The U.S. Is Spending a Fortune on War and a Pittance on the Climate Crisis | The New Republic

Source: The U.S. Is Spending a Fortune on War and a Pittance on the Climate Crisis | The New Republic

In the Middle East this week, world leaders have tensely debated who bears responsibility for the mounting destruction that could claim countless more lives. I’m referring not (at least exclusively) to the escalating war between Israel and Hamas, but a meeting in Aswan, Egypt. Some 700 miles from the Gaza border, United Nations negotiators have been wrestling over how best to finance the rebuilding of countries where lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the climate crisis—and the United States is playing a familiarly troubling role.

For about as long as the U.N. has discussed climate change, the U.S.—the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has sought to evade questions about nations’ historical responsibility for the crisis. That’s because those questions have tended to have dollar signs attached; as poorer and more climate-vulnerable countries have long argued, the richer countries that are more responsible for the problem ought to pay more to address it. After years of haggling, the text of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, codified a diplomatic consensus in 1992: “In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities.” 

Those words have been argued over ever since, particularly on the issue of “loss and damage,” which refers to the cost of recovering from climate-fueled destruction (whether it be extreme weather events like hurricanes or longer-term degradation by, say, sea level rise). Countries in the global south have pushed to establish a dedicated loss and damage fund, similar to those that already exist for climate mitigation and adaptation. Year after year, the U.S. has fought those proposals, fearing it could be on the hook for an ordinate amount of cash. Many were surprised, then, when—during the eleventh hour of last year’s climate talks in Egypt—the U.S. dropped its long-standing opposition to a dedicated fund and agreed to have the U.N. start the process of establishing one.