The East Africa drought has left 11 million people starving.
Funding For Nobel-Winning IPCC: Zero. The budget prohibits funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international volunteer scientific body tasked with assessing the world’s knowledge of climate science. In 2007, the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work.
Funding For International Climate Negotiations: Zero. The budget prohibits funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international body responsible for negotiating climate policy — under a treaty ratified by the United States.
Funding For Strategic Climate Fund: Zero. The budget eliminates support for the World Bank’s Strategic Climate Fund, which fights deforestation, reduces risk to climate disasters, and supports renewable energy in low-income countries.
Funding For Clean Technology Fund: Zero. The budget eliminates funding for the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund, which helps developing countries invest in low-carbon energy technology and infrastructure.
The Strategic Climate Fund and Clean Technology Fund together make up the Climate Investment Funds, established by the World Bank during the Bush administration. Hard as it is to believe, the Republicans now running the House of Representatives are even more radical deniers of the threat of climate pollution than George W. Bush — even though the damaged climate has grown more dangerous.
Update
At Oxfam America, Heather Coleman notes that Rep. Connie Mack’s (R-FL) state is likewise imperiled by climate change:
Meanwhile, back at the House, many of the Members of Congress who are ignoring this reality represent districts recently hit by some of the worst disasters in our nation’s history. Indeed, the Foreign Affairs committee member who led the amendment charge in that committee, Representative Connie Mack, represents Florida – one of the states that will be hardest hit by rising global temperatures.
If that’s not enough of a concern for Congressman Mack, maybe this will be: Some 12 million people in the Horn of Africa are facing famine due to increasingly frequent droughts in recent years. As a result, Valerie Amos, the United Nations humanitarian relief coordinator, warned that the world “must take the impact of climate change more seriously”. To ask the obvious but still painfully relevant question: how many major humanitarian disasters we’ll have to endure before US policy makers stop playing petty politics with people’s lives?
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