November 20, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian
Right after the election, President Biden departed Washington on November 10 for a big round of international meetings. First, he went to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where he spoke on November 11 at the UN “climate” conference known as COP-27. Then it was off to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for meetings on the 12th and 13th with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). And finally, to Bali, Indonesia, for a meeting with Xi Jinping of China on the 14th, followed by a big confab of the G20 on the 15th. Biden arrived back in Washington on the 16th.
In any sane world, the American President would use such a round of meetings to advance American interests, and also to extol, as a model for the world, the freedom-based economic system (often mis-named “capitalism”) that has made the U.S. the world’s wealthiest and most successful country. Indeed, when ex-President Trump traveled the world for meetings like these, some version of those were generally his main themes.
But now, we have a President who is a man of the Left, and it’s the opposite. You can’t help noticing that Biden — like the leftists who set his agenda and write his words — is ashamed of the country he leads and of its economic success. Thus he uses these occasions mainly to apologize and to try to buy forgiveness and atonement for his country’s supposed sins.
First, consider the COP-27 conference in Egypt. Some 35,000 people flew in to attend because, after all, UN bureaucrats and international diplomats are way too important to be subject to any imperative to reduce carbon emissions that may apply to the little people. Most of the attendees at the conference came from the so-called developing world. The representatives from those places, who are not dopes, are completely on to how easy and profitable it can be to shame a lefty fool like Biden, and they were primed to test just how much this sucker could be duped out of.
Somehow, in the short year since the last such conference — COP-26 in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021 — the focus of the mostly-annual UN get-together had shifted dramatically. Last year, all the talk was “Net Zero” — how we are going to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in the economy. Twelve months later, Europe now is facing an energy crisis. Its consumer energy bills are soaring, wind an solar are completely not up to the task of taking up the slack, and its emissions are rising with increased use of coal. Sorry, nobody’s carbon emissions are going down much any time soon. It’s time to memory-hole “Net Zero,” at least for the moment, and move to a new theme of convenience. This year’s theme was “loss and damage” funding.
What’s that about? To give some context, think way back to COP-15, that took place in Copenhagen in 2009. At that conference the rich countries made some vague commitment to provide $100 billion or so per year to developing countries for “climate action.” From the website of the OECD:
At the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) of the UNFCCC in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries committed to a collective goal of mobilising USD 100 billion per year by 2020 for climate action in developing countries, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation. The goal was formalised at COP16 in Cancun, and at COP21 in Paris, it was reiterated and extended to 2025.
That piddling $100 billion per year was supposedly for “mitigation actions” and “transparency in implementation.” In other words, maybe building a fleet of useless wind turbines. But now this year these developing countries have latched on to a much more lucrative idea in this “loss and damage” thing. Now, we are no longer talking just money to build wind turbines, with the reigning kleptocrats getting the opportunity to skim 10% or 20% here and there. No, now we are talking about much bigger money, and all of it going straight to the pockets of the kleptocrats. In the run-up to the conference the UN put out a big Report laying the new number on the table: $2 trillion per year. Euronews.green had a summary on October 11, with the headline “Loss and Damage: Developing countries need $2 trillion a year to cope with climate crisis.” Excerpt:
Developing and emerging countries will need $2 trillion (€1.98 trillion) per year by 2030 to cope with climate breakdown, a new report warns. The money - which covers all of the world’s developing economies except China - would fund a shift to renewable energy and help countries cope with extreme weather. The figure comes from ‘Finance for Climate Action’, a UN-backed report released on Tuesday. . . . Its authors call for ‘immediate action.’
The only right response for a U.S. President was to stay as far away from this shake-down as possible. But of course Biden went. The New York Times had a big article on November 12, headline “Biden Casts America as Climate Leader and Promises a ‘Low-Carbon Future.’” They first report that every likely target but Biden was able to figure out the game and stay home:
Mr. Biden was the only leader of a major polluting country to appear at the climate talks in Egypt. Mr. Xi, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India did not attend. The absence of the other leaders made Mr. Biden even more of a target for developing nations that were aggrieved.
Biden chose to make his speech about a so-called “low carbon future.” Everybody who knows anything about this subject knows that that’s a joke, except to the extent that the U.S. or other advanced countries decide to voluntarily impoverish their populations. The entire developing world, led by China and India, is building coal-fired power plants as fast as they can. But meanwhile, with Biden sticking his chin out so it could get punched, why not take advantage of the opportunity?
Some of the assembled negotiators and environmental activists criticized Mr. Biden ahead of his speech. Protesters briefly interrupted it. “Joe Biden comes to COP27 and makes new promises, but his old promises have not even been fulfilled,” said Mohamed Adow, the founder of Power Shift Africa, an environmental group, after Mr. Biden gave his remarks. “He is like a salesman selling goods with endless small print.”
In private, they surely laughed until they split a gut. And how did it all play out? Biden left the COP-27 conference right after his speech on November 11, but the conference continued until today, November 20, with the U.S. and Europe undoubtedly “represented” by committed members of the climate cult. Of course they fell all over themselves to buy atonement with other people’s money. On the “loss and damage” issue, here is the Times’s article from November 19, headline “In a First, Rich Countries Agree to Pay for Climate Damages in Poor Nations.” Excerpt:
Negotiators from nearly 200 countries concluded two weeks of talks early Sunday in which their main achievement was agreeing to establish a fund that would help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters made worse by the pollution spewed by wealthy nations that is dangerously heating the planet. The decision regarding payments for climate damage marked a breakthrough on one of the most contentious issues at United Nations climate negotiations.
The details of who pays what when remain to be worked out. All I know is, as soon as anyone actually puts up any part of the annual $2 trillion, the number will immediately go up by another order of magnitude. Hey, it’s all from the infinite pile of free money, so what does it matter?
Of other stops on Biden’s international swing, perhaps the most noteworthy was the meeting with Xi Jinping in Bali on the 14th. Steven Mosher has a summary in today’s New York Post, headline “Biden kowtows to Xi Jinping and lets China get away with murder.”
As Mosher points out, a meeting between Biden and Xi was an opportunity to get on the table any number of a long list of issues important to advancing America’s interests. Mosher mentions Covid, fentanyl, the Uyghurs, Tibet, persecution of Christians, Hong Kong, Taiwan and others. Biden somehow omitted to mention any of them, except a few in passing:
It’s almost like Joe Biden was sitting in the Confucius Institute classroom at Stanford University, where certain topics are forbidden.
So what did Biden bring up? Mosher:
What we got instead was a blast from the past, as Biden reverted to his 2016 talking points. Biden came before Xi as a supplicant, once again begging China to rein in its tributary state, North Korea, and urging it to cooperate with us on the issue of climate change.
On how the “climate” game will play out, Mosher has it exactly right:
As far as the “climate crisis” is concerned, the world’s largest polluter needs little encouragement to play the game. A projected 1 degree rise in the Earth’s temperature over the next century does not keep Xi up at night. Rather, he’s dreaming about de-industrializing America by encouraging us to shut down energy production and pay for the sin of ever using fossil fuels by shoveling money at the rest of the world. Of course, while America self-destructs, China will continue to bring a coal-fired power plant online every two weeks or so.
The best thing that Biden could do for his country on the world stage would be to stay home and say nothing. Firing the entire State Department also wouldn’t hurt.
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