Marc Morano highlights in an interview with the Federalist major problems with the recent United Nations Climate Summit.
So what’s happened over the years is they’re basically saying that the wealthy nations — Europe, United States, Canada, Australia — our use of fossil fuels (i.e., us driving around in SUVs) has created bad weather in Africa and therefore we need to give them reparations for all the bad weather we caused. That’s literally the sales pitch.
The problem with that is twofold. [First,] weather hasn’t gotten worse as CO2 has increased. Oddly, the weather has actually improved. And you can look at this — hurricanes, floods, wildfires, drought, tornadoes, on every climate time scale — 30, 50, 100 years — there’s either no trend in these bad weather extremes or there’s a declining trend. And how they get trends is … they can always cherry-pick a region or a timescale but if you look at it from a big climate picture, there is no climate emergency — no climate bad weather that we need reparations for.
The [second] thing interesting about this … is that these poor nations have actually immensely benefited from the wealthy nations’ use of fossil fuels. We brought schools, hospitals, medicine, infrastructure to these developing world countries and allowed them to develop even better. They’re enjoying a lot of the First World benefits from our wealth, and so the key is to allow the Third World or the developing world (Africa, Asia, South America, the 1 billion-plus people that have no access to running water, adequate access to running water and electricity) to develop like we did.
And the real problem is they don’t want them to develop. They don’t want them to make the same “mistakes” (i.e., long life expectancy, lower infant mortality, infrastructure, wealth creation). So instead, they want us to just pay them, pay their leaders to keep their people poor because then they’ll be good stewards of the environment. In a nutshell, that really is what the UN climate reparations fund is all about.
