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Comment by bbmario | Hacker News Reader

> and commits $200 billion to help poor nations cope with climate change.

Why?

Poor nations will continue to do whatever is most economically expedient to them. Does that mean burning down the rainforest? Overfishing oceans? Or any number of other environmentally unsustainable things? Yes, it does.

People do these things to make ends meet. Make their ends meet on condition that that stop doing $BadThing, and the problems stemming from e.g. burning the rainforest will diminish.

If the countries themselves aren't willing to establish these programs, let's help. Climate is a world game with all humanity on one side.

Furthermore, if the solution has to be solved for the entire planet, it's in our interest to ensure poor nations play ball. We have limited options to do that while not forcefully invading/etc.

Alternatives are always welcome; but the premise here is that we need them to do it. We need everyone to do it.

If I had to guess: Justice. Wealthy nations like ours are the primary driver of climate change while poor nations will suffer the bulk of the damage.

In addition to that, wealthy nations developed by exploiting resources like forests and oil. Now we're asking less-developed nations not to do that. Instead, they need to leapfrog that phase of development, which will cost money they don't have.

I'd go one more explicit step: the carbon we emitted made us wealthy while externalizing the costs. The recipe for gaining wealth at present for poor countries is, emit a shit ton of carbon in the pursuit of growth. If we're serious about reducing emissions we'll have to provide a different recipe.

Well you guessed wrong. What justice? Developing nations are the major polluters (reasons aside, that's just a fact). If there was "justice" for pollution we'd be at war.

US and EU have reduced carbon emissions in the past decade. Meanwhile China almost doubled their emissions, and now emits more than the US and EU combined.

China now burns more coal than all the other countries of the world, combined.

Any plan ignoring China's dramatic carbon emissions growth (for example: the Paris Accords) will do nothing to stop climate change.

Countries like the US and China are the largest contributors to climate change while the nations most affected by it (poorer countries at or near the equator or coastally located) have the least resources to actually do anything about it. How unfair is that? We should be footing the bill to help them.

Global deforestation is one concern. Instead decrying nations depleting their rainforests for economic benefit, we should put money where our mouth is given the importance of these ecosystems for overall global health.

From the plan pdf, p. 3:

Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change.

from p. 12:

In order to help countries of the Global South with climate adaptation efforts, the U.S. will invest $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund for the equitable transfer of renewable technologies, climate adaptation, and assistance in adopting sustainable energies. U.S. leadership can ensure that the developing world secures reliable electricity, reduces poverty and pollution-related fatalities, creates greater net employment, and improves living standards - all while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-...

"reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change."

nitpicking, did he consider changing "reasserting" to "asserting" ?

IIRC, California has had strong pro-environment policy long before it was popular to love the environment. So I don't think it's an outright abuse of language.

I don't understand why you were downvoted for just asking a question.

The new HN.

I don't understand why you would ask this two minutes after the comment in question was posted.

Man you gonna be so upset when someone tells you how insurance works

Probably because diffusion, air currents, stratospheric jets, winds and other climate phenomena are not contained by national borders.

He should do it like China does. “Give” them 200 to buy our solutions with natural resources as collateral. No free lunches. Either that or do it multilaterally, otherwise you’re just encouraging gamification of the system.

Where do you think China got that strategy? We've long had aid-with-strings-attached.

Besides morality and compassion (and who cares about that, amiright? /s), there's an enlightened self-interest here.

If, e.g., droughts and floods make a various regions holding, say 1 billion people unable to sustain themselves, those billion people are going to be forced to try to move to some place they can survive. That may cause us a lot more than $200 billion worth of trouble.

(Not that $200 billion is going to counteract the effects of climate change, but they idea is that it would substantially mitigate the most serious issues. I have no idea if that's true under this plan or possible under any plan, but that's the idea.)

Because otherwise our abandonment of fossil fuels would make their price fall on the global market, causing them to just be burned in poor countries instead. This is one place in the proposal where he's right. CO2 is a global problem so we can't ignore the rest of the world.

This is not as simple.

my guess would be potential allies and short and long term investment opportunities for American businesses.

That is four times the entire US foreign aid budget, perhaps it is a typo?

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