CLIMATE CHANGE REPARATIONS

The recent demand that the UK should pay £1 trillion in supposed climate change reparations to the Third World has caused a stir. The demand has come from the Leftie charity War on Want. The COP27 summit is of a like mind.

The claim for reparations has been an objective of many for some time. Even the Tories, in the form of Boris Johnson have been sympathetic. I dealt with this in The Hegemony of Political Correctness: and the rise of the woke-Right. In a speech to the UN in September 2021, Boris Johnson said:

“We’ve got to be honest, we in the United Kingdom, we in Britain, started this industrial hydrocarbon-based revolution. We were the first to send great puffs of acrid smoke into heavens on a scale big enough to derange the natural order … the industrial revolution was a good thing fundamentally, but we were also unwittingly beginning to quilt the great tea cosy of carbon dioxide around the world.

And so we understand that when the developing world looks to us to help, we must take our responsibilities. And that’s why two years ago, when I last came here, Mr. President, to UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], I committed that the UK would provide 11.6 billion pounds to help the rest of the world to tackle climate change … And so I’m very pleased and encouraged by some of the pledges we’ve heard here at UNGA, including from Denmark, and now, a very substantial commitment from the United States that brings us within touching distance of that $100 billion pledge that we need every year. But we must go further and we’ve got to be clear that government alone, government cash alone, is not going to be enough.

We must work together so that the international financial institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, are working with governments around the world to leverage in the private sector, because it is the trillions of dollars of private sector cash that will enable developing nations and the whole world, all of us, to make the changes necessary.”

Not only was Boris Johnson blaming the UK and the West for climate change, and was happy to dish out subsidies in consequence, but also fixed upon getting hold of yet more monies from the private sector and ‘international financial institutions’ for yet even more subsidies for the Third World.

In reality, neither the UK nor the West have anything to apologise for. It is untrue that Britain began ‘to quilt the great tea cosy of carbon dioxide around the world’.

In The Hegemony of Political Correctness, I pointed out that the population of Britain, during the industrial revolution, increased from 7.87 million in 1750 to 10.8 million in 1801. This should be compared to the populations of China and India of around 3 billion. The living standards of the British in 1800 were far lower and less energy intensive than those of the Chinese and Indians today. There were no fridges, freezers, computers, televisions, power stations, electricity, computers, modern lifestyles, aircraft or motor vehicles, etc. The emissions of Britain in 1800 were a fraction of those of China and India today.

Due to the absorption of gases by the oceans and plant life in one or two centuries, then the emissions of the industrial revolution are no longer in the atmosphere.

Furthermore, the rise in global temperatures occurred mostly since the mid-20th century and coincided with the industrialisation of many Third World countries and the population explosion across the Third World. This population explosion is a major problem. For example, the population of Africa, according to the UN, will increase from 1.3 billion today to 4.3 billion by the end of the century. Africa’s population is currently just over 17 per cent of the world’s population and is forecast to increase to 40 per cent by 2100.

It is the population explosion across the Third World that is driving climate change, if that change does exist and is man made, and there is no case for so-called climate reparations. Such a demand is nothing other than political correctness – the mechanism for the imposition of cultural Marxism.