Via David Wojick
Egypt is the country of camels, so it’s only fitting that the long-awaited camel nose of the great green dream of loss and damage has finally appeared. We are talking about the potential trillions of dollars flowing from developed countries to developing countries. A breathtaking prospect.
For those who missed it, here’s my quick recap of “loss and damage” in UN parlance from my introductory article:
“The loss and damage was a 9,000-pound gorilla. It means that the US and the rest of the developed world will compensate developing countries for all the bad that climate change does to them. Loss refers to things that cannot be repaired, like death or destroyed crops, while damage refers to things that can be rebuilt, like a razed town.
Since all the bad weather right now is due to climate change, we will pay the price for it all. I’m not making this up. Coverage includes short-term events like hurricanes or floods, plus sluggish ones like drought. Non-weather events such as plagues, pandemics, and wildfires are probably also included.”
To set the stage here is a recent Bloomberg headline: “Talks in support of US climate reports at UN Summit in Egypt.”
Bloomberg is very green so this is overstated in some important ways, but it’s the point. First of all, “USA” in this case means the Biden Administration, not Congress, and certainly not the United States. Second, we are talking about compensation, not compensation, at least for the moment. Compensation will be for past damages, perhaps going back to the early days of the supposed man-made process and the industrial revolution. Payment for progress.
Furthermore, loss and damage has been the talk of the COP for some time. COP19 in 2013 established the “Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage Related to Climate Change Impacts”, known simply as WIM. (But more than a whim.) Its job is to talk about loss and damage, which talk a lot of over the next nine years, without taking any serious action.
What is new now and very dangerous is the topic of the talk. It is called “Basic” by UN-speak. The facility is a mechanism where developed countries put money in and developing countries take out. This is called “Finance”.
There are already facilities for Mitigation (especially emission reduction) and Adaptation (to climate change). What is currently proposed and appears to be actually negotiated is the Loss and Damage Basis. If this happens, the question on the table is whether such a Facility should be created or not? The Biden people at least agreed to talk about it and that’s the new thing.
The camel aspect is that the creation of this Facility officially certifies that the US and other developed countries are in fact responsible for the harmful effects of climate change in developing countries. Developed countries have never unanimously acknowledged this responsibility and COP decisions must be unanimous.
Even if no money is committed at the moment camels are entering the tent. And as the metaphor suggests, the camel is much bigger than the tent and will destroy it. I have seen estimates of loss and damage over time that exceed the combined GDP of developed countries. In principle, it could bankrupt us.
More realistically, the establishment of a Loss and Damage Facility immediately raises monstrous questions such as these:
A. What did each developing country suffer in the last year due to climate change?
B. What is the cost, including lost lives?
C. How much of it will the developed countries have to pay?
Note that there is already a (supposedly) complete science called “attribution” that claims to be able to answer the first question.
So it’s not just another weird green dream of wealth that’s on the table at COP27. The ability to formally ask these absurd questions is up to the discretion. Such a decision in favor of Loss and Damage could also lead to numerous lawsuits against developed countries.
Will teams in the developed world agree to cause bad weather around the world? Unthinkable responsibility looms.
Stay tuned for CFACT.
Author
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For the source, see: http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html
For more than 100 previous papers for the CFACT, see:
http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/
Available for confidential research and consultation.
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