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Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henrywood. Time is tight, so I'll keep it short.

The usual two segments today. The Environmental Journalist Tina Gerhardt will talk about the just concluded COP27 Environmental Conference.

And Lyle Jeremy Rubin explains what led a cerebral young man to join Marines.

COP27, the acronym for the 27th Conference of Parties, which is UN Speak for the Annual Meeting on Climate Change, was just concluded in Sharmael Shake, Egypt.

It was not without achievement, but its accomplishments were just not up to the task.

The headline result was that the US led by Chief Climate Envoy John Kerry, agreed in principle to a fund to cover more UN jargon here, loss and damages.

That is, the harm suffered by the world's poor countries by climate change, which is mostly the result of carbon emissions coming from the rich countries.

For more, here's the climate journalist Tina Gerhardt. Her writing has been published by Grest, the Progressive of the Nation Sierra Magazine, and the Washington Monthly.

Her book See Change, An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, will be out from the University of California Press in May 2023. Tina Gerhardt.

There was an agreement, but it looks like it was fairly half-assed to use the technical language. Was that a fair characterization?

It was very mixed. There was a mixed outcome for sure, and I'm happy to go into details in terms of the bad, the ugly, or the good and the bad news.

The first thing, I mean, the thing that grabbed the headlines, was that there was an agreement on a loss and damage fund, which is something that the poor countries have been asking for.

For a long time, the US and other rich countries were not happy with the idea. Is this the fact that Washington agreed to it, a signal that it's meaningless, or is this real progress?

I have so many different thoughts about the loss and damage fund that was created. It is great news. It is a historic shift that loss and damage was, as it's called in New End Parliance, basically referring to things that have been irretrievably lost, like the entire season of crops in Pakistan, which is a third underwater.

We'll experience our damage, like flooded homes and businesses. It's great that this has been passed. There are delegates that have been demanding this for decades, literally since the beginning, the very beginning of the UN climate negotiations, so the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

I think the reason it's an important step for climate justice is that it marks a shift in the mindset, because it clearly announces that the blame for the climate crisis rests with the countries, the bear historical responsibility, and it should be said, reaped financial benefits during the time of producing emissions, and the communities in the global south are disproportionately experiencing these effects of these emissions.

So that's the part that I think is historic, but your other question that you asked is, is this really going to pan out? I think there's reasons to really have doubts. In 2009, over a decade ago, nations in the global north promised to deliver funds 20 billion dollars per year by 2020.

Most of that money has never been delivered. So one of the people at the climate negotiations, Mohammed Adao from PowerShift after he said, what we have now is an empty bucket, but we need to fill it so that support can float the most impacted people.

They agreed on the idea in principle, but there's no funding.

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