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i also want to address my concerns about the administration s $3 billion pledge to the green climate fund. . the american public does not support paying their hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a slush fund that spends billions of international climate change programs in developing nations to address the impacts of extreme weather. the need for spending our natural disasters is down historically while other international priorities have increased. according to the 2014 annual global climate and catastrophe report released, global natural disasters in 2014 combined to cause economic losses of $132 billion. 37% below the ten-year average of $211 billion. with immediate global priorities such as the upheaval in the middle east and syria and iraq to a resurgent russia in eastern europe and abroad we should be focusing our resources on countering global terrorist threats with humanitarian assistance, democracy promotion and embassy security measures. the only reason i can se ....
negotiations is that each country will have to decide based on its own circumstances, its own capabilities, hopefully with as much salutary pressure as possible to do your best but that each country was going to have to make the decision about exactly what to do and how to do it. by the way, that goes for developed countries as well as developing. but even more important for developing countries who were trying to reassure that they can take on the fight for climate change without imperilling their own priorities for development, growth and eradication of poverty. so that flexibility is absolutely essential and is really in some sense the core of our approach. thank you very much, senator kaine. senator coons. thank you mr. stern, for your testimony, leadership, for your hard work and creativity in pursuing such an important global goal. let me start in some ways where i think senator kaine was pursuing a conversation about some limitations of previous agreements an ....
we hadn t set fort and secured agreement for this kind of structure then. you did have a number of countries, but a quite small number of countries who had essentially put out press releases saying this is what we re planning to do, but i think you could have counted those on one hand. that was not a large number of countries who did that, so it s a completely different, it s a kpleeptsly different ball game now. and it started with the durbin mandate for this negotiation. which we were instrumental in developing at the end of 2011, where the whole theory of the agreement was that it was going to be applicable to all. it was going to be the not-kyoto. it was going to be everybody. that was the huge, that was the starting point. and then we, as i said, we ve worked through these different structural features along the way. and so fort. a and the impact of the china announcement was significant. the 1997 bird/hagel resolution asserted that the united states should not j ....
indicated that we are real into the 80s with probably the u.s. amount i already told you. i don t think this is a huge problem. senator udall? i yield my time to senator boxer. and mr. chairman, here we are again. we have two different venues where we can argue about climate. [ laughter ] and always very pleasant. we re friends. but here we go. i continue to be perplexed by those who wish to obstruct action to reduce carbon pollution. some are deniers, and we ve been through there before. they say they re not scientists and i would agree with them. they ought to be listening to the 97%, 98% of scientists who tell us human action and activities is causing too much carbon pollution. and some just don t seem to grasp the incredible advantages that we have in moving toward clean energy and i m not going to go into it because we re not the environment and public works committee and it s not about public health, but it s so clear that when we do this we also create a tr ....
jones, your opening testimony was touched upon where china is north korea s last remaining patron. what would happen if china joined us in the sanctions if we re just thinking through and really did cut north korea off? how would north korea respond? well, china has said that they support fully united nations sanctions and i talked about some of the signs that the chinese are beginning to take unprecedented action in that direction, signalling to north korea they will pay a price if they don t come around in particular on the nuclear issue. this is why when we talk to the chinese we try to talk about how we can work in concert to bring pressure on tnorth korea in a surgical way. we re going to keep at that because we think increasingly the core chinese interests in stability on the korean peninsula and our core interest in security that these are converging concerns. and we are seeing signs for the first time in decades that the chinese also recognize this that their ....