COP29 finished a few days ago, and the bill to the developed nations is stated as $300 billion per year.
This bill is to enable developing counties to adjust to the changing climatic circumstances that they are facing now and will face in future years.
There are two issues which cause concern for those nations that are affected by the climate crisis (cue the climate crisis deniers sharpening their quills).
First, it is not enough to do the work required to protect their land and population from inundation. According to those most at risk, they have estimated that nearly $1 trillion per year is needed.
READ MORE: Failure to co-operate on climate will spell disaster
Second, this money is being offered as loans and various other types of funding mechanisms which require repayment or access to materials and natural resources, at preferential rates.
From a distance, this seems to be more of the same wealth extraction under the guise of “helping out” these poor relations that are the victims of the profligacy by the developed world exacted on the developing world for several hundreds of years.
It is a “weel kent” fact that migration starts with the need to survive, and risk to life is caused by the lack of water or too much of the wrong type, like sea water. Expanding this a little further, the lack of fresh drinking water drives warfare, and more migration.
READ MORE: Tommy Sheppard: There's an easy alternative to the UK's migration mess
As a species, we have migrated all over the world facing even greater challenges than we do now, as we are even better organised, with more technological innovation available.
If the developed world (which includes Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland) will not pay up what’s needed to stem the rise of global temperature and the risks of inundation, they (we) will need to hire more police, border guards, fences, walls, razor wire, to stem the tide of migrants.
Oh, the irony facing Scotland of having a falling population. It doesn’t seem to have been a very fair COP.
Alistair Ballantyne
Angus
THANK you for Professor Alfred Baird’s letter – “The Scots Language needs Same Status as Gaelic now has” (Nov 19). Also thank you for your recent article on little-known Scots words.
When I was at primary school in Haddington in the 1940s, the word used for an apple-core was a gowk. Because we were hungry and because of the necessity of not being found eating in class, we always ate the gowks. I still do. It was years before I realised the apple core’s white face and black pip eyes really does look like a gowk (ghost).
READ MORE: Alan Cumming calls on Scottish Government to deliver arts funding
Professor Baird, being in Orkney, will have a good ear for the Orcadian speech. That was my mither’s tongue, so I have been cheered to read the Auld and New Testaments, the whole Bible translated into Doric, the Scots of the north and north-east. This was published a few months ago, the culmination of 17 years of dedicated work by Gordon M Hay, a lawyer in Peterhead, in whose native tongue it is.
The Bible brought to us by Ninian (AD 350-420) and Columba (AD 540-597) would be in Latin, though taught by them in Pictish and Gaelic. There was a Gaelic Bible printed two-and-a-half centuries ago, but in spite of the fact that generations of Scots missionaries have translated the Bible into other languages all over the world, there was never till now a whole Bible in Scots.
The Doric New Testament is as lively and relevant to us as the Aramaic was to Galilee. Why has it not been properly recognised on the Scottish cultural scene? It should be being thought about, discussed, criticised and celebrated. It should be being compared with Lorimer’s Scots New Testament, which saw the light of day in 1983.
Instead – an eerie silence. What ails us?
Lesley Findlay
Fort Augustus
IT’S difficult sometimes, when you stand too close to something, to see it, but it seems to me as though that nice Mr Starmer has already introduced his “assisted dying bill” by the simple act of denying us old ‘uns the £400 energy grant.
Far too many of us will be “assisted” by this act of his.
Do you know, I am not alone in thinking Thatcher was bad, but this one beats her hands down.
Christopher Bruce
Taynuilt
READ MORE: Assisted dying: processes that are too complex can become unworkable
MY own belief is that if one chooses to end one’s life, for whatever reason, after careful counselling and consideration, then that is a right. In principle, then, but that is as far as it goes. Terminal care is expensive, personal funds for the inheritance of others can be drained away in nursing care. The demand for hospital beds grows.
The problem for me is that not only is this a personal choice but also one for the authorities. We live in a capitalist society and the clue is in the name; a system dedicated to the pursuit of wealth. We see the policy of austerity meant to address the country’s financial state resulting in the dilution of public services. Will the idea ever take hold in the Treasury that old, disabled and terminally ill people are a bit too expensive? Then the PR and propaganda machines fire up to persuade the nation. Those in power will tell us that life is sacred: those same administrators who aid and abet the Gaza genocide.
Peter Barjonas
Caithness
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