In the past five years the institutional discussions surrounding climate change have shifted noticeably from “net zero” goals (zero net carbon emissions from target countries) to a more mercenary debate over carbon taxation.  The question on everyone’s mind is this:  Who gets the most access to those delicious climate funds?

Who gets access to the cash is less important than who gets to manage the cash, but we’ll get to that issue in a moment.

The recent COP30 event held last week in Brazil was largely focused on wealth redistribution with a lesser emphasis on carbon reductions.  Climate “financing” is the name of the game, and COP30 was largely a squabble over which countries will get the most access to the various carbon taxes and donations collected by global intermediaries.  In fact, the conference was largely considered a failure.  From The Guardian:

“The sticking point was fossil fuels. As science has told us for well over a century, the carbon dioxide that burning them produces is heating up the planet, now to dangerous levels.  But in more than 30 years of annual climate meetings, the need for that to halt has been mentioned only once…”

“…Meanwhile, developing countries desperately wanted to move forward on securing the money that would help them cope with the already disastrous impacts of extreme weather.  By the early hours of Saturday, some delegates were ready to walk out and force a collapse. “It was on the edge for us,” said Ed Miliband, the UK energy minister. “I was prepared to walk away.””

The meaninglessness of the climate apparatus becomes evident at these kinds of events; flush with thousands of bureaucrats who serve no purpose, clamoring for money that is essentially stolen in the name of a crisis that doesn’t exist. 

At COP30, developing countries secured a tripling to $120bn of annual finance to help them adapt to the impacts of extreme weather, but that sum will not be delivered in full until 2035.

Developing nations have already garnered billions in climate financing.  India, for example, receives around $30 billion annually in climate funding which is meant to help third-world countries reduce their reliance on oil and coal while developing “green tech.”  The dramatic inefficiency of green energy aside, it’s unlikely that much of this financing is actually going into improving carbon emissions in India or anywhere else. 

The biggest beneficiaries are NGOs and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) working closely with the World Bank.  These organizations collect the carbon funds and then redistribute that money according to their own guidelines.  Carbon taxes also represent a fresh revenues source for various governments in the first-world, with some of this money being transferred to intermediaries in the name of “Climate Reparations.”   

The woke vernacular of the climate agenda is no coincidence.  Calls for reparation, equity and “climate justice” reveal the globalist/socialist roots of the global warming scam.  Environmental groups were quick to promote wealth redistribution in the name of imaginary climate crimes and “colonialism”.  COP30 partially adopted this language by supporting the Belém Package – An agreement to integrate “equity” into climate financing decisions. 

“There can be no true climate justice without reparatory justice,” say climate activist groups in a letter sent to COP30. 

“The climate crisis did not arise recently — it is a continuation of centuries of greenhouse emissions, extraction, dispossession, and racial violence,” the letter said, urging COP30 to address historical injustices and the need for reparations as part of any negotiation on climate.

The melding of woke activism and climate hysteria is part of a larger progressive cultism that, until recently, has been infecting global politics like a plague.  There are obviously millions of true believers when it comes to global warming doom, just as there were millions of people that embraced the pandemic hysteria of covid.  However, the main thrust of climate governance is still mostly about cold hard cash.  

There is, of course, no science that supports the claim of a causation relationship between man-made carbon emissions and global warming.  As we have noted many times in the past, climate scientists rely on a tiny 140 year window of temperature data to defend their claims.  If we look at a much larger window of hundreds of millions of years, the temperatures today are actually some of the coldest ever recorded.  

Furthermore, when comparing atmospheric carbon content data over the same timeline, it is undeniable that carbon emissions have no relation to planetary temps.  They simply do not match up.

Climate scientists dishonestly ignore this data in preference of a 140 year model; a meaningless timeline which offers no insight into why the Earth warms or cools and when it might do so in the future.  They insist on the assumption that carbon “pollution” created by human industry is the cause of current warming and then adjust their models to support this assumption.  It’s not science, it’s the opposite, but there’s a lot of money to be made by perpetuating the lie.   

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The current generation “Z”—those now roughly between 13 and 28 years old—is becoming our 21st-century version of the “Lost Generation.” Members of Gen Z are often nicknamed “Zoomers,” a term used to describe young adults who came of age in the era of smartphones, social media, and rapid cultural upheaval.

Males in their teens and twenties are prolonging their adolescence—rarely marrying, not buying a home, not having children, and often not working full-time.

The negative stereotype of a Zoomer is a shiftless man who plays too many video games. He is too coddled by parents and too afraid to strike out on his own.

Zoomers rarely date, supposedly out of fear that they would have to grow up, take charge, and head a household.

Yet the opposite, sympathetic generalization of Gen Z seems more accurate.

All through K-12, young men, particularly white males, have been demonized for their “toxic masculinity” that draws accusations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.

In college, the majority of students are female. In contrast, white males—9-10 percent of admittees in recent years at elite schools like Stanford and the Ivy League—are of no interest to college admission officers.

So they are tagged not as unique individuals but as superfluous losers of the “wrong” race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Gen Z men saw themselves scapegoated by professors and society for the sins of past generations—and on the wrong side of the preposterous reductionist binary of oppressors and the oppressed.

Traditional pathways to adulthood—affordable homes, upwardly mobile and secure jobs, and safe and secure city and suburban living—had mostly vanished amid overregulation, overtaxation, and underpolicing.

Orthodox and loud student advocacies on campus—climate change, DEI, the Palestinians—had little to do with getting a job, raising a family, or buying a house.

During the Biden years, white males mostly stopped enlisting in the military in their accustomed overrepresented numbers.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, they had died in frontline combat units at twice their percentages for the demographic. No matter—prior Pentagon DEI commissars still slandered them as suspects likely to form racist cabals.

Gen Z males seemed bewildered by women and sex—and often withdrew from dating.

Never has popular culture so promoted sexually provocative fashions, semi-nudity, and freewheeling lifestyles, and careers of supposedly empowered single women.

And never had the rules of dating and sexuality become more retrograde Victorian.

Casual consensual sex was flashed as cool everywhere on social media. And when it naturally proved in the real world to be selfish, callous, and empty, males were almost always exclusively blamed as if they were not proper Edwardian gentlemen.

Soon, young men feared sexual hookups and promiscuity as avenues to post facto and one-sided charges of harassment—or worse.

For the half of Generation Z who went to college, tuition had soared, rising faster than the rate of inflation. Administrators were often more numerous than faculty. Obsessive fixations with race determined everything from dorm selections to graduation ceremonies.

Zoomers were mired in enormous student debt.

Yet they soon learned that their gut social science and “studies” degrees proved nearly worthless. Employers saw such certificates as neither proof of traditional knowledge nor of any needed specialized skill set.

Unemployed or half-employed Zoomers then ended up with unsustainable five-figure student loans and the insidious interest on them. Their affluent, left-wing, tenured profs, who had once demonized them as oppressors, could have cared less about their dismal fates.

Add it all up, and Zoomers puzzled their parents. And they found scant guidance from the campus.

Instead, they sought needed spiritual inspiration from a Jordan Peterson, entertainment and pragmatic advice from a Joe Rogan—but sometimes toxic venting from a demagogic, anti-Semitic Nick Fuentes.

What would shock the lost generation back into the mainstream, barring a war, depression, or natural catastrophe?

One, an end to DEI hectoring and blame-gaming, and a return to class rather than race determining “privilege.”

Two, some sanity in the war between the sexes. When women represent nearly 60 percent of undergraduates, why does gender still assure an advantage in admissions and hiring?

Three, the federal government needs to stop funding $1.7 trillion in student debt, often for worthless degrees, and wasting away one’s prime twenties and thirties.

Let universities pledge their endowments to guarantee their own loans. They should graduate students in four years. And they must slash the parasitical class of toxic administrative busybodies who cannot teach but can hector and bully.

Four, society needs to stop granting status on the basis of increasingly meaningless letters and titles after a name.

Skilled tradesmen like electricians and mechanics are noble professionals. And their status and compensation should reflect their value to society—far more so than a bachelor’s degree in a studies major or years vaporized in off-and-on college.

Finally, incentivize building homes, rather than overregulating and zoning them into unaffordability.

If the lost Gen Z is not found soon, the result for everyone will not be pretty.