Connect with us

Business

UN’s COP29 conference pledges $300 billion a year for ‘climate change’ in third world nations to help them transition to alternative energy

Published

4 hours ago

5 minute read

COP29 International Climate Change Event Concept. Baku, Azerbaijan

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The deal may already be moot with Donald Trump returning to the White House

The international COP29 conference finished over the weekend with multinational pledges to spend billions of dollars over the next decade combating “climate change” in third world nations, amid expectations that the agreement will be rendered moot by former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Just the News reports that the conference, among the almost 200 nations who signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, ended with a mutual commitment to spend $300 billion every year until 2035 helping poor countries mitigate the so-called effects of “climate change” and transition to alternative energy.

India representative Chandni Raina wanted the conference to commit to $1.3 trillion a year, and lamented $300 billion as “abysmally poor” and a “paltry sum” that would not suffice to “address the enormity of the challenge we all face.”

Another group in attendance, the America-based Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), had a very different conclusion, as CFACT dissents from the green agenda of the international establishment.

“Nations such as China and India are given a pass on emissions reductions and paying out funds,” noted CFACT’s Craig Rucker. “This, despite the fact that China is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases and boasts the second largest economy, while India’s economy is all the way up at number five.”

Regardless, the conference’s deliberations may already be moot, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, which in turn would eliminate America’s share of the funding for COP29.

Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”

Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Trump’s successor, outgoing President Joe Biden, re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.

In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.

Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.

Related Topics:

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

More from this author
Business / 2 mins ago

Pentagon mum after Musk calls its most expensive project ‘obsolete’

Business / 1 hour ago

Trump And RFK Jr. To Save The Day For TikTok?

Business / 4 hours ago

UN’s COP29 conference pledges $300 billion a year for ‘climate change’ in third world nations to help them transition to alternative energy

Business

Pentagon mum after Musk calls its most expensive project ‘obsolete’

Published on November 27, 2024

By

U.S. Air Force F-35 Lightning IIs from the 356th Fighter Squadron at Eielson Air Force Base fly side by side with Republic of Korea Air Force F-35s from the 151st and 152nd Combat Flight Squadrons as part of a bilateral exercise over the Yellow Sea, Republic of Korea, July 12, 2022. 
Senior Airman Trevor Gordnier | U.S. Air Force photo

From The Center Square

The Pentagon has about 630 F-35s. It plans to buy about 1,800 more. And it intends to use them through 2088. DOD estimates the F-35 program will cost over $2 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain over its lifetime.

Pentagon officials declined to comment on Elon Musk’s critical assessment of its most expensive project, the F-35 stealth fighter.

Tesla CEO and SpaceX leader Elon Musk called the Pentagon’s stealth fighter “obsolete.”

“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk wrote on X. “This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes. And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”

In May, The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the cost of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system was projected to increase by more than 40% despite plans to use the stealth fighter less, in part because of reliability issues.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s F-35 Lightning II is the most advanced and costly weapon system in the U.S. arsenal. It’s a joint, multinational program that includes the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, seven international partners and foreign military sales customers.

The Pentagon has about 630 F-35s. It plans to buy about 1,800 more. And it intends to use them through 2088. DOD estimates the F-35 program will cost over $2 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain over its lifetime.

On Tuesday, a reporter asked Defense Department Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder about Musk’s comments on the F-35.

“Yeah, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I’m not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35.”

The GAO report found the F-35 program fell short of its goals.

“The F-35 fleet is not meeting most of its performance goals, including those for availability and for reliability and maintainability, according to DOD and contractor data,” according to the report. “We have consistently found that the F-35 fleet is not meeting its availability goals, which are measured by mission capable rates despite increasing projected costs.”

President-elect Donald Trump recently picked Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy leaders of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Trump said the new group will allow his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Ramaswamy and Musk detailed some of their plans for DOGE last week. Those plans include a focus on military spending after the Pentagon failed another audit.

“The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent,” they wrote in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s annual audit once again resulted in a disclaimer opinion. That means the federal government’s largest agency — with a budget of more than $840 billion — can’t fully explain its spending. The disclaimer this year was expected. And it’s expected again next year. The Pentagon previously said it will be able to accurately account for its spending by 2027.

Continue Reading

Business

Trump And RFK Jr. To Save The Day For TikTok?

Published on November 26, 2024

By

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Christian Josi

Of the many, many Biden-era policies that the new Trump administration is expected to reverse, it appears that the pending TikTok ban is high on the list.

After promising to save TikTok on the campaign trail, his spokeswoman last week confirmed that Trump’s plans to deliver. Since almost everyone — including Trump himself — as well as many companies utilize the technology, reeling in the ban is good politics and smart policy. Coincidentally, it is also consistent with the stance taken by President-elect Donald Trump’s pal and nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose populist and libertarian views will likely help shape Trump 2.0 even beyond the department.

Much like what has come to be known as Barack Obama’s “Facebook election” in 2008, the 2024 cycle might well be known as the “TikTok election.” Trump joined with Vice President Kamala Harris and candidates from federal to local levels in embracing the app unequivocally and successfully, quickly gaining millions of followers almost overnight. From rowdy rallies to ebullient encouragement from supporters in every part of the country and soundbites hitting at opponents and detractors, to the now-iconic dance moves, the Trump campaign made its way into the history books with a good deal of help from his TikTok content.

This was no accident. The president-elect and his campaign knew that connecting with young voters, especially those Gen-Z voters going to the polls for the first time, would be a critical part of the coalition that could return him to the White House. An NBC News poll taken last week showed that among first time voters, Trump’s support grew a whopping 22% from 2020 to 2024. As the Trump team recognized, these voters get their news and information largely from social media, and many from TikTok in particular, and little if any from traditional media outlets.

Back to RFK, Jr. As a key advisor and voice in Trump world, he has been a similarly strong advocate for protecting TikTok and undoing the legislation that now threatens to ban the app. Last Spring, Kennedy, with more than three million followers of his own, came out publicly against a ban and committed to filing a lawsuit to fight it.

In a post on X, Kennedy wrote: “Don’t be fooled — the TikTok ban is not about China harvesting your data. That’s a smoke screen. Intelligence agencies from lots of countries, especially ours, are harvesting your data from everywhere all the time. TikTok isn’t even majority Chinese-owned, and the company agreed to put its data behind a U.S. firewall. The Biden administration rejected that deal. Congress and the administration don’t understand that TikTok is an entrepreneurial platform for thousands of American young people. They want to screw them over just so they can pretend to be tough on China.”

The initial misinformation and propaganda against TikTok when the ban was first proposed came in heavy and hard, and many people initially bought it. Myself included. I thought, without having even logged on, TikTok was garbage (wrong) and admittedly I can be pretty gullible when it comes to suggestions of Chinese chicanery. Nobody’s perfect. But I digress.

The power of populism at this uniquely American moment is golden — an opportunity to give voices to the voiceless and an ear to those previously unheard. It is a good thing that both Trump and Kennedy understand that banning social media which is now a fact of American life, no matter what the app or the platform, is an attack on free speech and the populist power now driving American politics. Any politician still advocating for a TikTok ban is going against that populist sentiment and may want to re-think it — as even I have — lest they soon be looking for a new line of work.

Christian Josi is the founder and managing director of C. Josi & Company, a global communications and public affairs resource organization.

Continue Reading

Trending

X