Biden’s $1 Billion Pledge to Green Climate Fund Is an Insult to the American People

Amid record levels of inflation and with a debt-ceiling crisis looming, President Biden felt last week was the right time to make a major announcement: The President pledged a $1 billion commitment to the Green Climate fund, and an additional $500 million for environmental activism in the Amazon rainforest.

I say “the President pledged” because that’s exactly who is making these promises: Joe Biden, not the American people.  These mammoth commitments did not come with congressional approval.  None of this was actually voted on.  Just as his former boss, Barack Obama, made pledges to enrich the theocratic despots in Tehran through the Iran Nuclear Deal, President Biden is committing money he doesn’t control to an agreement he doesn’t have the authority to sign on behalf of America.  Congress can and should deny the legitimacy of these pledges and ensure they are never fulfilled.

Congress should do this not only due to Biden’s lack of authority, but because the Green Climate Fund is little more than a globalist, redistributive scam.

To understand this, we must first understand the details of the Paris Agreement, from which the Trump Administration withdrew the United States in 2017.  This agreement (which, by the way, Obama also signed America onto without congressional approval) is centered around “nationally determined commitments” (NDCs) for reducing emissions and fighting global warming.

For accountable nations like the United States, this meant meeting goals that would require an absurd and impossible overhaul of our energy industry and society at large, just to reduce carbon emissions – an effort that would be of dubious benefit to achieving the Agreement’s broader goals of reducing global warming.

For other large economies, like China or Pakistan, it meant no commitment whatsoever; they were free to go on building coal-fired power plants, even exceeding the rate at which they had previously built them.  Pakistan’s representatives said as much in their 2016 NDC, stating “An exponential increase of GHG [greenhouse gases] emissions for many decades is likely to occur before any decrease in emissions can be expected.”  This was the primary reason the Trump Administration withdrew from the Agreement – it involved an enormous economic burden for the United States, its efficacy was unproven and doubtful, and its lack of enforcement mechanisms meant other nations had no incentive to honor their commitments.

There was another issue with the Paris Agreement, though: It required that the American people subsidize developing nations according to the whims of green energy activists the world over.  This requirement was embodied in the Green Climate Fund (GCF), a pool of money that would be paid into by larger nations – like the United States – then funneled to poorer, “developing” nations who claimed they could not meet their NDCs without robust foreign aid.  The Green Climate Fund is thus little more than a vehicle for the global redistribution of wealth.

And that’s not all: Many of the countries that signed on to the Agreement are notoriously corrupt.  These nations almost certainly did not agree to participate because they wanted to help reduce global emissions – they agreed because they were, in effect, signing up to receive massive, free funding with no oversight or enforcement.  American funding of the GCF is unlikely to end up anywhere but in the pockets of corrupt regimes.

It is essential for Americans to understand that progressive climate activists do not have a monopoly on caring about our environment.  Set aside politics: All Americans want clean air and water.  That is not what is at issue here.  It’s that contributing to the Green Climate Fund carries no discernable benefit for Americans.

Allocating $1 billion of taxpayer funding we don’t have to this fund at a time when American families are suffering under historic inflation does nothing to serve our vital national interests.  The Biden Administration is suffering from ideological capture; it has chosen climate craziness over common sense, and this recent “pledge” is little more than a green climate indulgence the American people are being forced to pay.  Congress should make sure this funding never sees the light of day.