On Global Warming, Follow the Money (UPDATED)

Yesterday in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry inadvertently said something true, admitting that the policies the Obama administration has pursued with the ostensible object of fending off global warming are worthless:

The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.

If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions –- remember what I just said, all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions -– it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65% of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.

So what is global warming hysteria really all about? Money, mostly. The Paris conference is going into overtime, as we all knew it would, as the parties debate who is going to pay whom, and how much:

Britain and other rich countries face demands for $3.5 trillion (£2.3 trillion) in payments to developing nations to secure a deal in Paris to curb global warming.

Developing countries have added a clause to the latest draft of the text under which they would be paid the “full costs” of meeting plans to cut emissions. The amount paid by rich countries is a key unresolved issue at the climate conference in Paris, which is supposed to end tomorrow.

When trillions of dollars are at stake–or many billions, as in the case of “green” energy scams in the U.S.–you can pay for a lot of junk science.

STEVE adds: I was trolling the same news items as John, and came up with this:

As predicted here weeks ago, the Paris climate summit has degenerated into a full-scale shakedown. The main sticking point is the demand of developing countries that $3.5 trillion in “climate adjustment assistance” be included in the final agreement as a legally binding part of the agreement. Ron Bailey reports this afternoon:

Poor country governments want rich country governments to make explicit promises about how much and when climate finance is going to be flowing their way. They don’t want to count loans, export credits, or private investments – climate finance has got to be public money and it’s got to be with no strings attached. As Indian climate negotiator Susheel Kumar explained earlier this week, climate finance is not a donation, it’s an entitlement. Poor countries deserve the money as reparations from rich countries that have wrecked the climate. As it happens, in the current draft of the universal climate accord, rich countries promise to “mobilize” $100 billion annually as climate finance for poor countries by 2020. In fact, they also agree that $100 billion is a floor and that poor countries can expect to get increasingly larger amounts between 2020 and 2030. But that is evidently not satisfactory.

Apparently this is too much even for John Kerry who has threatened a U.S. walkout if legally binding aid isn’t struck from the document. Kerry has tried to explain that any agreement with binding aid is dead on arrival in Congress back here in the U.S. I can’t believe anyone will take such a threat from Kerry seriously. Developing nations maybe poor, but they’re not stupid. They saw how Obama and Kerry folded to the Iranians. There is zero chance that Obama will want to be blamed for the failure of a “world-saving” climate agreement.

Prediction: Over the next few hours, some kind of “compromise” language will be found to paper over this very real problem. Kerry will probably promise that the World Bank, or the IMF, or the Tooth Fairy, will commit the money to developing nations, or that the money question will be the sole subject of next year’s climate conference. But India and China might hang tough, and again refuse to sign even a weak agreement as they did in Copenhagen in 2009, which would at least save Obama and Kerry the embarrassment of causing the collapse of the summit.