But given their historic role in causing the problem, rich countries now have two very clear obligations: to stop harming, by massively cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and to start helping, with compensatory finance so poor countries can adapt, before they suffer the full impacts of climate change.
The countries topping the Adaptation Financing Index--the USA, the EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia --should start providing compensatory finance to developing countries, in line with their responsibility for causing climate change, and their capability to assist.
With the monetary house he helped build at Bretton Woods in ruins, and the principles of
compensatory finance to which he lent his name increasingly abandoned by governments awash in red ink and economists drawn again to old verities dressed in the latest technical fashions, the Age of Keynes seems at last to have run its course.