tinydancer
Diamond Member
This has always been about wealth redistribution. The game has always been green on the outside and red on the inside.
Obama has already pledged billions to a United Nations fund that would distribute the money. Of course after they take their fees out of the fund first.
Cass Sunstein: The great global warming wealth transfer
"There is unprecedented momentum for a real international agreement at the Paris climate talks in December: the U.S. is on track to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, China has announced a cap-and-trade program and many others have made commitments of their own.
The biggest obstacle? Justice — or at least two ideas about justice.
The first involves redistribution. As part of any agreement, poor nations, such as Brazil and India, want wealthier countries to pay them a lot of money, both for scaling back their emissions and for adapting to a warming climate.
Their argument has traction. Wealthy nations have agreed, in principle, to provide $100 billion by 2020 to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to give $3 billion.
(Disclosure: my wife, Samantha Power, is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) Recently China announced that it would give another $3.1 billion, and Prime Minister David Cameron said that the U.K. would give $8.8 billion. But both Obama and Cameron face significant opposition from their national legislatures — and in Paris, poor nations seem poised to demand far more, perhaps even trillions.
Are those demands justified? Rich countries have a lot of poor people too, and they face multiple demands on their budgets. Though developed nations can be spectacularly generous, they are likely to resist giving many billions of additional dollars in foreign aid. And if the real goal is to help poor nations, the argument for specific funds to combat climate change seems weaker than the argument for a general cash grant, which poor countries could use however they like (for example, to combat malaria)."
But poor countries have a second and perhaps more compelling idea: corrective justice. In particular, they call for “reparations,” a term used over the weekend by Indian Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar.
Their contention is that rich nations, which created the problem of climate change, have an obligation to fix it, not least by providing compensation for the high costs that, in their view, global warming has already imposed. Their argument adds that rich countries have gotten rich as a result of cheap energy (mostly coal); poor countries should be paid if they are to be deprived of the same opportunity."
Cass Sunstein: The great global warming wealth transfer
Obama has already pledged billions to a United Nations fund that would distribute the money. Of course after they take their fees out of the fund first.
Cass Sunstein: The great global warming wealth transfer
"There is unprecedented momentum for a real international agreement at the Paris climate talks in December: the U.S. is on track to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, China has announced a cap-and-trade program and many others have made commitments of their own.
The biggest obstacle? Justice — or at least two ideas about justice.
The first involves redistribution. As part of any agreement, poor nations, such as Brazil and India, want wealthier countries to pay them a lot of money, both for scaling back their emissions and for adapting to a warming climate.
Their argument has traction. Wealthy nations have agreed, in principle, to provide $100 billion by 2020 to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to give $3 billion.
(Disclosure: my wife, Samantha Power, is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.) Recently China announced that it would give another $3.1 billion, and Prime Minister David Cameron said that the U.K. would give $8.8 billion. But both Obama and Cameron face significant opposition from their national legislatures — and in Paris, poor nations seem poised to demand far more, perhaps even trillions.
Are those demands justified? Rich countries have a lot of poor people too, and they face multiple demands on their budgets. Though developed nations can be spectacularly generous, they are likely to resist giving many billions of additional dollars in foreign aid. And if the real goal is to help poor nations, the argument for specific funds to combat climate change seems weaker than the argument for a general cash grant, which poor countries could use however they like (for example, to combat malaria)."
But poor countries have a second and perhaps more compelling idea: corrective justice. In particular, they call for “reparations,” a term used over the weekend by Indian Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar.
Their contention is that rich nations, which created the problem of climate change, have an obligation to fix it, not least by providing compensation for the high costs that, in their view, global warming has already imposed. Their argument adds that rich countries have gotten rich as a result of cheap energy (mostly coal); poor countries should be paid if they are to be deprived of the same opportunity."
Cass Sunstein: The great global warming wealth transfer
