The climate finance farce

The developed world is inventing all sorts of accounting tricks to avoid picking up the tab for the fight against climate change.

The year was 2015. The day, December 11. On that cold Parisian night, John Kerry thundered before a room full of hopefuls. Unless the 195 country representatives agreed to America’s terms, Kerry was going to walk away from the Paris Agreement talks. “You can take the US out of this,” he said. “Take the developed world out of this. Remember, the Earth has a problem. What will you do with the problem on your own? I would love to have a legally binding agreement. But the situation in the US is such that legally binding with respect to finance is …