Is Subdued COP 30 a Trump effect? – Watts Up With That?

By David Wojick

The mainstream press run-up to COP 30 is the most subdued I have ever seen, and I have seen them all. No grand global plans or calls for astronomical sums of cash. Likely a Trump effect — but as a scientist with no hard evidence, I will not claim that, just point out the possibility).

The big thing missing is easy to see. This is the strident call for trillions of dollars in “financial flows” from developed to developing countries via various UN funds.

If payments are mentioned at all, they now tend to be in hundreds of billions a year, not trillions. Mind you, a few hundred billion is still ridiculous, but it is way less than trillions, definitely a new low profile.

President Trump has done several big things to contribute to this lack of financial grandeur. He is pulling America out of the Paris Accord, effective this January. He denounced climate alarmism as a colossal scam to the UN General Assembly, in their face as it were.

On the financial side, he has terminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was throwing billions of dollars a year around the world in climate money. Many other US agencies have also terminated climate spending.

Thus, it is perfectly clear that no climate change “financial flows” will be coming from America for at least the next few years. The other developed countries, some of which are still rabid on climate, are in no position to make up for the loss of America.

Moreover, and this may be another reason for the somber COP, these other developed countries are experiencing serious economic problems. Ironically, some of these are energy cost crunches brought on by ill-conceived climate policies. This is certainly true for the EU and UK.

Mind you, the monster-dollar “financial flows” rhetoric was mostly motivational. It had little to do with the actual work program of the COP, so that will still proceed, albeit cautiously, when it comes to costly national commitments.

Perhaps the best example of this newfound caution is the program that promised to be the biggest of all financially. This is the so-called loss and damage program, whereby the developed countries would pay the developing countries for all the bad weather they were hurt by. That plus non-weather events like wildfires and sea-level rise.

Because all this damage is claimed to be due to climate change. In fact, they have coined nonsensical language to codify this claim. Every big bit of bad weather is now termed a “climate event.” The green press constantly uses this ridiculous terminology.

Of course, the potential losses and claims are in the untold trillions of dollars, because there are billions of people in developing countries and a lot of bad weather. In previous COPs, these trillions were often flaunted in order to motivate creation of a “Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD),” which finally happened at COP 28.

This year, the FRLD is instead very low-key. To begin with, they have no money, as the financial flows have failed to flow. They have something like $250 million, which is as nothing.

They are going to issue a call for proposed projects so they can begin to work out who gets funded for what kind of losses, but these will obviously be small. And of course, they will spend a lot of time loudly wishing they had a lot more money.

The other UN Climate Funds and Programs are in pretty much the same sinking boat. America has pulled out, and nobody else has any money. The green press will have to work hard to find something interesting to write about. Human-interest stories could be it.

I, on the other hand, will be happy to chronicle the sadness of COP 30. Stay tuned to CFACT for more good news from this angle. COP 30 is going nowhere.