Poor countries exploit climate panic to press us for easy cash

Despite its unprecedented largesse, the deal hashed out at the COP29 climate conference – for wealthy Western nations to hand over £240 billion a year by 2035 to tackle climate change – was met with derision by some of the developing nations on the receiving end.

The Indian delegate described the money as ‘a paltry sum’.

The Nigerian envoy went even further, calling the deal an ‘insult’.

Several countries had walked out of the talks in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku – they demanded ‘trillions not billions’.

Some of the delegates who remained covered their mouths with tape, on which was scrawled the words ‘Pay up’.

But scant consideration was given to the people who will have pay these vast sums. Britain has already committed to paying £11.6 billion in climate aid between 2021 and 2026.

On the basis that the new deal agreed at COP29 will mean a trebling in existing climate aid (from $100 billion to $300 billion a year), we may presume that UK taxpayers are now going to be stumping up around £6 billion a year.

That is going to swallow nearly half of Britain’s existing aid budget (£15.4 billion in 2023), meaning either less money for refugees (£4.3 billion) and genuine humanitarian aid like earthquake relief – or that the Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves is going to be picking our pockets even more than she is already.

The conceit behind climate reparations is that years of Western emissions have increased droughts and caused sea levels to rise, putting some countries under existential threat.

It is true that Britain started the Industrial Revolution, but we are now responsible for just 4.4 per cent of cumulative historic emissions. We have long been overtaken by China (15.4 per cent) and are about to be overtaken by coal-hungry India (currently 3.47 per cent) – yet India is one of the nations which will be receiving the money.

Since the United Nations still defines it as a ‘developing’ country, China – with the world’s second-largest economy and producing almost a third of current greenhouse gases – will not be bound by mandates to cut emissions or give money to poorer countries.

COP29 is a disaster because it pushes developing countries even further towards becoming welfare junkies. The climate has become, like the historical ills of slavery, an excuse for grasping governments to try to extract ‘reparations’ from Western nations.

Of course, this is easier than trying to improve the lives of your people through economic growth. 

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And we would be wise to ask where this money will end up. Indiscriminate development aid over the years has bought plenty of presidential palaces and Rolls-Royces, but done rather less for ordinary people.

What a travesty that some climate aid will be funding the Taliban, who turned up at COP29 pleading that what Afghan women are really suffering from is climate change, not a brutally repressive theocracy.

The West is now reaping what it has sown by spreading climate hysteria and by patronising the developing world. Small wonder that third world governments have worked out there is a huge opportunity here to press for some easy cash.