There can be no more Panglossian document than the UK international climate finance results published by the government last month. Apparently, since 2011 UK taxpayers have helped prevent 145 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, given 33 million people improved resistance to climate change and saved 717,000 hectares of ecosystem. How proud we can all feel of ourselves.
Except, that is, we are beginning to learn a bit more about how our money – £11.6 billion of it between 2021/22 and 2025/26 alone – is being spent. There is £52 million, for example, on a road driven through the rainforest in Guyana and millions for a rewilding scheme in Uganda which involved subsistence farmers being thrown off the land. In Brazil, federal prosecutors have demanded that 12 million tonnes of carbon credits paid for by Britain and other wealthy countries and corporations should be cancelled because the ‘extractive and colonialist’ scheme breaks Brazilian law by ‘selling’ the carbon which is locked up in existing trees.
We have a government which, on anything else, would recoil from charges of ‘colonialism’
The conceit is that by buying up forests or by funding conservation, western governments and corporations are preventing emissions. The whole concept rests on the idea that the trees would have been doomed without western money and have now been saved. Yet the practice of selling carbon credits for deforestation avoidance has had extremely poor results. In some cases, deforestation has occurred in spite of the projects. In Cambodia, one area was found to have lost a fifth of its trees even though they were supposed to have been preserved through the sale of carbon credits. In Rondonia, Brazil, 31 square miles were felled out of 362 square miles supposedly protected by an offsetting scheme.
Worse, it appears that UK civil servants have been well aware of the pitfalls of frittering public money on carbon credits, privately admitting that the government could be accused of ‘greenwashing’, but went ahead and spent the money anyway.
It is all too typical of what happens with anything related to climate. The normal rules of public spending are suspended. We have a government which, on anything else, would recoil from charges of ‘colonialism’ – but not when it comes to climate. ‘Social justice’? On everything else, the government seeks to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, but when it comes to climate, the money goes in the other direction. The poor get lumbered with taxes to pay for huge grants to the wealthy buyers of electric cars and heat pumps. Subsistence farmers in developing countries? Never mind them, so long as western corporations get the chance to claim they have achieved ‘net zero’.
We used to have an aid system which was focused on improving the lives of the world’s poor – inoculating them against deadly diseases, giving them clean drinking water, rescuing them from natural disasters. Now, all has been subsumed into the grand cause of reducing global carbon emissions. Our climate aid efforts are claimed to benefit the poor, but when they do so, it is secondary to the overarching aim of saving the world from climate change. The government’s climate finance results for example, boast that UK taxpayers have helped improve ‘access to clean energy’ for 89 million people – not energy, note, but ‘clean’ energy. For all we know we could have stopped many of those 89 million people from accessing cheap, coal-generated electricity and given them a solar panel instead. The West seeks to assuage its own climate guilt by proxy by forcing the world’s poor to live lives of environmental purity.
As the world’s great and good arrive on their private jets in the Brazilian city of Belem for Cop 30 this week, they might like to reflect on this. But I suspect they won’t. It will be platitudes as usual as western governments act as if nothing really matters in the world so long as we can all claim to have reached net zero carbon emissions.
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