FT.com / World - Climate deal in balance over aid.

I don't blog much on climate change. That's not what this blog is about. But it's massively important.

I don't really care if the change is natural or man made: I think it is exacerbated by our behaviour, and to that extent we can do something about it.

Our screwed up economics is preventing that. So we get this sort of report:

The chief of the United Nations has conceded that a deal in Copenhagen on climate change might not include promised financial aid for developing countries, an admission that will infuriate poorer nations and potentially scupper a broad-based agreement.

Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN, told the Financial Times in an interview that countries could sign a deal at Copenhagen without a firm commitment from developed nations on long-term financing for poorer countries to combat global warming. “We can start next year discussing this matter,” Mr Ban said. Developing countries have long insisted that any Copenhagen deal must include assurances that they would receive finance flows of at least $100bn a year by 2020.

This is not aid. This is meeting the cost of our externalities. That's all.

But we deny this obvious truth.

That's why I get angry with conventional economics: the reality is that whilst it is the prevailing paradigm its prevailing logic of maximisation without consideration of cost also prevails, at cost to us all.