(Zero Hedge)—In the past five years the institutional discussions surrounding climate change have shifted noticeably from “net zero” goals (zero net carbon emissions from target countries) to a more mercenary debate over carbon taxation. The question on everyone’s mind is this: Who gets the most access to those delicious climate funds?
Who gets access to the cash is less important than who gets to manage the cash, but we’ll get to that issue in a moment.
The recent COP30 event held last week in Brazil was largely focused on wealth redistribution with a lesser emphasis on carbon reductions. Climate “financing” is the name of the game, and COP30 was largely a squabble over which countries will get the most access to the various carbon taxes and donations collected by global intermediaries. In fact, the conference was largely considered a failure. From The Guardian:
“The sticking point was fossil fuels. As science has told us for well over a century, the carbon dioxide that burning them produces is heating up the planet, now to dangerous levels. But in more than 30 years of annual climate meetings, the need for that to halt has been mentioned only once…”
“…Meanwhile, developing countries desperately wanted to move forward on securing the money that would help them cope with the already disastrous impacts of extreme weather. By the early hours of Saturday, some delegates were ready to walk out and force a collapse. “It was on the edge for us,” said Ed Miliband, the UK energy minister. “I was prepared to walk away.””
The meaninglessness of the climate apparatus becomes evident at these kinds of events; flush with thousands of bureaucrats who serve no purpose, clamoring for money that is essentially stolen in the name of a crisis that doesn’t exist.
At COP30, developing countries secured a tripling to $120bn of annual finance to help them adapt to the impacts of extreme weather, but that sum will not be delivered in full until 2035.
Developing nations have already garnered billions in climate financing. India, for example, receives around $30 billion annually in climate funding which is meant to help third-world countries reduce their reliance on oil and coal while developing “green tech.” The dramatic inefficiency of green energy aside, it’s unlikely that much of this financing is actually going into improving carbon emissions in India or anywhere else.
The biggest beneficiaries are NGOs and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) working closely with the World Bank. These organizations collect the carbon funds and then redistribute that money according to their own guidelines. Carbon taxes also represent a fresh revenues source for various governments in the first-world, with some of this money being transferred to intermediaries in the name of “Climate Reparations.”
The woke vernacular of the climate agenda is no coincidence. Calls for reparation, equity and “climate justice” reveal the globalist/socialist roots of the global warming scam. Environmental groups were quick to promote wealth redistribution in the name of imaginary climate crimes and “colonialism”. COP30 partially adopted this language by supporting the Belém Package – An agreement to integrate “equity” into climate financing decisions.
“There can be no true climate justice without reparatory justice,” say climate activist groups in a letter sent to COP30.
“The climate crisis did not arise recently — it is a continuation of centuries of greenhouse emissions, extraction, dispossession, and racial violence,” the letter said, urging COP30 to address historical injustices and the need for reparations as part of any negotiation on climate.
The melding of woke activism and climate hysteria is part of a larger progressive cultism that, until recently, has been infecting global politics like a plague. There are obviously millions of true believers when it comes to global warming doom, just as there were millions of people that embraced the pandemic hysteria of covid. However, the main thrust of climate governance is still mostly about cold hard cash.
There is, of course, no science that supports the claim of a causation relationship between man-made carbon emissions and global warming. As we have noted many times in the past, climate scientists rely on a tiny 140 year window of temperature data to defend their claims. If we look at a much larger window of hundreds of millions of years, the temperatures today are actually some of the coldest ever recorded.
Furthermore, when comparing atmospheric carbon content data over the same timeline, it is undeniable that carbon emissions have no relation to planetary temps. They simply do not match up.
Climate scientists dishonestly ignore this data in preference of a 140 year model; a meaningless timeline which offers no insight into why the Earth warms or cools and when it might do so in the future. They insist on the assumption that carbon “pollution” created by human industry is the cause of current warming and then adjust their models to support this assumption. It’s not science, it’s the opposite, but there’s a lot of money to be made by perpetuating the lie.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.