The case against climate change reparations

I was a little disappointed by Boris Johnson’s argument against Britain paying reparations for the damage done to developing countries by climate change. Yes, he acknowledged at Cop27, Britain was the first country to industrialise and, as a result, ‘people in the UK have put an awful lot of carbon into the atmosphere’. But we simply don’t have the financial re-sources to pay compensation for all the harm caused by the industrial revolution.

Hmmm. I can think of several better arguments against climate change reparations. To begin with, he could have questioned the link between carbon emissions and the extreme weather events that are supposedly wreaking havoc in the developing world – such as the flooding that occurred in Pakistan earlier this year. Turns out, more people died in floods in Pakistan in 1950 (2,900) and 1965 (10,000) than they did in 2022 (just over 1,500).