This week’s entry in our #LookItUp series is partly directed at the you-skeptics-have-all-the-money accusation and partly also at the claim that the world is not spending nearly enough on the climate crisis. How much money is being spent? You don’t want to know. Seriously, you don’t. But if you insist, we can #LookItUp.

Courtesy of the Climate Policy Initiative, yet another multinational climate pressure group with apparently limitless resources that pay for nearly 200 staff members around the world, we can look up the annual tally of climate-related spending through the “Global Landscape of Climate Finance”. The current total, as of 2023, is, gulp, $1.9 trillion dollars. About the size of Canada’s GDP. So the climate movement, if it were a country, would be big enough to be in the G7. And they have the gall to say we have all the money and rich powerful sinister friends.

Now we’re all for private giving. But in the case of Big Climate, about half the funds come from the public sector. And of the private sector half, much is forced through regulation so it’s not really private. The CPI generates the following flow diagram to explain where the money comes from and where it goes to:

If our finances looked like that they’d throw a fit. And what do they do with all this cash extracted from your pocket?

In a nutshell, very little goes to climate adaptation, arguably the most useful way to spend the money. Fully $1.8 out of $1.9 trillion goes to “mitigation” where they try to fix the weather instead of preparing for it, including $834 billion for wrecking the energy and electricity system and $545 for fouling up the transportation sector.

So next time you are wondering how big the climate grift is, or you hear someone complain that we aren’t doing enough to fix the climate crisis, or you’re just wondering why we can’t have nice things anymore, you can #LookItUp, and weep.