Globalists Use UN Green Climate Fund to Redistribute Wealth
World leaders are convening in Glasgow for a climate summit meeting beginning on October 31st. This get-together is a follow-up to the 2015 conference in Paris that resulted in the one-sided Paris Climate Agreement. As the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) gets underway, it is worth recalling the prescient words of a former United Nations climate change expert who candidly linked globalist policies to combat climate change with wealth redistribution.
More than ten years ago, Ottmar Edenhofer, a former co-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group III "Mitigation of Climate Change," explained the connection as follows:
“Basically, it is a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the big issues of globalization…First of all, we industrialized countries have practically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must be clear: we are de facto redistributing world wealth through climate policy. It is obvious that the owners of coal and oil are not enthusiastic about it. One has to get rid of the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” [translated from German via Google Translate]
The UN Green Climate Fund (GCF), which will surely be a major topic of discussion at the Glasgow climate summit, demonstrates what Edenhofer was talking about.
The Green Climate Fund was established as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It describes itself as “the world’s largest climate fund, mandated to support developing countries raise and realize their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) ambitions towards low-emissions, climate-resilient pathways.” The Nationally Determined Contributions are supposed to embody objectives by each country, as part of their participation in the Paris Climate Agreement, to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
The world’s more economically advanced countries agreed to jointly provide $100 billion per year to the GCF by 2020. However, the $100 billion annual target has not been met so far.
Not only are the so-called “developing” countries pressing for the so-called “rich” countries to promptly fulfill their collective pledge of providing $100 billion annually to the GCF. The developing countries are demanding far more in redistribution of wealth to them through the GCF, with essentially no strings attached that would require them to meet firm decarbonization targets. Indeed, some developing countries are pushing for as much as $750 billion annually in additional contributions to the GCF from richer countries by the middle of this decade.
For example, as reported by Bloomberg Green, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy suggested that “post-2025, we most move from a floor of $100 billion. Taking the needs of developing nations into account, we must move toward a collective goal of mobilizing $750 billion a year” from developed countries. South Africa would be a funding recipient, not a donor country.
By all normal economic measures, South Africa should not even be considered a developing country that would be entitled to receive funds from the GCF. Yet by virtue of the UN’s own “Human Development Index,” South Africa is still classified as a “developing country.” No wonder South Africa wants “richer countries” to fork over $750 billion annually within just a few years to the Green Climate Fund piggy bank from which it will partake.
President Biden’s climate czar John Kerry, who loves to fly around to climate meetings in fossil fuel-guzzling private airplanes, promised to restore the funding to the GCF that had been scrapped by the Trump administration. He said this would be “just the beginning of what we intend to do.” Kerry added that “President Biden knows we need to contribute going forward, and even now we have started to consider exactly how to provide scaled-up resources to the GCF.”
Yannick Glemarec, executive director of the Green Climate Fund, said that U.S. reengagement “will send an extraordinarily positive signal” to spur accelerated financial support for the fund’s projects.
But GCF whistleblowers are advising the Biden administration to spend its money elsewhere. Whistleblowers have complained about integrity issues at the GCF in vetting projects for funding and about political interference in what should be purely technical decisions.
A whistleblower from a developed country, a technical specialist who did not want to be identified, was quoted by Climate Home News as saying that “[T]here was inappropriate pressure to approve projects which could harm people.”
“Sincerely, I don’t think that the GCF, the way it is managed today, is a good channel for climate finance,” said Pierre-Daniel Telep, a German who worked on renewable energy projects at the GCF for over two years.
The Green Climate Fund funnels a significant amount of money to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), GCF’s largest project implementer. In fact, the GCF just reaccredited UNDP to receive GCF funds despite unresolved corruption allegations involving UNDP-administered programs in Russia, Samoa, and Armenia. An audit of UNDP practices has also revealed deficiencies in UNDP’s internal controls, accountability, and anti-money laundering implementation.
UNDP’s Administrator, Achim Steiner, dismissed the significance of these concerns, declaring to UN correspondents during a press briefing that the “reaccreditation speaks for itself.”
One thing we do know is that Steiner is a big believer in wealth redistribution. “Inequality is not just about how much someone earns compared to their neighbour,” Steiner said in 2019. “It is about the unequal distribution of wealth and power: the entrenched social and political norms that are bringing people onto the streets today, and the triggers that will do so in the future unless something changes.”
The developing countries seeking handouts from the Green Climate Fund have objected to any decarbonization conditions imposed on their domestic development entities seeking to access GCF funding. GCF Board members from some of these countries have backed such objections in strident terms.
For example, GCF Board member Ayman Shasly, from Saudi Arabia of all places, described the imposition of a decarbonization timetable condition as “blackmail.” Shasly accused the GCF of being “manipulated by [developed countries] pushing their own agenda onto the fund.”
It is the developing countries and their left-wing supporters, crying “equity” and “climate justice,” who are seeking to manipulate the GCF into acceding to their demands.
Yan Ren, the GCF Board member from China, which is absurdly categorized as one of the GCF Board representatives of developing countries, said, “We should not impose conditions on developing countries to force them to achieve certain targets. There is no one size fits all on fossil fuels.”
China has the world’s second-largest economy, exceeded only by the United States. China is engaging in fossil fuel-intensive activities in trying to become the world’s number one economic superpower. In the process, China has become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
To help greenwash its image, China is exploiting its membership on the GCF Board as a “developing country” that should not be required to meet firm decarbonization targets.
To add insult to injury, China has managed to obtain funding from the Green Climate Fund to pay for mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions that China is increasingly spewing into the air.
Sadly, the Biden administration intends to scale up U.S. contributions to the Green Climate Fund. It will thereby waste American taxpayers’ money on a dysfunctional globalist wealth redistribution device that even funnels funds to China.