the pigs in charge of the piggery.....

The Biden administration’s proposal to put the World Bank in charge of a fund that would pay poorer countries suffering irreversible climate damage is threatening to rattle U.N. climate talks that begin next month in Dubai.

The negotiating team led by climate envoy John Kerry reluctantly endorsed the idea of establishing a fund for “loss and damage” suffered by developing nations at U.N. climate talks last year, but countries left the details of how it would work — and where its many billions of dollars would come from — for later.

By ZACK COLMAN

Developing nations have favored creating a fund similar to others established under the United Nations’ climate program, which operate as independent bodies under the U.N. They oppose the U.S. proposal to fold it inside the World Bank — an institution that many poorer nations see as a tool of the industrialized world to impose its economic policies.

Those nations say rich countries like the U.S. have long exerted too much control over the World Bank at the expense of those receiving aid. They note that even the U.S. is tacitly acknowledging the problem by pushing the bank to focus more on climate issues.

“It’s just a question of logic,” said Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for a bloc of island states that stands to receive much of the loss and damage money. “Why is there this pressure to push it back to this institution that we need to reform that was created in the ’40s by mostly colonial powers at the time?”

The fight over the new fund is a top issue this week for negotiators gathering for a final technical meeting before the U.N. climate talks.

The U.S. has long been at the center of conflict over the loss and damage fund. It has emitted more of the greenhouse gases warming the planet than any other nation since the mid-19th century. But it backed creation of the fund only after securing promises that the language establishing it would not equate compensation with legal liability. And it so far has not pledged any money for the fund.

The U.S. has practical reasons for placing the fund in the World Bank, according to people who have followed the bank. It’s the bank’s top shareholder and has decades of history with its efforts to lend money to developing nations. And some veterans of international climate talks say establishing a new fund whole cloth would take years, so placing it within the World Bank or another institution would be a far quicker way of delivering money to nations in need.

“Historically it’s served as a useful anchor because it’s a trusted institution where there can be trustee services,” said a State Department official involved in climate finance who is not authorized to speak publicly as a matter of practice. “But you know, there’s other views as well. So that’ll have to be settled over time.”

The loss and damage fund discussions are taking place at the same time that the U.S. and other countries are working to reshape the World Bank to address climate change by financing clean energy projects and helping countries adapt to a warmer world, a case U.S. officials made last week to the bank’s annual meeting in Marrakech, Morocco. Such changes would help to unleash billions more in lending annually and attract more private funding as well.

But some people are skeptical about the U.S. push to establish the fund inside an institution that many nations say is dominated by Washington.

The U.S. is leaning on the World Bank to meet its climate finance goals because it’s a “USA policy tool,” said a senior World Bank official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. And, the person added, the bank is “the only one you can play with ... without new cash.”

The World Bank may also be ill-suited to the goal of the loss and damage fund since it uses loans and revenue-generating transactions in its current work. In contrast, vulnerable nations are seeking grants to fund their climate adaptation and loss-and-damage projects.

How and where to create the loss and damage fund is only one of several thorny issues facing it. One of the biggest fights concerns calls for China — by far the biggest current greenhouse gas polluter — to pay into the fund, an issue that divides the U.S. and a bloc of developing countries that negotiate in concert with China at the climate talks. That dispute is unlikely to be resolved before nations meet in Dubai starting Nov. 30.

Underpinning the developing nations’ resistance to the U.S. effort is skepticism that Washington will make good on long-delayed promises to deliver cheap, no-strings money to help poorer countries cope with climate change.

That fear could be justified because the U.S. will likely fall short once again. House Republicans steadfastly oppose funding President Joe Biden’s request for $11 billion in international climate finance.

“[The U.S. has] a huge responsibility — it’s the same old thing, the same shtick,” Robertson said.

The U.S. declined to provide more funding for a separate Green Climate Fund, which seeks to help countries adapt to climate change, at a meeting of donor countries earlier this month. Biden announced in April he would inject $1 billion to the green fund, bringing the total U.S. contribution to $2 billion, but still short of the $3 billion pledge that President Barack Obama made in 2014.

The State Department official said another contribution was coming but declined to provide details.

Some officials from the developing world say they believe the U.S. is pushing for World Bank reforms to substitute for its historical difficulty delivering funds.

“No doubt about it, both in perception and reality,” said Iskander Erzini Vernoit, director of the Morocco-based think tank Imal Initiative for Climate & Development. “They say this not just in closed-door rooms but also publicly. People like Kerry will say, well, public funds are limited, so you’ve got to look at all these other measures.”

The United States’ long resistance to the establishment of a loss and damage fund plays into that concern. Erzini Vernoit said the U.S. “cannot be considered a bridge builder” in the negotiations. And he questioned whether countries outside of the World Bank system could access the money if the fund is housed within that institution.

Many emerging economies complain the World Bank’s governing structure puts too much power in donors’ hands rather than the countries it is designed to support, said Luisa Abbott Galvao, senior international policy campaigner with environmental group Friends of the Earth.

“It’s developing countries, it’s low-income countries in the Global South that are being hit the hardest by climate change and that should have the biggest say in how that support is given,” she said. “And yet the U.S. which is the longest, largest historic contributor, is calling the shots as the largest shareholder.”

But Anne Christianson, director of international climate policy at think tank the Center for American Progress, said the U.S. has been putting a lot of diplomatic hours into the loss and damage negotiations, even if there’s still “quite a bit of daylight” between its position and that of the developing countries.

The Biden administration has offered some indications of what it wants to fall into loss and damage funding. Those include insurance schemes to cover climate damages as well as early warning systems to help nations prepare for climate-fueled storms, droughts and other destructive events.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/19/biden-climate-fund-fight-un-summit-00121772

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Oct 2023 - 8:55pm
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not saving the planet....

Mapped: The Deep Ties Between Big Ag and Europe’s Right-Wing Politicians

How agribusiness used hikes and free rent to win the hearts of European conservatives.

By Clare Carlile

Striding out on alpine hikes, mingling at rooftop soirées and lending office space free of charge – these are just some of the ways Big Ag has sought to win over influential EU lawmakers on critical green reforms in recent years.

These relationship-building activities have helped to forge a powerful alliance in Brussels between select politicians from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and those with a commercial interest in slowing moves to more nature-friendly farming: pesticide manufacturers and farming unions linked to industry.

A major investigation published earlier this month by DeSmog and Politico revealed the high volume of meetings held by six key EPP parliamentarians. It found the farming industry had an average of two meetings a week with those politicians since 2020, as the EU negotiated flagship reforms to protect nature and climate.

DeSmog has now gone deeper, mapping the extensive personal and professional ties between the group of six conservative MEPs and groups linked to the agriculture industry.

We chose to highlight the parliamentarians’ connections to the most powerful EU actors that are hostile to plans to cut pesticides – a group that includes the biggest farming unions. In addition, we included agricultural groups to which MEPs had personal ties.

The nature of the links featured on the map range from direct contact in meetings, at socials and on hikes, as well as membership of industry-linked organisations and committees.

The lobbying blitz captured on the map appears to have yielded results. In the three years since Farm to Fork – an ambitious plan to overhaul farming practices as part of the Green Deal – was first announced, lawmakers from the conservative EPP have consistently fought back against plans to transform agriculture.

Reforms include measures to halve pesticide use across the bloc – proposals that have alarmed an industry worth €12 billion in Europe alone each year. Scientists say the raft of green measures, aimed at tackling spiralling climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse, are crucial for the future of Europe’s food supply.

DeSmog’s revelations come ahead of a major vote on the pesticide reduction law by the EU’s environment committee, which is due to take place on October 24.

Campaigners and green politicians fear the law could be considerably weakened, amid mounting pressure from national ministers to strip out legally binding targets for member states.

“These revelations add to the growing evidence that powerful industry interests are simply buying influence in the name of profit margins, at catastrophic expense to people and planet,” said Célia Nyssens-James from the European Environmental Bureau, the bloc’s largest network of not-for-profit environmental groups. “Clearly too many MEPs on this Committee do not have European citizens’ best interests at heart.”

Clara Bourgin from Friends of the Earth said: “These ties are both appalling and sadly unsurprising. When certain MEPs strongly push back against EU pesticide law and binding reduction goals, and more broadly against European environmental commitments, it’s clear that intensive industry lobbying is behind it.”

Franc Bogovič, one of the six MEPs in the analysis, denied that policymakers were under the influence of industry.

“I’m a farmer and … I’m an agricultural engineer and I have my own opinion,” he told Politico Europe. “I really don’t need their [industry groups’] opinion on this. I have my own clear view of what is possible and what is not possible in agriculture.”

https://www.desmog.com/2023/10/18/mapped-the-deep-ties-between-big-ag-and-europes-right-wing-politicians/

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By Gus Leonisky at 20 Oct 2023 - 5:13pm
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greasy salmon....

Developing countries poised to abandon climate reparations fund

Member nations have rejected a proposal by the US and EU to establish the fund within the World Bank

The beneficiaries of a proposed global climate reparations fund have shot down a US- and EU-backed plan to host it within the World Bank, threatening to abandon negotiations entirely ahead of next month’s COP28 climate summit if Washington does not budge on the matter, sources familiar with the discussions told Financial Times on Friday.

The G77 nations plus China are “deadlocked” with the US regarding who will run the fund, which is meant to pay for “loss and damage” incurred by nations considered “particularly vulnerable” to climate change.

The World Bank’s structure could complicate the fund’s ability to receive philanthropic donations or raise money on capital markets, G77+ representatives have warned, while its focus on loans and other revenue-generating transactions is also a sticking point. Developing nations, often struggling with debt burdens imposed by international institutions in the guise of lifting them out of poverty, want grants, not new financial obligations.

Luis Pedroso Cuesta, the Cuban chair of the G77+, explained that while the bloc initially wanted an independent fund, they would compromise on hosting by an international body like a UN organization or another multilateral development bank.

However, the World Bank was not an option as it lacks a “climate culture” and drags its feet on important decisions, making it ill-suited to urgent climate crises, the G77+ has argued. Even the US admitted as much when it pushed the bank to finance more clean energy projects last week.

“We have been confronted with an elephant in the room, and that elephant is the US. We have been faced with a very closed position that it is [the World Bank] or nothing,” Cuesta complained.

Some analysts from the G77+ countries claim the US is hiding behind the World Bank to distract from its own inability to fulfill its climate finance promises. “People like [US climate czar John] Kerry will say, well, public funds are limited, so you’ve got to look at all these other measures,” Moroccan think tank director Iskander Erzini Vernoit told Politico on Thursday.

Christina Chan, a senior advisor to Kerry, condemned such criticisms as “irresponsible,” denying the US was being “obstructionist.”

The parties are also at odds over financing. The G77+ demands developed nations – specifically the US – pay up. However, despite its status as the world’s top historic emitter of greenhouse gases, Washington has pledged nothing to the fund as of Friday, instead leaning on China to pony up.

At last year’s COP27 climate summit, 200 countries agreed to establish a loss and damage fund to help developing nations recover from the effects of climate change they had already endured. The US, long a holdout from such proposals, consented on condition that it would not equate compensation with legal liability.

https://www.rt.com/news/585486-climate-change-reparations-world-bank/

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By Gus Leonisky at 22 Oct 2023 - 3:55pm
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hot....

The issue, betrayed, is nothing more and nothing less than the future of a multitude of species on Earth, including Homo sapiens.

As confirmed by the acceleration of climate extremes, consistent with the prediction by Wallace Broecker, the authoritative climate scientist, global climate change is racing beyond tipping points (Figure 1), yet the evidence continues to be denied, including in the recent COP-28 climate conference, where climate scientists are almost nowhere to be seen.

As temperature rise (Figure 2a), fires engulf large tracts of land, storms intensity and sea levels rise (Figure 2b), the living Earth is entering a critical stage. Having ignored the existential threat of climate change, extreme nationalism and fascism ─ the ideology of death ─ spill rivers of blood in many parts of the world.

While the powers that be ─ politicians, CEOs, top-bureaucrats, economists and their media mouthpieces ─ proceed to propagate dangerous lies, such as the denial of climate change at the heart of the Dubai COP-28 conference.

A principal lie is that, in itself, the application of clean technologies ─ solar, wind, tide, hydrogen, may be sufficient to arrest global warming. Likewise, ignoring the export of fossil fuels in national carbon inventories, despite the dissemination of greenhouse gas emissions world-wide.

xxx

Figure 2a Based on NOAA’s temperature data Earth’s temperature rose by an average of 0.08° C per decade since 1880; Since 1981 the warming rate is 0.18° C per decade. The 2022 surface temperature was 0.86 °C warmer than the 20th-century average of 13.9 °C and 1.06 ˚C warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900). The 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred since 2010.

Figure 2b. Accelerated sea level rise after Church and White, 2011 and University of Hawaii (Fast Delivery). Values in millimetres compared to the 1993-2008 average. NOAA. University of Hawaii Sea Level Centre.

Major climate untruths propagated by governments, fossil fuel corporations and their subservient media include proposed limits on domestic emissions which are meaningless to the arrest of global warming since with continuing mining, export and combustion of fossil fuels, greenhouse gases disperse through the atmosphere regardless of where the fossil fuel is mined or burnt.

With CO2 level reaching 418.51 ppm at a rate of ~2.5 ppm/year and methane CH4 level reaching 1917.1 ppb at a rate of near-12 ppb per year, greenhouse gas rises are exceeding any in recent geological history, representing the most severe atmospheric crisis since the asteroid impact which killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Oblivious to the physical laws on which climate science is based and to the time factor of the impending climate crisis, setting artificial targets such as “1.5oC by 2030” or “2oC by 2050”, the powers-to-be may not be aware of what life on planet Earth is facing.

Australia is the world’s third biggest exporter and fifth biggest miner of fossil fuels by CO2 potential. hydrocarbon exports, following Russia and Saudi Arabia. “The government denies responsibility for emissions created by the vast amounts of coal and gas Australia exports overseas as one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers, and has flatly ruled out any discussion on banning new fossil fuel projects” (McNeill (2022).

While ongoing combustion of fossil fuels is raising greenhouse gas concentration at a rate unprecedented in the geological record, global heating being a self-amplifying process, the utilisation of clean energy: solar, wind, hydropower and thermal power cannot by itself stem global warming, now rising above 420 ppm CO2, well above the 180-280 ppm range of the preceding glacial-interglacial cycles. Such a high CO2 level, compared to that which existed in the Miocene before 5.3 million years ago when mean global temperature was about ~4oC, rising at a rate to which much of the fauna and flora can hardly adjust.

Nowadays as bombs keep falling, heads of governments jet around the world genuflecting to each other, signing arms deals, uttering honey words, while the corporate media discusses their official dinner menus, no solutions are reached for the worsening humanitarian crises nor the future on an uninhabitable Earth.

https://johnmenadue.com/climate-change-terror-dubais-cop-out-denial-conference/

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