27 January 2022

Highest CO2 levels in over 2.5 million years!, not even news! SMFH

Sustainability Scrooges

It turns out that English-speaking countries (and two literal empires) are holding out on the rest of the world. According to a recent analysis by U.K. climate news company Climate Brief, the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia have all fallen billions of dollars short of paying out their “fair share” of climate funding to help developing countries meet climate targets.

Climate Brief’s analysis compares countries’ climate emissions numbers with the amount they’ve provided in international climate finance. While rich countries promised to provide $100 billion in climate funding by 2020, they fell far short of that target – based on the U.S.’s emissions, the superpower should have provided $40 billion by 2020, but instead contributed just $7.6 billion. Australia and Canada dispersed just one-third of the funding they should have, while the U.K. performed best, paying out three-quarters of its share f(but still $1.4 billion short of its mark).

The $100 billion by 2020 mark was meant to create enough funding to support cutting carbon emissions while helping vulnerable communities deal with increasingly extreme weather conditions caused by global warming. However, research shows that we are closing in on the point of no return for the climate. In late October, the UN released a report stating that there is “no credible pathway [of carbon cuts] to 1.5C in place” – climate scientists predict that any rise in global temperatures above that mark will cause irrevocable changes to the Earth’s climate. U.N. secretary general António Guterres stated that “We need a global surge in adaptation investment to save millions of lives from climate carnage.” Luckily for all of us, some countries have gone above and beyond. Switzerland paid out four times the amount it needed to, France and Norway paid triple, and Japan paid $13 billion, over double its fair share. (Guardian)

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