EU Plans to Give £13 Billion of Your Tax Money to Third World for “Climate Change”
The European Union plans to dish out £13 billion (€15 billion) of your tax money to help the Third World “fight climate change” in what appears to be yet another blatant rip-off of the citizens of western nations.
The announcement was made by dreadful liberal Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who currently holds the rotating EU presidency. “Climate change,” whether real or imaginary, has become the new excuse for the mad ruling elite to funnel even more white western tax money into the Third World.
Mr Reinfeldt said that the figure, which represents a target annual contribution to be reached by 2020, is a “starting-point” in negotiations on a new global deal to combat climate change after Kyoto Protocol requirements expire in 2012.
“The (European) Commission has presented €15 billion as the European part of the global response,” said Mr Reinfeldt.
He added that the commission proposal still “has to be discussed with all the EU member states. It’s a starting point of discussion.”
The load will be shared between EU members based on gross domestic product “and other factors like emission levels”, he said.
A European diplomat said authorities are looking for the EU’s total contribution to be twice that amount, or 30 percent of the €100 billion the EU estimates are required per year to meet emissions reduction targets by 2020. The other half would come from the private sector, from trade in carbon emissions rights quotas.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen welcomed the EU announcement and called for talks between what he called “rich and developing nations” to move faster. “It is very encouraging that the European Commission now puts forward a concrete and ambitious proposal on climate financing,” he said.
Meanwhile, a new poll has found that the public in Britain are becoming less trusting of claims about climate change. A survey conducted by researchers at Cardiff University found that 29 percent of those questioned thought the evidence had been exaggerated — double the number who held the same opinion in 2003.
Many others thought the evidence linking human activity and global warming was “unreliable” or “conflicting”.
* People like Mr Reinfeldt and Mr Rasmussen never stop to ask why there are “rich” and “developing” countries in the first place, or why these “developing nations” always seem to be developing and never quite make it to the “developed” level.
Arguments that “developing nations” are somehow backward because of “colonialism” are proven incorrect by the existence of the African nation of Ethiopia. This nation, which has a population of 85 million, is one of the oldest independent nations on earth with a history going back nearly 2,800 years. It was first mentioned in the Greek poem The Illiad and was a formally established nation in Roman times. A letter to the emperor of Ethiopia, written by the 15th century king, Henry IV of England, still survives, showing that it was a functioning nation in medieval times as well.
Ethiopia has remained interdependent throughout all recorded history, only once being occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941. Despite being older than almost every current European nation, Ethiopia is still a “developing” nation, which is completely reliant on foreign aid.
Official figures show that between 1950 and 1970, Ethiopia received almost $600 million USD in aid: $211.9 million from the US, $100 million from the Soviet Union and $121 million from the World Bank. Sweden provided the training for the Ethiopian army, and India, which itself gets billions of pounds of foreign aid from Britain, at one point contributed the majority of foreign-born schoolteachers in the Ethiopian educational system.
Since 2001, Ethiopia has received a further $1.6 billion USD in grants from the United States, the European Union, individual European nations, Japan, the People’s Republic of China and the World Bank. In 2001 Ethiopia qualified for the “Highly Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPC) debt reduction programme (sponsored by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), which is designed to help persuade creditors to write off loans to “developing” nations.
In November 2007, the magazine The Economist reported that “despite almost a decade of well-intentioned development policies, Ethiopians remain mired in the most wretched poverty.”
Yet for some reason, much younger nations such as Australia (which is only about 200 years old) are all “developed” nations which are continually called upon to provide aid to the “developing” world.
