Climate ‘Reparations’ Are a New Name for Foreign Aid
The U.N. proves Donald Trump right about the climate lobby: It’s all about the money.
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By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Nov. 25, 2022 4:11 pm ET


The word “reparations” was inflammatory, but perhaps the honorary chairman of the recently concluded 27th United Nations climate conference should have been Donald Trump. It was his assessment of the global climate lobby that prevailed: “It’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

The parties to the so-called COP27 did not officially run up the white flag on their project to control earth’s thermostat by 1.5 degrees Celsius, and they never will. But a watershed is upon us. By last Saturday, the focus had shifted from a goal at which the leading nations were clearly failing to one at which they are past masters: distributing foreign aid to advance their political interests and recycle money to domestic constituencies.

The U.S. and Europe are experts and China is rapidly becoming one. Please refer to the work of the late economist Peter Bauer for the nature of foreign aid. As for talk of trillions to compensate poorer nations for global warming, these words at COP27 were clearly infused with the departed spirit of the zero-interest-rate world that is rapidly disappearing in the rearview mirror since the global Covid spending blowout.

An organizer of the first U.N. climate conference in 1997, Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel, might have seen this moment coming. By 2007, he had moved on to other subjects, telling interviewer Robert Bryce: “I do not think energy policy matters much over the long run. Certainly diplomats do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In general, politicians are pulling on disconnected levers.”

This was not a counsel of despair: He maintained that certain technical efficiencies mean that nuclear and natural gas would lead to eventual decarbonization anyway.

His comments remind us of the fun game of listening closely for when the truth leaks from notable lips. Take Tony Blair. He admitted to the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006 “I’ve changed my thinking” by abandoning the unrealistic idea of a forced march away from fossil fuels.

For two decades the irresistible subject became the corruption and stylization of climate science and news reporting, as represented by the stale parrotings of the website Inside Climate News, from which one never learns anything interesting about climate science.

Was John Kerry winking at his audience or putting up a mute protest against the pending demotion of the orthodox greenhouse-controlling mission? Before the U.N. conference, he told a press group he refused to “feel guilty” toward the developing world.

Cue the gasps. But he was perfectly right not to feel guilty. The lives of virtually all of us would not be possible without fossil fuels. The expected warming is still far below any threshold of disruption to justify an expedited abandonment of fossil fuels. The expected costs of global warming are much less than the expected growth in global wealth to pay for them. Climate policy will still be pursued, and Mr. Kerry will be one of the pursuers, but not because it has any impact on climate (though one big asterisk, which we’ll have to face eventually, is the practicality of aerosol injections).

Even the New York Times has lately surmounted its psychological infirmities to notice realities, with a long piece on a recent Sunday recognizing that the outlook is less dire than routinely claimed. One nit I might pick with the sociological realists concerns a carbon tax, which might yet appeal for fiscal reasons. But even here the wisdom of Mr. Ausubel can’t be discounted:

“The outcome of [a carbon tax]” he said in the same 2007 interview, “will likely bear little relation to what experts forecast. I will wager the main beneficiaries will be government administrators, lawyers, accountants, and financial intermediaries, not people bothered by weather and climate. Keeping energy cheap for end-users matters. For those adapting to climate change, cheap energy matters enormously. Cheap energy can translate into cheap water, for example, through pumping or desalination. Cheap energy also means people can range further in search of jobs and income.”

It also allows them air conditioning to cope with hotter days, one might add.

The point is not that greenhouse gases are entirely immune to political developments. In the pace of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, you can see the effect of China’s entry into the world trade system, the collapse of Soviet heavy industry, the rise of fracking, the Covid lockdowns and reopenings.-- excerpt, rest at link above --