From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
Squeezing the global economy dry to solve a fake problem.
The $13.6 trillion question: how do we pay for the green transition?
The public sector will have to provide about 30 per cent of climate finance globally, and the heat is building on governments to come up with ways of doing that.
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The bill will be immense. If average global temperature rises are to be limited in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate finance globally will need to increase to about $US9 trillion ($13.6 trillion) a year globally by 2030, up from just under $US1.3 trillion in 2021-22, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative.
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Former US presidential candidate John Kerry, who stepped down from his role as the US special climate envoy in March, puts the challenge of meeting this bluntly: “We don’t have the money.”
The 80-year-old is now planning to turn his attention to climate finance to prepare for the phaseout of fossil fuels. “We have to put in place more rapidly the funding mechanisms that are going to actually fuel this transition at the pace it needs to be,” he says.
To do that, governments around the world are weighing up options from wealth taxes to levies on shipping. The US is planning to fund the IRA by raising $US300 billion over the decade by requiring large corporations to pay a 15 per cent minimum tax on their profits, as well as through a stock buyback tax, among other measures.
The impact of the proposed tax squeeze on ordinary people would be unimaginable.
People in the USA and other Western nations are already reeling under the impact of excessive government spending on climate measures and other wasteful “investments” driving up inflation, coupled with the simultaneous attack on fuel and energy availability and cost. Adding to this burden would inflict hardship previously unknown outside of wartime or great calamities.
All for the sake of solving a problem which does not exist.
This is how great powers fall, not by the hand of a conqueror, but rotted from within by rulers who lose touch with reality, burdening the nation with their delusions, until the structure of society is crushed under the weight of unbridled incompetence. A conqueror, if they appear, merely delivers the final blow to a power which is on the brink of collapse. Let us hope it is not our turn to suffer that fate which has befallen so many throughout history.
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