“LIABILITY LAWYERS ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS”
by David Wojick, Ph.D., CFACT, ©2018
(Dec. 21, 2018) — Buried in the 133 pages of gobbledygook agreed to at last week’s UN climate summit are two very dangerous provisions. These greatly advance the green cause known as “loss and damage.”
This is where the green goal is for the developed countries like America to pay for all of the damages supposedly due to climate change, especially in the developing countries. Given that pretty much all bad weather is now attributed to human caused climate change, the potential amount of wealth transfer is simply staggering. I explain this in my May article titled “Absurd ‘loss & damage’ policy advances at UN’s Bonn climate summit.”
The new provisions added at the Katowice, Poland summit meeting do not yet call for this sort of compensation, but they lay the groundwork for it. This is because they allow the developing countries to build their fantasy case in detail. Liability lawyers are going to love this.
These are basically paperwork provisions, but as I said in an earlier article on the Katowice summit, paperwork has implications.
First off, there is to be an annual report of climate change actions and events. This report was originally intended to facilitate verification of each country’s claimed climate change efforts under the Paris Agreement. Each country has what is called “Nationally Determined Contributions” for addressing climate change and the idea is that their progress needs to be monitored. Thus the UN-speak for this yearly report is called the “Transparency Framework” because it is designed for watching what countries are doing.
The sorts of things originally intended to be reported are CO2 emissions, emission reductions, adaptation projects, as well as financial transactions. The latter are a big deal, especially funding by developed countries to developing countries.
However, it is now the case that developing countries can also annually report loss and damage from climate change. They will certainly do this and they have every incentive to make the numbers as big as possible. I can imagine countries competing to see who has been hit hardest. They are, after all, hoping to get paid and the bigger the hit the more they make.
Countries can even include projected future loss and damage. (Damage refers to things that can be fixed, albeit perhaps at great cost. Loss includes things like lives and crops.) These projections open the door to wild speculation using computer modeling, along the lines of the recent reports from the IPCC and the National Climate Assessment.
Read the rest here.