Climate cult meets reparations lunacy

OPINION:

In case you’re keeping track, last week the Biden administration did something else they said they’d never do. But succumbing to pressure from Europe is expected when abdicating American leadership. Our jet-setting climate czar, John Kerry, agreed on your behalf, at a meeting of folks who specialize in bilking America, to create what amounts to a climate reparations fund.

The fund is intended to compensate those nations in the developing world that have allegedly suffered the ill effects of global climate change because of productive Western economies. It seems that punishing success is more than a domestic political trend.

With Europe’s climate cultists now in the driver’s seat of U.S. policy, Americans will potentially be funneling money into countries known for brutality, corruption and mismanagement — all in the name of apologizing for our free-market economy and republican form of government.

The insanity of it all is plain. Government failure in the Third World is a long-standing, self-inflicted wound on humanity by phony democracies and dictators that have used essential services as weapons. They’ve intentionally withheld funding for water treatment, waste management, sewage systems, water purification, crop irrigation and other basic infrastructure needs that would improve the natural environment and human health.

Nations are responsible for their own environmental conditions that affect the health of their citizens far more than any marginal rise in temperatures could do. The Biden administration, however, is now on record saying Americans should be held liable for smog, devastating droughts, crop failures and famine in developing nations.

It’s victimization culture on steroids driven by Europe’s left-wing climate cultists. It’s a marrying of climate change fanaticism, globalization and reparations lunacy. The United States and its allies need to reject this position forcefully or it will continue to weaken the West’s ability to counter an ascendant Communist China.

Of course China, which emits some 66% more CO2 than the U.S. and Europe combined, will have no part in this scheme, again leaving U.S. taxpayers on the hook for nonsensical global policy that is anything but global. In addition, the nations where China has invested billions over the last decade that now suffer at the hands of their debt trap diplomacy and continuing deplorable conditions could now likely benefit from U.S. tax dollars, even though the CCP has enormous influence over their governments and economies.

In the vein of never letting a little common sense get in the way of climate change hysterics, President Biden will likely now try to plow billions of dollars into other nations through an alphabet soup of multilateral organizations.

Legitimizing the concept of reparations internationally in this way could also lend legitimacy to the left’s efforts to champion reparations domestically. Mainstreaming universal basic income and slavery reparations continue to be key goals of the American left. Now that the midterms are over, expect those favorite leftist social experiments to rear their ugly heads again, particularly in blue states and cities. The Biden administration’s decision to pay for alleged “climate wrongs” perpetrated by America will give domestic reparations activists political cover.

Mr. Biden’s latest capitulation will allow the climate cultists to achieve further global redistribution, but perhaps more importantly institutionalize the concept that the West has victimized nations. This flies in the face of the basic fact that Western free-market capitalism has provided more innovation, freedom and economic opportunity to more people in more places than any other system in history. Those nations and their people that became a part of that success have benefited from better health and natural environments.

Climate profiteers and their naive zealots in the activist community have driven Europe into an energy crisis that is making them vulnerable to aggressors like China and Russia and sinking their economies.

Here in the U.S., the Biden administration continues to follow their lead. Just last week the president suggested that if your heating bills are too high, get solar panels. Between now and 2030, the climate activists in our government are looking to eliminate between 10% and 20% of capacity from our electrical grid while replacing only a fraction of it with less reliable systems.

House Republicans and all Americans concerned about inflation need to send a message to the administration that they will fight — by whatever means necessary — any effort to prevent more of our money from feeding this global cabal that has no hope of changing the climate.

• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV, an author and a former Bush administration official.