
and pretend that things are going to get better.
and exclude China, one of the largest polluters over the last 50 years from any pressure
It's as simple as using trade policy to 'encourage' high polluting third-world countries to allow regular pollution audits,
Rules for thee but not for me (Score:2, Interesting)
Poor countries must demonstrate clearer accounting and transparency to back up their calls for trillions of dollars of climate finance,
Why, when no first world nation does the same?
At this point trillions of dollars have gone into climate related slush funds with much of it siphoned off to make some very rich people incredibly richer, with a tiny portion actually going to real efforts to help the environment.
Why shouldn't the third would be allowed to dine at the same trough? Sounds like a racist thing if
Re:Rules for thee but not for me (Score:4, Insightful)
> Why, when no first world nation does the same?
Because first world nations are spending their own money. These nations are not; They are soliciting funds from others, and the lenders would like to know where the money is going.
Regardless of the bullshit you clearly believe about how these projects are funded domestically, this ask seems entirely reasonable.
=Smidge=
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All the more reason to make sure the money is being spent properly.
For the record, as an American taxpayer I have no problems funding clean energy projects in developing nations. Fossil energy may be cheap for now but it creates both environmental and socioeconomic disasters that are extremely difficult to fix. We have the technology to avoid making the same mistake, let's use it.
=Smidge=
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Re: Rules for thee but not for me (Score:1, Insightful)
"This is the taboo question that no none is allowed to ask, because everyone already knows the answer, and the answer is not the evil racist white man."
In fact that often IS the answer. Nations were destroyed with colonialism, and racism was literally invented to excuse it. Many have also been deliberately suppressed since through various foul means including sanctions, backing coups, and outright assassination. That answer is the real taboo, especially if you ask the governments responsible.
Re: Rules for thee but not for me (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Re: Rules for thee but not for me (Score:2)
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Also, what do you mean by "most of the wealth," because initial conditions and compounding interest play a huge role. Not to mention the ongoing forms of theft, that, for example, Niger and other nations in the Sahel have recently rejected.
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Re: Rules for thee but not for me (Score:2)
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Hold up a minute (Score:1)
Because first world nations are spending their own money.
Excuse me? As a taxpayer I can very much assure you they are NOT spending "their own" money. They are spending the money of the citizens of those countries.
They spend either my tax money, OR by printing more money destroy the purchasing power of money I have. Either way they are spending my money.
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Essentially we are saying to those developing nations that they should not follow what we did and industrialize as cheaply as possible. We can't realistically say they must not improve their quality of life and wealth to Western levels, as after all we benefitted greatly by screwing up the climate.
So we need to provide assistance. Technology and expertise are welcome, but of course there is the colonialism issue... Naturally people in developing nations are a bit wary of big foreign investments in infrastru
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> Essentially we are saying to those developing nations that they should not follow what we did and industrialize as cheaply as possible.
1) There was no real alternative at the time. There is now.
2) Fossil fuels are NOT cheap. They might be cheap to deploy, but sustaining them requires money and clout that even some nations we consider to be industrial struggle with sometimes. That's not even getting into the LOCAL political problems it causes.
Nobody is saying they must not improve their quality of life;
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Re: Rules for thee but not for me (Score:2)
Citation needed [Re:Rules for thee but not for me] (Score:2)
At this point trillions of dollars have gone into climate related slush funds
Citation needed.
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It's a shakedown. The audits are a result of suckers waking up to the reality that they've been conned (or that they've conned themselves).
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European voters' primary complaint is that the costs of green energy is being thrust on the poor rather than distributed across the income classes in an allegedly fairer manner. They are not inherently against green energy sacrifices.
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Giving free money to poor countries for it to be embezzled is not a "green energy sacrifice".
China (Score:3, Interesting)
China is 40% and likely growing to 70% over the next two decades.
What's the plan?
China Badger don't give a fuck.
If the plan is to pray for China to have a change of heart then they should put their money into churches.
Otherwise adaptation.
The bonus of adaptation is it works even if the computer models have errors.
Which, of course they do.
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We have moved on from denying climate change is real to saying we shouldn't do anything because China isn't.
Of course, in reality China is way ahead of almost everyone else. 5 years ahead of their agreed Paris target. More wind and solar than the rest of combined, and more new capacity installed every year than everyone else as well.
China is on the same curve we followed, where they peak in the next few years, and then fall. But they are going to fall faster than we ever did, even if they don't increase the
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What's the plan?
China Badger don't give a fuck.
Actually China Badger does give a fuck and are investing more in green energy than anyone else. When all is said and done history will look to China's ascension as a first world industrial nation and remember that it did so contributing only a small fraction of the emissions per capita than America did.
But hey that's why they call it the first mover advantage. You can stand upon your mountain of hypocrisy and point the finger at someone else, all the while continuing to emit more per capita than those you c
"more than $1tn a year." (Score:2)
Fuck off. How about zero. I'm done being guilt-tripped into paying. If you feel like you've been cheated because you can't build your economy up on fossil fuels, look up leapfrogging [wikipedia.org].
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None of the countries that will contribute to global population growth in the next decades can do anything about it, at least not ethically. If nobody were to make any babies, the population of these countries would stay almost the same, because progress makes people live longer and the bulk of their people is still young. Even with slightly below replacement birth rates like in the developed world, these countries would multiply their populations, because (comparatively) hardly anybody will die there for a
Whut (Score:2)
Poor nations are going to tell the rest of the industrialized World to go F themselves over the entire Climate Change thing.
They're going to remind those like the United States that they did absolutely nothing to slow down pollution of any kind while they
were going through their Industrial Revolution and to make demands on everyone else to do so now is simply hypocritical.
That whole " Do as I say, not as I do " thing :|
Or... create solutions that work remotely. (Score:2)
Like a satellite to measure greenhouse gases, and watch water and land temperatures. We obviously can't trust random things someone tells us. If we're already double checking, then why do we need them to estimate in the first place?
Apply tariffs and taxes globally based on the effect those items have to the rest of the world. Subtract from them if the country can prove they're mitigating the problem, but only if that proof has measurements and tamperproofing. It shouldn't be rocket science to record dat
One trillon (Score:2)
"Not my fault" (Score:2)
Meaning: Rich countries willfully, do nothing for decades and now demand poor countries do something.
TL;DR: "Not my fault", you go.
And What, Expose the Graft (Score:2)