A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin got up to some extremely foolish stuff last week while the country was focused on the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade. As Kate Aronoff notes in a new piece, Manchin joined the Republicans in voting for a nonbinding motion to take $8 billion that would have gone to the Green Climate Fund and give it instead to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

The Green Climate Fund is a U.N. group that finances climate adaptation and mitigation in poorer countries. As Liza Featherstone argued last week, there’s an urgent case right now for giving poorer countries as much money as possible. Several recent reports have pointed to tropical deforestation as one of the leading contributors to species loss, as well as one of the top risks for triggering what’s known as a “tipping point”—if deforestation in the Amazon proceeds, for example, researchers worry that eventually the remaining forest won’t be able to sustain itself, triggering a massive “dieback” that then accelerates climate change even further, because the forest currently is a crucial (if diminishing) carbon sink.

Giving developing countries money to help them adapt to and mitigate climate change isn’t just the moral thing to do, Liza explained. Yes, rich countries owe it to poorer ones, given how much rich countries have done to exacerbate climate change, but rich countries should also finance poorer ones for purely selfish reasons:

People living in the global south are doing excellent work to preserve biodiversity. Earlier this year, The New York Times reported on a conservation nongovernmental organization in Panama’s Azuero Peninsula that has successfully worked with the local community to reverse deforestation and preserve the region’s wildlife, including its three winsome primates—spider monkeys, howler monkeys, and the capuchins. People in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has some of the most biodiverse forests on earth, risk their lives to protect mountain gorillas from poachers in Virunga National Park, with some success; there are only 1,000 of the animals left in the world, but that number has been gradually increasing, and one gorilla gave birth to two babies just last week. Such things don’t happen just because people were enlightened. Conservation takes resources, one thing that poor countries, by definition, lack. Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, told The Guardian that the countries that are taking action aren’t getting enough support. They need not just direct support for their conservation efforts but also support to lift millions out of poverty—sustainable development that gives people an alternative to making money through deforestation. They need support for industrializing with clean energy rather than the fossil fuels rich countries have already burned far too much of, whose fumes poison both people and habitats. The global north could provide that support, and it’s in our urgent interest to do so.

Instead, however, Manchin and Senate Republicans would prefer to spend even more money on Pentagon Stuff.

Democrats probably should have seen this coming, Kate pointed out. This all happened as part of Senator Chuck Schumer’s U.S. Innovation and Competition Act—an effort that seeks to pass economic and climate policy by packaging it as a way to make the U.S. more competitive with China. But “positioning all research and economic spending as a defense investment means carrying out a debate about the state of the economy on the GOP’s own terms,” Kate pointed out. And, as evidenced by this Green Climate Fund business, Republicans are fully capable of stripping out climate policy no matter how it’s advertised.

In any event, if this change stands, it’ll strip $8 billion from climate financing to poor countries, at a time when the rich are already way behind on their pledge to deliver $100 billion a year. And it happened as South Africa is still recovering from devastating floods that showed just how important it is to invest in infrastructure resilience now, while we still can. In addition to Kate’s and Liza’s pieces, you might want to check out Glen Retief’s dispatch from Durban, where over 450 people were killed in floods driven by record rainfall last month. “What we are experiencing now in Durban,” the head of South Africa’s Oceanographic Research Institute told Glen, “is a microcosm of where the whole world is headed, unless we change.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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