Fast Track Finance « Climate Equity

The real innovative climate financing resource that everybody is looking for might have a name. It could be Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, George Soros or Oprah Winfrey. Forget about carbon taxes, airline levies and cruise line surcharges which a UN High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing – including billionaire George Soros —  is currently mulling over in an increasingly desperate search to find new finance sources to pay for mitigation and adaptation effort in developing countries. They are controversial and politically hard to implement.  For the real feel-good and quick solution, the 20-member expert panel should look no further than, lets say Seattle, Omaha or New York. 

Especially now that both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are appealing to their fellow US billionnaires to follow their lead and to donate at least half of their wealth for good causes. It could be done with a simple stroke of a pen (or keyboard, nowadays). In fact, this is probably exactly how those enormous fortunes have ballooned in the age of unfettered financial speculation…

(more…)

The good news first: going only by sheer numbers, the European Union is delivering on the fast start funding commitment it gave on behalf of its 27 member countries during the COP15 in Copenhagen as part of the Copenhagen Accord political final declaration. 

The bad news: it is far from certain whether that commitment represents “new and additional” money as promised in the Copenhagen Accord, or rather the ingenious creativity of the European block – very much wanting to be perceived publicly as the “good guys” on the question of delivering money to fund adaptation and mitigation actions in developing countries — in double-counting, recycling, overestimating or blatantly hiding the real figures, as some observers charge. 

During a side event at the Bonn climate talks on Thursday, the representatives of the Commission and several  EU countries delivered ten fast-paced presentations, choke-full of numbers which aimed at knocking out the air – and the many doubts – from the listeners in an already pretty airless overcrowded meeting room.  This was a more detailed presentation than the information gathered from an EU document leaked two weeks ago, which had left observers of fast track climate financing underwhelmed.

(more…)