Poor countries have no incentive to deal with climate change

Bjorn Lomborg writes: 

Life for most people on earth is still a battle against poverty, hunger and disease.... Tackling global temperatures a century out has never ranked high among the priorities of developing countries' voters - and without their cooperation, the project is doomed. When the only problem was climate change, Bjorn Lomborg, 'Wall Street Journal', 8 May 2024

Sad, but true. The intense focus on climate change and, in particular, greenhouse gas emissions is, I think, unfortunate, in that it's a global problem that requires global cooperation - which is not happening and is not going to happen. National governments should focus on improving the well-being of the people they are supposed to represent; there are plenty of country-level environmental problems that could be solved without the cooperation of other countries: I'd nominate clean water and air, and loss of habitat as a priority for most developed countries, but others will disagree. 

But climate change, or climate breakdown, and the problems it gives rise to, is serious. I think it should be addressed by Climate Stability Bonds, which would be issued by a supra-national body, and backed by contributions for national governments, NGOs, and philanthropists. A crucial first step would be to define precisely, exactly what we want to achieve. The fundamental question is whether we want to try to change climate, or to mitigate climate-related adverse impacts on human, animal and plant life. I envisage a range of biological, ecological, financial and social measures would be targeted, all of which would have to fall within an approved range for a sustained period before the global climate stability goal would be deemed achieved, and after which bondholders would be paid. Such a scheme would have big advantages over the current approach, which is extremely expensive and achieving nothing at all: I refer (again) to this graph:

'Climate activism became a big public cause about halfway along this graph. Notice any effect?' From Riding the Climate Toboggan, John Michael Greer, 6 September 2023

I have written about the bonds and their advantages in papers linked to here. For the purposes of this discussion, the one relevant advantage is that, once they have deposited their funds into the bonds' escrow account, governments need not try to persuade, cajole or threaten other governments to help achieve our climate change goals: all necessary actions would be undertaken by a shifting cast of highly motivated bondholders, working with each other in ways that we cannot foresee, over the requisite, long, time period. The bonds would set up a system of cascading incentives: bondholders would do what they can to ensure that, when global cooperation is absolutely required, reluctant national governments would have incentives to comply.