A piece in The Sunday Telegraph by Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, purports to give us spending data from the Department for International Development (DFID), "on projects which they say will either reduce carbon emissions abroad or attempt to deal with the effects of predicted changes in the earth's climate".
According to Gray, in the past four years DFID has spent £900 million on climate change projects with nearly two thirds of that being spent in the past financial year. A further £533 million has already been committed up to 2013. The biggest recipients, he says, are India and Indonesia, two countries considered to be rapidly emerging economies.
These figures, apparently, come from a Freedom of Information request, and "reveal" that total spending on tackling climate change overseas has increased from £61 million in 2007-08 to more than £883 million in 2010-11. In total £3.5 billion of public money has been paid out or allocated to projects addressing climate change abroad since 2007-08.
This is all very good stuff and, coming from this source, is eminently quotable – as a number of blogs and other groups are already doing. It provides good propaganda, not least to counter theincreasingly bizarre claims coming from the warmists, about expenditure by those whom they insist on calling "deniers".
However, I suspect that not even DFID knows exactly how much money is spent specifically on climate change. Much of the funding is grouped under portmanteau projects, covering a wide range of issues, of which climate change is sometimes only a small part.
Furthermore, there is some reason to suspect the accuracy of what the government has told Gray. For instance, based on his FOI answers, he tells us that amongst the aid provided by DFID was a £4.7 million project in Indonesia aimed at helping the government there provide "more effective leadership and management of climate change programming".
Indeed there is such a project, and details of this and all the others can be found on the DFID website. However, while Gray has been told of a £4.7 million project, the website details give us £6.2 million, in order to ensure that the GoI (Government of Indonesia) "can provide more effective leadership and management of climate change programming to deliver emissions reduction and poverty reduction outcomes".
Interestingly Indonesia is very much in the frame and, if Gray has doing nothing else, he has certainly alerted us to that. Looking wider, we thus learn that in December 2009 DFID exchanged letters with the Government of Indonesia agreeing to a five year programme focusing on climate change over 2010-15, with a budget of £50 million.
The intention is that from 2011 onwards DFID focuses exclusively on issues of climate change in Indonesia, and delivers this by forming a joint UK Climate Change Unit with other government departments located in the British Embassy and withdraws from development work in other areas.
That UK Climate Change Unit (UKCCU) was launched on 6 April 2011, with the press release informing us that this cross-government unit would deliver the UK's climate change goals in a vitally important context.
Thus we see multiple additional projects, such as Promoting Low Carbon Development in Indonesiawith a budget of £5,000,000. There is the Indonesia Low Carbon Growth Project for £1,500,000, the Multi-stakeholder Forestry Programme at £2,000,000, Support to Climate Change Programme in Indonesia at £1,199,735, and the Rapid Response Facility on Climate Change at £500,000.
With a few others, that brings the known total to just under £17 million already spent, leaving – presumably – another £33 million in the kitty for the next three years.
But all of this pales into insignificance against the bigger picture. Go to the DFID website, hit the "project search" tab and then key in "climate change". You will get 301 projects, the first being theEnvironmental Transformation Fund, with a budget of £554 million, of which only £39.6 million has been spent.
That, however, is only the start. We have the Global Environment Facility 4TH Replenishment at £219,646,000, the Global Environment Facility 5TH Replenishment at £210,000,000, and the actualGlobal Environment Facilt at £203,080,000.
Adding these four, we already have more than £1 billion, but the projects get cheaper as you go down the list. You will love this one though, for a mere £13,999,992, the object being to fund DFID secondments to the EU:
To enhance the capacity of the European Union in policy analysis and programme management in key areas. These include Maternal and Child Health, Climate Change, Wealth Creation, Water and Sanitation, and issues focussing on Fragile States, Conflict Prevention and Resolution. In addition it will provide support for stronger overall Evaluation and Monitoring of EU spend. The Programme will second approximately 25-30 high calibre DFID staff (Seconded National Experts - SNEs) to the European Commission and related organisations in Brussels and Luxembourg, EU delegations in developing countries, EU Presidencies, and to the new European External Action Service (EEAS) of the European Union. The National Experts on Professional Training scheme (NEPT) will also provide short term opportunities in the EU (Brussels) for staff to get experience and knowledge of how the EU manage their development programmes.So, nearly £14 million of our foreign aid budget goes to sending British bureaucrats to commune with Eurocrats in Brussels and elsewhere. The starving children of Sudan, to name but one location, will be delighted.
Obviously, Gray's work is but the tip of the iceberg, adding to his earlier work in an already already visited by Booker and myself on several occasions. Given a chance (unlikely though that is, with current pressures), we'd like to hack further into this iceberg. Perhaps DFID could give us a grant?
The Failygraph is finally getting close to the message, courtesy of Bruno Waterfield - despite the Londonisation and the desperate self-importance of this failing rag, needing to find a "secret" report to justify printing that which has been evident from open source material for days - and even weeks.
Despite that, Bruno has managed to convey some of the essence of the situation – that the Germans want Greece out of the euro. For this Bruno relies on Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister. He, as we all know, simply does not believe that any Greek government is able to implement the reforms necessary to restore the country to financial health.
With no more substantive evidence of a split between Merkel and Schäuble than had The Guardian, the paper feels the need to run this meme, and while it has Austria and Finland supporting the German view, the Netherlands doesn't get a look in.
That leaves us with the unsupported Failygraph narrative, where the European Central Bank and the "Eucopean Commission" (sic) are, for now, lining up with Merkel to push for the rescue attempt to continue, "fearful that the financial tsunami that would be unleashed if it failed would swamp the eurozone".
At least the piece is without the rampant Germanophobia that so obscures proper analysis, and which has brought Your Freedom and Ours into the fray, but there is still a great deal of bolt-on reporting here.
So far, the only evidence of a "split" between Merkel and her finance minister is a hare started by the Financial Times based on comments made by unnamed "officials". Clearly, there is tension in the ranks, which means that different factions are going to be briefing against each other, so we need a whole lot more than unattributed comments from the rival gangs.
Oddly enough, when it comes to fears of "a financial tsunami that would be unleashed if it failed would swamp the eurozone", this seems to be old hat. In the Financial Times "Trader's diary", David Schwartz notes there were no meaningful price drops two weeks ago when negotiations between Greece and its lenders were thought to be going down to the wire.
Uncertainty of this type, Schwartz says, might have triggered three-digit price swings just six months ago. And last Tuesday, when the Eurogroup meeting was suddenly cancelled, the FTSE 100 fell just six points. To him, "it is becoming increasingly clear that investors are no longer panicking about a possible default".
With Europe's leaders now publicly berating Greece and and repeatedly signalling that there are finite limits to the amount of financial support they are willing to provide, it also appears that EU leaders and UK investors alike are growing more comfortable with the idea of Greece's default and its possible departure from the euro.
Thus, Schwartz concludes, "many observers now expect the country to go bust. It is a question of when, not if. I also suspect that this perception is now firmly factored into UK share prices".
Timing, now, is everything. Monday's meeting may reveal more clues, and we might even get to see a glimpse of that elusive fat lady, waiting in the wings for her final crescendo.
It has been an interesting week, which started with the vote in the Greek parliament in the expectation that the eurozone ministers (the so-called Eurogroup) would meet on the Wednesday to approve the terms of the bailout.
The next day, though, it started to come clear that Merkel was blocking settlement, with the Germans wanting Greece out of the euro. Not least was the relative triviality of the funding gap, which was to become the battlefield. By Tuesday, it was becoming more widely known that there wasn't going to be an immediate decision, and that Greece was being pushed towards the exit.
Wednesday thus saw a conference call instead of the planned meeting, and an appreciation that there were serious tensions building up, with Germany, Finland and Holland pushing for the Greek to withdraw from the euro.
Then, by Thursday, it was out in the open, with Greece's finance minister Evangelos Venizelos making a public complaint that some eurozone countries no longer wanted Greece in the single currency. That, of course, left Merkel in a difficult position, having to deny the very thing that she and her colleagues were trying to achieve. Nevertheless, by the last working day of the week, the situation looks close to final, although there is an extraordinary variance in the tenor of press reports.
By now, there is a fightback going on, with the forces of darkness rallying to keep Greece in the Europe, ending up with the media hopelessly misreading the position, and still indulging in anti-German rhetoric, even though the Germans have made their position clear.
And all of this brings us back to Sunday, with Booker looking back over the week, in his column, to report on how "the European project is splitting apart at the very core".
Behind all the spin, smoke and fury of recent days, we see unfolding the greatest crisis in the history of the "European project", he writes. "What is emerging is a fundamental split which threatens to inflict on it by far the most serious reverse in its 62-year history".
The thesis is nothing new to readers of this blog, but – owing to the inadequacies of the media in general – it will come as news to many of Booker's readers. Thus, a wider audience will get a glimmering of what is really going on, ready for the message to be drowned out in the torrent of ignorance that will assail us in the coming week.
For what it is worth, my guess is that, under enormous pressure and very reluctantly, Germany will approve the bailout at the Eurogroup meeting tomorrow, only then to create further hurdles which Greece will be required to surmount. And thus the dance will go on.
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