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Posted on 10/22/2013 12:39:41 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The world invested almost a billion dollars a day in limiting global warming last year, but the total figure – $359 billion – was slightly down on last year, and barely half the $700 billion per year that the World Economic Forum has said is needed to tackle climate change.
These are the findings spelled out in the latest Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) report. For the first time, it estimated global North-South cash flows at between $39 and $62 billion.
But the total funding pot fell $5 billion from 2012, and remains just a tiny fraction of the $5 trillion that the International Energy Agency estimates is required by 2020 for clean energy projects alone, if rising temperatures are to be pegged at 2 degrees Celsius.
“Investment to combat and adapt to climate change is happening around the world, but it’s short of where it needs to be and efforts to grow it have not been successful enough,” said Thomas Heller, the executive director of Climate Policy Initiative, the group which compiled the report.
“Leveling the playing field can help unlock significant additional finance,” he added.
The report, Landscape 2013, says that amounts invested in clean energy were dwarfed by the $523 billion a year that the world shells out in fossil fuels subsidies, according to the OECD.
The EU’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger was last week accused of suppressing data which shows that the bloc’s €30 billion of subsidies to renewable energy sources is outweighed by a de facto €66 billion of handouts to the fossil fuels sector, and €35 billion to nuclear power.
Some 38% of this year’s climate investment – $135 billion – came from the public sector, according to the CPI study. It was used to leverage the other 62% of funds from project developers ($102 billion), manufacturers and corporations ($66 billion) and households ($33 billion).
“Three-quarters of the climate revenues originated in the same country it was spent in, while the other quarter flowed from the global North to South, and was dominated by public sector funds.”
“Of private flows, the vast proportion was invested in developed countries where policies are often underpinned by similar legal and regulatory frameworks,” the report says, adding that perceptions of risk in the developing world need to be challenged by policy-makers.
All the funds for adapting to climate change – some 65% of the total – came from the rich world’s public exchequer, and were mostly invested as international climate finance.
Full story "The world invested almost a billion dollars a day in limiting global warming last year, but the total figure - $359 billion - was slightly down on last year, and barely half the $700 billion per year that the World Economic Forum has said is needed to tackle climate change."...................
I’m one of the minority of freepers who think that global warming is potentially a problem, but what exactly is this money being spent on? Right now, the estimate is you could remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a cost of $100 a ton, so if you just spent that money on carbon dioxide removal, you’d lower total global emissions by about 11 percent.
That’s good, but not great. On the other hand, scholarly research suggests that we could get that down to $10 a ton. See http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/7b1.pdf. I know that $10 is their optimistic estimate, but given that sequestration could happen in the lowest-wage country on earth and still do the job, it’s a possibility.
At that point, current spending could not only take care of all human CO2 annual emissions, but would reduce the current levels that have built up over the years. So I ask: what are we currently getting for our money? People jetting to conferences and paying for the palaces of third-world dictators?
“The world is full of snake oil salesmen.”
I have some pre-ban salamander oil, guaranteed to be on the endangered species list. Beats hell out of snake oil. PM me if you want in on it.
As we say, “It had legs, and we know how to move it.”
Here is an interesting video that demonstrates the relative volume of CO2 in our atmosphere that is “human-caused”, compared to the rest of the “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere overall. (The current estimates of 400 ppm is up from the 385 ppm mentioned in the video, but the point remains the same)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYLmLW4k4aI&feature=player_embedded
Your post says that we could remove 11% of the CO2 from the atmosphere. Were you talking about 11% of the human-caused CO2? In any case, I would be interested in hearing why it is you think removal of 11% (or 100% for that matter) would have ANY positive effect on our global climate.
Thank you.
Money is what global warming is all about. It is like every other critical need.
Solving a problem is not what it is all about...Money is.
insanity
Man is not causing global cooling....warming... climate change
The climate has been changing since time began
environmentalism is the home of the new commies
It’s nothing but a thin veneer. The goals are exactly the same. Impoverishing the masses, destroy the middle class, empower the all mighty government.
The worst nightmare of the eco-nuts is that third worlders all figure out how to earn more than $2 a day.
Think about that.
The communist-idiot eco-criminals are taking funds from billions who are malnourished, dieing, drinking filthy water, living in hovels, sorting through garbage and so forth. They hate humanity. They hate free enterprise. They hate freedom. They hate YOU.
Feeding the peasants is the LAST thing the gaia worshippers plan to do.
There is no margin for error if you remove CO2 from the atmosphere. If you mess up the plant life, goodbye food chain. If it turns out that the sun’s magnetic field continues it’s current rate of decline, you could be in for a little ice age.
You should read Lord Monckton’s analysis where he concludes (rightly so) that it will always be less expensive to adapt to the slow sea level rise while enjoying the benefits of increased crop yields.
CO2 on it’s own is incapable of accelerating temperature rise. The only thing the IPCC clings to is their unsubstantiated claim that somehow an increase in CO2 will increase atmospheric water content, but decrease cloud cover. This has been invalidated by several decades of increasing CO2 with no measured increase in atmospheric water content. Google The Missing Hotspot for details.
Global Warming on Free Republic
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