Climate Debt and Recycled Cement
Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
A Program Meant To Help Developing Nations Fight Climate Change Is Funneling Billions Of Dollars Back To Rich Countries
Quotes:
Japan, France, Germany, the United States and other wealthy nations are reaping billions of dollars in economic rewards from a global program meant to help the developing world grapple with the effects of climate change, a Reuters review of U.N. and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development data shows.
The financial gains happen as part of developed nations’ pledge to send $100 billion a year to poorer countries to help them reduce emissions and cope with extreme weather. By channeling money from the program back into their own economies, wealthy countries contradict the widely embraced concept that they should compensate poorer ones for their long-term pollution that fueled climate change, more than a dozen climate finance analysts, activists, and former climate officials and negotiators told Reuters.
Wealthy nations have loaned at least $18 billion at market-rate interest, including $10.2 billion in loans made by Japan, $3.6 billion by France, $1.9 billion by Germany and $1.5 billion by the United States, according to the review by Reuters and Big Local News, a journalism program at Stanford University. That is not the norm for loans for climate-related and other aid projects, which usually carry low or no interest.
Notes:
There are all sorts of arguments one could make about this, including that it’s more important that the money make it to countries that need it for renewables (and other “green” investments) as quickly as possible than the nature of that money.
That said, further indebting already debt-ridden countries doesn’t seem like the most resiliency-oriented plan, and while many of the announcements about this money seemed to suggest they would be grants (and would thus not need to be paid back), some of these governments seem to have claimed that reputational credit and then shifted to primarily loans, which is a questionable approach to this trend.
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