Soros offers climate plan, but who are the ‘developing nations’?

Tropical Storm Katrina is shown here as observed by NASA's QuikScat satellite on August 25, 2005, at 08:37 UTC (4:37 a.m. in Florida). At this time, the storm had 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour; 43 knots) sustained winds. The storm did not appear to yet have reached hurricane strength. [Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/QuikScat Science Team.]Big money man George Soros has come up with a climate plan. Al Jazeera (English) reported on Soros’ idea after the billionaire—maybe ‘kazillionaire’ would be more appropriate—said  the $10 billion a year pledged by rich nations “to help the poor adapt to climate change” is not sufficient. Soros wants to up that $10 billion tenfold.

Al Jazeera said, “Soros suggested shifting some International Monetary Fund resources from providing liquidity to stressed global financial systems to a new mission of financing projects in developing countries for clean energy and adapting to climate change…About $100bn in a one-time infusion could be generated…”

The term ‘developing nations’ is ubiquitous these days. But exactly who determines what a developing nation is and what nations are classified under that term?

Ironically for a term so loaded it is driving world economic and climate policy, the UN doesn’t have a list readily available. There may be one deep in the informational abyss the UN has on its website.

But the best The US Report could come up with is this statement appended as a footnote on a list of geographic and economic regions:
 “There is no established convention for the designation of "developed" and "developing" countries or areas in the United Nations system. In common practice, Japan in Asia, Canada and the United States in northern America, Australia and New Zealand in Oceania, and Europe are considered "developed" regions or areas. In international trade statistics, the Southern African Customs Union is also treated as a developed region and Israel as a developed country; countries emerging from the former Yugoslavia are treated as developing countries; and countries of eastern Europe and of the Commonwealth of Independent States (code 172) in Europe are not included under either developed or developing regions.”

The World Bank has a list of developing countries. TUSR located that list at the website for the 10th International Conference on Clean Energy. These developing countries are low and middle income economies as defined by the world bank.

The developing nations comprise a big list.

So who are some of the countries looking to benefit from Soros’ benevolence—at the expense of ‘developed countries' including the U.S., Japan, New Zealand, Australia and some in Europe?

Well, there’s Uganda, where at the moment laws are proposed to execute those who have homosexual relations more than once.

Then there’s Iran where the president who was schmoozed by Columbia University here in the U.S. has on multiple occasions questioned the Holocaust and is believed to be pushing ahead with nukes.

Let us not forget the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Ditto those Iranian nukes.

Let us acknowledge the Sudan, where suffering and lack of human rights co-exist on a level that should bring shame to every policy maker at the UN.

Also developing are the Russian Federation, Brazil and the country the U.S. is deeply indebted to—China. Ditto Cuba.

Is a pattern beginning to emerge for you?

As alarmists, financiers and global warming groupies take drinking the kool aid to epic heights, and as they stamp a Jupiter-sized carbon footprint of their own upon Copenhagen, we should remind ourselves of some recent American history.

One of the most devastating events in the U.S. was Katrina. Would limiting carbon have prevented it?

The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) reported on findings released by a group of forensic scientists studying what caused the disaster we call Katrina:
“’New Orleans flooded not so much because there was a hurricane, but because of human error, poor decisions and judgments, and failed policies, said [Ray] Seed, who traveled with other team members to New Orleans over the weekend to release their 500-page ‘draft final’ report into what they say is the costliest catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history. Current damages are on the order of $100 billion to $150 billion -- and rising. ‘”

Ask yourself: will limiting carbon stop a future Krakatoa blast? Will it stop tectonic plates from shifting in the Pacific Northwest? Will it restore trees to ravaged landscapes and restore ground cover to over-grazed lands?

Al Jazeera said Soros wants “$100bn of the money, held in the form of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) issued by the IMF” to go to “poorer nations to be used to invest in carbon-cutting projects.”

If Soros’ wishes are fulfilled, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and a number of other like-minded countries will be laughing all the way to the World Bank. Pockets of totalitarian governments where corruption is rampant will be lined with ermine. Figuratively speaking.

There may be an upside for the U.S. though. If China gets a sizable cut of those billions Soros wants to hand over, the U.S. can always borrow some of it back.