1. Unelected bureaucrats commit other people's money all the time. The UN, NATO, the World Bank, the WHO, the WTO...Originally Posted by Florence
I see that the Climate Change Conference in Paris has decided that the "developed" countries will contribute $100 billion to the "undeveloped" countries to help them mitigate their expenses lowering their carbon emissions. At least I think that is the rationale. A couple of points:
How can unelected bureaucrats commit the U.S. to pay out billions of dollars? Doesn't Congress have anything to say about this?
What percentage of the $100 billion will do anything useful vs. the percentage that will go to graft and corruption?
Why can't we use that money to put solar panels on our own roofs? Or build up our own renewable energy sources?
2. My guess is that absolutely none of the $100B will accomplish anything of value, but a few people will become fantastically wealthy.
3. Because the political ties to the fossil fuel industry run way too deep for anything beyond lip service to be paid to alternatives at a federal level. The only real hope for solar and other alternatives, IMO, is to work through member owned utilities first and then add some incentives from local or state governments. Those local utilities are the only ones with monetary incentives to get on board.
In the real world $100B won't even scratch the surface of what needs to be done. I heard a podcast yesterday where the speaker noted that $100B is roughly 1/15th of the GDP of Great Britain. Global GDP is somewhere just shy of $80 TRILLION. The $100B pledge is 1/800th of that. In comparison, if you make $80,000/year that level of allocation would give you $100 to spend to begin to change the way you do almost everything. Its probably not going to get you very far. Besides, China and India (understandably) already want concessions and exclusions that will allow their economies to develop using the cheapest energy available. India has plans to open a new coal fired power plant every month through 2020. Btw, they would still be behind the US in coal fired power generation. Anyway, the scale of investment required to meet the 'ambition coalition' goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5*C would be exponentially higher than $100B, probably in the tens of trillions. And considering global temperatures are generally accepted to have already risen by 1*C or so we would need to start spending that kind of money yesterday.
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