In an unusual and blunt lecture at a university in Baku, Azerbaijan, the host city of upcoming international climate negotiations later this year, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell called gains made in the past not nearly enough. Without the proper amount of cash, he said those could “quickly fizzle away into more empty promises.”

Much of it comes down to money: $2.4 trillion a year, Stiell said. That’s how much a United Nations High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance estimated that developing nations — not including China — need to invest in renewable energy instead of dirtier fossil fuels, as well as to adapt to and recover from climate change harms such as floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.

Richer nations have promised less than 5% of that amount in climate financial help to poor nations — and they often haven’t even delivered that much.

Stiell said: 

It’s already blazingly obvious that finance is the make-or-break factor in the world’s climate fight. We need torrents — not trickles — of climate finance.[...]

The time has passed for business-as-usual in all aspects of the world’s climate fight.[...]

Hiding behind loopholes in decision texts or dodging hard work ahead through selective interpretation would be entirely self-defeating for any government as climate impacts hammer every country’s economy and population.

It always comes down to money, doesn't it? And $2.4 trillion a year - how do they arrive at that number? And who pays? Well, I can tell you who doesn't pay, according to this -- China. Why not China? Probably because China would tell the UN where to head in. And, honestly, that's what the United States should be doing as well.

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But wait! There's more!

Joanna Depledge, a climate negotiations historian at Cambridge University in England, said the idea that the weak language in the Dubai agreement is “somehow seen as a triumph” shows the world is in trouble.

“It will take an Olympian effort over the next two years to put us on track to where we need to be in 2030 and 2050,” Stiell said.

Climate negotiators, he said, should adopt the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger.”

It would be interesting to build a time machine, send these people back to the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum, and point out where all the carbon emissions are; maybe titanotheres were belching and farting methane into the atmosphere, to cause that period of warming?

Make no mistake about it, the UN is looking squarely at the United States when they start throwing these proposals around; they seem to have little use for the United States until something has to be paid for. These proposals come at a time when the U.S. is staggering under $34 trillion in debt. Yet, the UN is proposing we send billions more to various third-world nations, where much (if not most) of this money will end up in the Swiss bank accounts of those countries' rulers.

Thanks, no.

It's well past time that the United States pulled out of the United Nations. Take over that big New York City museum and hand it to developers to be turned into an office building. Let the UN bog off to The Hague or someplace like that. This is an organization that outlived its usefulness decades ago; America should have no truck with an organization that:

• Appoints Iran to chair a human rights conference
• Can't bring itself to condemn Hamas over the Oct. 7th attacks without throwing some shade on Israel
• Has an agency with members who actually took part in those same Hamas attacks
• Interfere in American criminal justice proceedings

There's more, but you get the idea.

The United States is seen by the United Nations as a credit account with no upper limit. This sanctimonious demand for trillions of taxpayer dollars from developed nations is just the latest intolerable demand. We should withdraw from the United Nations, and the sooner, the better.