This comment on the "historic" Cancún meeting is worth reading:
To justify the two-week waste of time and money, agreement was reached to establish a Green Climate Fund, projected to rise to $100 billion annually by 2020, for countries threatened by altered weather patterns. It's unclear who will contribute to the fund, how it will be administered or who (other than Third World tyrants) would be the beneficiaries. It looks like a classic shell game in which affluent countries will pledge funds but actually make no significant contributions. If money really does end up in the pot, what a carnival of graft, corruption and international conflict over the spoils that will be!
The Cancun meetings, from their inception, had less to do with saving the Earth than with the redistribution of wealth from industrialized countries to the Third World, on a much larger scale than has ever been accomplished through conventional foreign aid. Third World delegates were exemplified by Bolivian President Eva Morales who, for years, has been campaigning for international compensation for poor countries that agree to protect their own forests. The final declaration from Cancun indicates that this campaign was successful but, again, honeyed words don't necessarily produce hard cash. Ironically, Bolivia refused to sign the final agreement because it didn't contain mandatory (and crippling) emission caps for wealthy countries.
Read the whole article here.
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