RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-venezuela-oil-dealings-dumb-and-dumber/

The White House has combined disdain for human rights with a degree of geopolitical stupidity impressive even by its own dismal standards.

It’s not exactly news that, so far as the Biden administration is concerned, climate policy trumps both human rights and America’s strategic interests.

Even so, with its latest opening to Venezuela, the White House has combined disdain for human rights with a degree of geopolitical stupidity impressive even by its own dismal standards.

A columnist at the Wall Street Journal explains:

At the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the U.S. agreed to pay environmental reparations to developing countries. Days later it emerged that the Biden administration would issue a new license to Chevron to resume operations in joint ventures with Venezuela’s oil company, PdVSA.

The U.S. government thinks you’re a fool, dear reader. And not only because it waited until Americans were en route to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving to let news slip of a deal to increase heavy-crude output from joint ventures controlled by a dictatorship allied with Iran. Or that it expects you to believe that Venezuela is considering a return to free elections in exchange.

Presumably you also haven’t noticed Team Biden’s effort to impede the development of huge reserves of light sweet crude from Guyana, a U.S. ally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-dirty-oil-deal-with-venezuela-free-elections-guyana-environmental-reparations-strategic-value-pdvsa-11669579238?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

At the United Nations climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, the U.S. agreed to pay environmental reparations to developing countries. Days later it emerged that the Biden administration would issue a new license to Chevron to resume operations in joint ventures with Venezuela’s oil company, PdVSA.

The U.S. government thinks you’re a fool, dear reader. And not only because it waited until Americans were en route to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving to let news slip of a deal to increase heavy-crude output from joint ventures controlled by a dictatorship allied with Iran. Or that it expects you to believe that Venezuela is considering a return to free elections in exchange.

Presumably you also haven’t noticed Team Biden’s effort to impede the development of huge reserves of light sweet crude from Guyana, a U.S. ally.

Washington policy makers occasionally make miscalculations that help American enemies, undermine development in a poor country, or harm U.S. economic interests. But to nail the trifecta requires a special blend of ideological blindness and incompetence that is mercifully rare. Still, as the administration’s treatment of Guyana demonstrates, it does happen.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/21/why-should-u-s-pay-reparations-to-u-n-climate-shakedown-artists/

The world’s climate criminals aren’t the energy companies selling the fossil fuels needed to power a modern economy, nor those that make the products that burn those fuels. The real offenders are the global warming alarmists who have once again revealed what the game is, and it has nothing to do with protecting the environment.

This year’s United Nations climate hootenanny, the 27th Congress of Parties, produced an agreement in which rich nations will pay reparations to poorer ones for the damage that their energy consumption has supposedly caused. Our own country, at the insistence of its increasingly impaired, ever-pandering-to-eco-cranks president, will even participate in the scam. The amount is not much relative to our economy – $1 billion – but it sets a precedent and tells the world that we’re willing dupes.

After all, 81 million Americans voted to put a mentally infirm man in the White House. So we must be in favor of atoning for our environmental sins by taking part in a U.N.-controlled slush fund.

But some of us see the shakedown for what it is: Part of a ruse to use a manufactured climate crisis as a way to punish prosperous nations for being rich (putting the greedy West in its place through wealth redistribution), and to replace capitalism with a collectivist economic system wherever and whenever possible.

Naturally the international highwaymen congratulated themselves on a job well done.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-signs-up-for-climate-change-reparations-europe-fund-un-john-kerry-poor-countries-bank-capitalism-11668974219?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The use of climate policy to soak Americans keeps getting worse, and the United Nation’s climate conference in Egypt ended this weekend with agreement on a new fund to pay reparations to poor countries. Welcome to the latest climate shakedown.

Poor countries have long sought to force wealthy countries to pay for the “loss and damage” they suffer from natural disasters that are supposedly climate-related. This is separate from the $100 billion a year that rich countries have promised to help poor countries reduce emissions and adapt to climate change.

The 2015 Paris accord suggested rich countries compensate poor countries for climate damage—the rationale being that industrialization has increased temperatures and led to natural disasters. Poor countries finally forced discussion of a formal mechanism to pay climate reparations onto this year’s U.N. conference agenda.

John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, dismissed the idea earlier this month: “It’s a well-known fact that the United States and many other countries will not establish . . . some sort of legal structure that is tied to compensation or liability. That’s just not happening.” But on Thursday Europe abandoned the U.S. by proposing a deal, and Mr. Kerry rolled over.

Wealthy countries will now set up a fund to cover climate damage for the least developed countries—i.e., not China or middle-income nations. This will be financed from “a broad donor base” and “mosaic of solutions,” such as international development banks and taxes on aviation, shipping and fossil fuels.