Not for the first time, the United Nations’ annual climate change talks spluttered to an inconclusive finish on Monday after two angst-filled weeks.

While sections of the media love to beat the drum about the threats of global warming, their coverage of the Poland conference has been sparse.

The ABC’s flagship TV current affairs show can afford to send its host to America to fill a whole program with one actor’s eight-year-old #MeToo reminiscences.

But it hasn’t reported from the COP24 talks and over the past two weeks only obliquely mentioned the conference once, last Thursday while host Leigh Sales was off looking into overheated thespian relationships.

Australia’s role in the talks was likely to be newsworthy because new Prime Minister Scott Morrison decided recently to withdraw support for a major part of the UN process, the Green Climate Fund.

The history of the development of this planned $100 billion-a-year fund says much about the underpinnings of the global warming movement and the ideology that fuels it.

Back in 2011, Australians knew very little about the Gillard government’s decision to commit us to spending billions of dollars from its carbon tax — the one it promised not to introduce — ostensibly to help poorer countries combat climate change.

That’s because it was never debated in Federal Parliament and Australia’s agreement to join the GCF was made quietly at UN meetings overseas where commitments are buried in mountains of bureaucratic bumph.

And even now, most Australians wouldn’t know about this global plan designed to redistribute up to $100 billion a year from rich countries when, and if, the fund matures.

At the UN’s annual climate change meeting in Mexico in December 2010 — known as COP17 — Gillard minister Greg Combet committed 10 per cent of Australia’s carbon tax to the fund after 2020.

It has taken until the COP24 meeting in Poland for Australia to extricate itself formally from further obligations after Morrison said in October we would no longer be “throwing money” into the fund.

I stumbled on this issue in March 2011 and started asking questions on radio about it. Combet initially denied formal commitment of carbon tax receipts, but documents from his department confirmed it.

Later that year I put it to Gillard on air that we would be sending hundreds of millions of dollars into the fund.

“Paul, Paul, Paul,” she said patronisingly. “Now you’re just being silly.”

But that is exactly what her government had committed Australian taxpayers to do without ever giving them a say in the matter or even seeking the agreement of the Parliament.

We became one of just nine countries to commit to the fast-start financing of the fund by agreeing to contribute $200 million a year for three years from 2015.

We made one $200 million payment, even though by then we had no carbon tax.

The Green Climate Fund’s history is important because it discloses how environmentalism is used to further what are global socialist ambitions on wealth redistribution. In the best traditions of Fabian socialism, it is done incrementally and stealthily.

Whether you agree or not with the aims of the fund, surely any decision like that should not be kept from the public?

And surely such a decision — which could potentially have cost the Australian economy billions of dollars in carbon taxes annually to projects of unknown benefit overseas — should not only be scrutinised by the Parliament, but subjected to a vote?

It was never taken to an election as party policy, so it has no mandate.

When Morrison during a radio interview called time on the fund, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten publicly committed Labor to continue supporting it.

So unless Shorten intends to pay Australia’s commitments from consolidated revenue, that undertaking would entail another carbon tax and the potential for 10 per cent of it adding to our overseas aid payments.

What are the chances that it gets any prominent mention in Labor’s election campaign?

The GCF process hit the wall in July at its meeting in South Korea, where the demands of developing countries for more cash hit the realpolitik of the world’s major economies.

President Donald Trump had refused to stump up the remaining $2 billion of the $3 billion America promised in start-up funding through his predecessor Barack Obama. The fund also lost about $1 billion on currency devaluations caused by Brexit uncertainties.

And the board of the GCF had become factionalised between developed and developing countries over who would control where the money was spent. What a surprise.

“It appears that some donors are no longer comfortable with the scenario of having a board of equals, where the board still has the authority over the replenishment process in the sense that it has the authority over the policies of the fund,” Zaheer Fakir, the developing country board member for South Africa, said.

“Now (they) want to change from what they view … as dysfunctional and toxic to a functional and toxic fund that the donors control. Where developing countries are only interested in their projects, but not worried about the strategic policies of the fund.”

By August, it was clear that the diminishing enthusiasm for the GCF was being reflected in the preparation for the Poland talks where developed economies would be pushed to advance the aims of the 2015 Paris agreement.

A paper issued by the World Resources Institute in September said Australia “should” be the sixth-biggest contributor to the fund based on its economy, past greenhouse gas emissions and current emissions per capita.

That would have entailed about $400 million in second-round funding before Morrison’s intervention.

The GCF’s desultory report to COP24 stressed “the urgency to reach pledges for the first formal replenishment process aiming to conclude the process in October 2019”.

By then Australia will almost certainly have a Federal Labor government.

How much it is prepared to commit to funding global warming adaptation projects overseas — and how it intends to pay for them — are things the Australian public is entitled to know.