I wonder as James Shaw sits in Egypt watching yet another COP gabfest go nowhere, whether he has worked out the $20 million our country has offered for loss and damage is essentially the same mistake they have made with the farmers in their He Waka Eke Noa response.
We are one of just three countries, as I understand it, which has offered any money at all.
Loss and damage is this year's pet theme. It's around the broad idea that poor countries cop the worst of climate change damage, so the rich countries should pay for that.
The sad fact is, even if they did, what would it achieve in terms of climate change?
If you accept that Tuvalu is going under water because of us burning coal, does handing them money stop them going underwater? No, it does not. Does it make them feel better about going underwater? Who knows?
So loss and damage is yet another invention that doesn’t address, or go anywhere close, to addressing the actual reason they have had COPs 1 through 27.
But the main point is this. Three countries have pledged money. Only three, out of a couple of hundred. What does that tell you? The world doesn’t give a monkey’s.
And that is critical to the farmers.
The Prime Minister's argument around He Waka Eke Noa was that although it penalises the farmers, although it's not what the farmers signed up to, although it reduces our output of the very product that makes us so much foreign income, although the gap will merely be filled by producers from other less productive countries, we, she declared in her nuclear moment, would be leading the world.
And when we lead the world, she claimed the world will stop, look, and then act.
Except, they won't. As the $20 million for loss and damage shows.
If they don't stop for $20 million do you think they’ll stop when they see us cripple our farming industry?
In that is the tragedy of ideology that isn't remotely connected to the real world. Nothing wrong with highfalutin ideals, just don’t run yourself bankrupt in the process.
And don't delude yourself that the actions of a minuscule little island at the bottom of the world makes one jot of difference to anyone.
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