Climate Reparations to Take Center Stage at Sharm El Sheikh

by Steve Bonta November 4, 2022

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Climate reparations will be the central topic at COP27, this year’s edition of the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. For years, delegates to the conference, in concert with environmental activists, have been agitating for the creation of a fund for climate reparations, money to be transferred from rich countries to poor countries as compensation for the alleged climatic havoc wreaked on the latter by carbon emissions from the former. In past Climate Change Conferences, including last year’s Glasgow edition, delegates from wealthy countries have been reluctant to commit to such a permanent regime of reparations. But this year is expected to mark a turning point, with US climate envoy John Kerry signaling for the first time, in a pre-conference interview, that the United States would not “obstruct” discussions of climate-induced losses and damages.

The climate change scam having long been a featured item of the international socialist agenda, such climate reparations are merely socialist wealth redistribution in creative new garb. In order for a socialist system of global governance to truly take hold, mechanisms for international leveling must be imposed to reduce the wealth and power of countries like the United States and make them subordinate to international authority.

The rhetoric employed to urge such reparations on a reluctant developed world is eerily similar to the talk of “racial reparations” within the United States. According to radical environmentalist scolds, the predatory neocolonial regimes that have corrupted the once-pristine global South with their unrestrained consumption and industrialization now owe a moral debt to the oppressed in those countries. Accordingly, the United States and other unjustly rich countries need to compensate poor countries for the floods, hurricanes, droughts, and other supposedly anthropogenic catastrophes wreaking havoc on their fragile infrastructure and livelihoods.

 

According to Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (based, appropriately enough, in Bangladesh, the world’s cyclone capital), putting so-called “loss and damage funding” on the agenda at Sharm El Sheikh is by far the most important task for next week’s conference. “If we lose the agenda fight,” Huq warned, “then we might as well come home and forget about the rest of COP because it will be useless in the face of what is happening in the world on climate change…. Loss and damage [funding] is by far the most important issue that needs to be discussed and if the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] doesn’t do it then it basically becomes redundant.”

So much has loss and damage funding become prioritized that it is now being classed as the “third pillar” of climate action, alongside mitigation (taking steps to reduce emissions) and adaptation (adopting measures to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic climate change). According to CNBC’s Sam Meredith:

            Advocates of loss and damage funding argue it is required to account for climate impacts — including hurricanes, floods and wildfires or slow-onset impacts such as rising sea levels — that countries cannot defend against because the risks are unavoidable or the countries cannot afford it.

“This is the litmus test for the success  of COP27,” said Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network, which includes more than 1,500 civil society groups.

In other words, prepare for yet another massive shakedown of American taxpayers by the internationalist Left, this time in the name of collective guilt for every cyclone in the Bay of Bengal and each new drought-induced crop failure in East Africa. Should Republicans regain control of Congress, the Biden administration will likely encounter resistance to any attempt to pony up new billions for export to Third World oligarchies. But if COP27 achieves this critical agenda item, the pressure for climate reparations will become permanent and relentless and, in the long run, America’s leftist ruling class will find ways to acquiesce to it.