Rep. Banks: We’ll ‘Do Everything’ We Can to Block Biden’s Climate Reparations

During an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) asserted that House Republicans would “do everything that we can” to block the Biden administration from paying into any global climate reparations fund.

Just days after President Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, assured reporters that such a fund was “just not happening,” the Biden administration emerged from the United Nations Climate Change Conference having apparently signed on to a global agreement to pay climate reparations to developing nations — an agreement that the world’s biggest polluter, China, has not signed on to, and might actually be able to profit from.

Responding to this news, Banks said that regardless of how small the GOP majority in the House is, they will do everything they can to block the payments — and argued that the Biden administration’s agreement to use American taxpayers’ money for a global climate reparations fund “might be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

The show’s host, Laura Ingraham, asked, “Congressman, I have one question for you, will Republicans do everything in their power to stop the funding of any of this theft from the American taxpayer?”

“You better believe it,” Banks replied. “With even a one, two, three, seat majority in the House, we’re going to do everything that we can to block it and we can. We’ve seen Joe Biden try to force American taxpayers to pay for foreign wars, other people’s student loans. We’ve seen Obamacare, fill in the blank. But to pay for the weather, bad weather in foreign countries out of the pocketbooks of hard-working Americans might be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

It is unclear at the moment as to the exact price tag of the global “climate justice” fund — through a United Nations estimate from 2021 placed the annual cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Per the Washington Free Beacon, “That sky-high figure—and China’s potential to receive a portion of it—will likely draw Congress’s ire, particularly after Republicans take control of the House in early 2023.”

While Biden’s climate diplomats agreed to the fund during the U.N. conference, Congress will actually be responsible for appropriating the taxpayer money that is paid into it. For that to be possible, the Biden administration would have to convince enough Republicans to agree to the funding.