For anyone mistakenly believing the latest United Nations global gabfest on climate change in Baku, Azerbaijan, was all about saving the planet, it was in fact, all about money.
Recommended Videos
This annual 11-day meeting – although it always goes into overtime – formally known as COP 29 or the 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has always been about money, specifically about redistributing money from developed countries like Canada to developing nations.
It’s also about hypocrisy, given the number of jet-setting politicians, bureaucrats, celebrities and billionaires who attend these annual orgies to excessive consumption, along with tens of thousands of delegates, creating an obscenely high carbon footprint.
The issue of money has to do with how much more money taxpayers in developed nations like Canada are going to pay to developing countries in climate reparations for allegedly ruining the planet by using our fossil fuel resources during the industrial revolution to power ourselves out of the third world into the first.
The total price tag to avert climate armageddon, we’re being told by “experts,” is $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 from all government and private sources.
The goal of COP 29 was to come up with a new figure – formally called a New Collective Quantified Goal – for the portion to be contributed by 22 designated “wealthy” countries, including Canada, starting after 2025.
Developed nations are currently paying $100 billion annually toward this goal, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doubling Canada’s contribution to $5.3 billion over five years from 2021 to 2026, compared to the $2.65 billion he committed taxpayers to from 2015 to 2021.
The debate in Azerbaijan – a wealthy, corrupt, petro-state bordering Eastern Europe and West Asia, where most of the money ends up in the hands of the ruling family of its authoritarian president – is over how much money Canada and the 21 other “rich” countries should be contributing to the fund post-2026.
For that reason, the news coming out of COP 29 has resembled the bargaining that goes on in a Mideast bazaar.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
An initial offer of $250 billion a year at was angrily rejected by developing nations, which would receive the funding, as an insult, prompting an offer of $300 billion annually in a bid to reach a deal.
Dispute over the final number – developing nations say it should be higher and they’ve been frozen out of the negotiating process by wealthy countries – has resulted in political temper tantrums, staged walk-outs and name-calling over how much more money taxpayers in countries like Canada should be conscripted into paying toward the climate fund.
The idea that taxpayers in Canada and other countries are currently facing an affordability crisis with many families struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table for their children holds no sway in the corridors of COP 29.
Nor does the fact that the tax-and-spend Trudeau government has already mortgaged the financial future of the children of today’s taxpayers.
What COP 29 has underscored is that the debate over how to fight climate change has never been about environmental policy – it’s been about financial policy.
The Trudeau government, for example, has already committed $200 billion to the cause through 149 different government programs.
This includes the federal carbon tax, clean fuel regulations, clean electricity regulations, methane regulations, a cap on emissions in the oil and gas sector, electric vehicle standards, plus massive subsidies to EV battery makers to establish a supply chain in Canada.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
At press time, negotiations at COP 29 were going on and on past its official deadline – which happens at every COP conference – with the standard warning that unless a deal is reached climate catastrophe awaits us all.
Negotiators announced Saturday they had agreed to new rules for international carbon credit trading after almost a decade of deliberations, but critics warned the rules are so weak they may invite fraud.
And whatever happens, the entire exercise at COP 29 is a house of cards.
That’s because U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has said he will pull the United States – the world’s second-largest emitter of industrial greenhouse gases after China and a major contributor to the green climate fund – out of the UN’s Paris climate agreement, which underpins the entire COP process, after he becomes president on Jan. 20, as he did the last time he was president from 2016 to 2020.