Prometheus may be unimpressed by the COP27 reparations, but writing for the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker does not appear to be (#understatement) a fan either:
[T]he idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialization and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of “climate justice,” but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the “reparations” climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialize for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.
If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?
Maybe Pakistan could have become a thriving economy with little industrial activity, producing carbon-free economic growth and prosperity for its people. But the nation’s gross domestic product per capita has roughly tripled in the past 50 years, and I’d wager that a significant amount of that growth has been the result of innovations such as the combustion engine, air conditioning, the microchip, the personal computer and all the other wonders of the developed world.
Critics say that the developed world has already received the benefits of those advancements in the form of profits for the West’s capitalists. But have they? If we are going to examine the wider social and environmental effects of rapid growth, isn’t it reasonable to ask what would be the level of the world’s overall income and wealth without the innovations of industrial capitalism?
No good deed goes unpunished, they say. So, for having the genius to produce the ideas, create the economic system and develop the capital that has in a little more than a century given the world unimaginable prosperity, eliminated deadly diseases that once killed millions, reduced infant mortality, extended life expectancy and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty, we must now be made to pay.
To support the idea of these reparations (regardless of the uncertain quality of the data on which they may be based) is, at a very fundamental level, to be opposed to the idea of scientific advance and of human flourishing.
But that is the position that the West’s leadership has taken.
Also from the Wall Street Journal:
John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, dismissed the idea earlier this month: “It’s a well-known fact that the United States and many other countries will not establish . . . some sort of legal structure that is tied to compensation or liability. That’s just not happening.” But on Thursday Europe abandoned the U.S. by proposing a deal, and Mr. Kerry rolled over.
To be fair, our climate Metternich must have felt a little adrift without the steadying presence of James Taylor to lend him a hand, but for the U.S. to have caved in like this because of pressure from the EU is yet another reminder of American weakness in the era of Kabul Joe.
That’s bad enough, but even a basic knowledge of European history should have been enough to tell Kerry that the continent’s remarkable economic development since the industrial revolution has been shadowed by a pathological distrust of the fruits of that advance.
Under the circumstances, for Kerry and Biden to buckle before Brussels is as idiotic as (doubtless) it will be expensive.