ROME — The UK’s leading Catholic bishop on the environment lamented this weekend that the COP26 Climate Change Conference failed to redirect sufficient funds from wealthy nations to poor ones in reparation for global warming.
“It is to our shame that we have failed in our negotiations to provide the funding required by the poorest nations,” said Bishop of Salford John Arnold, who attended the Glasgow conference.
“Having seen the enthusiasm of so many people, expressing their hopes for the COP26 conference, having read so much about the science that has accurately explained what damage we have done to our climate and our world… the plan is not there,” he said.
The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), the official aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, similarly denounced the lack of financial redistribution to aid poorer nations.
“Poor communities came to Glasgow with clear asks and shouldn’t have to compromise on the compensation owed to them from the rich countries who’ve caused the devastation to their homes, livelihoods and spiritual spaces,” said CAFOD’s Director of Advocacy Neil Thorns.
Mr. Thorns did not specify how the wealthy nations had caused such devastation.
Looking ahead to COP27, Thorns said that countries “must come back next year with greater ambition” if they truly wish to achieve “climate justice.”
“The question is are we travelling ‘far enough, fast enough and fairly enough,’” Thorns said, “to which the answer is no. Climate justice is not just a concept for some, it is what must be delivered.”
Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks during the Fridays For Future march on November 5, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
CAFOD alleged that scientists claim that a temperature rise higher than 1.5C would be “catastrophic” for people in the most marginalised communities around the world, and would cause “more severe and frequent disasters destroying lives and livelihoods.”
CAFOD’s warning does not seem to comport well with the facts concerning climate-related deaths, which have steadily decreased year by year and are headed for a new record low in 2021.
“Activists constantly talk about the existential threat climate change poses and the deaths natural disasters inflict — but they never quite manage to total up these deaths,” wrote climate expert Bjorn Lomborg in a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal.
The facts do not favor alarmists, Lomborg noted, since the truth is that people “are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before.”
Despite the good news about plummeting yearly deaths from weather, CAFOD insisted that COP26 “has handed a threadbare lifeline to the world’s most vulnerable people.”
Like the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, the 10-page Glasgow Climate Pact mysteriously omits any reference whatever to air pollution, which kills over 9 million people every single year.
The Pact does devote extensive coverage to carbon dioxide — a colorless, odorless, non-toxic, non-polluting component of air and a vital factor in photosynthesis. It also finds space for the tendentious matter of gender equality, despite the latter’s conspicuous absence in important international rights agreements.