It's all about appearing to be morally superior, appearing to care more, appearing to have compassion whereas the actual results are diametrically opposite to all the seeming. In actuality this approach is a diabolical form of corruption.
The following short piece from MercatorNet says it all:
It's difficult to read about the devastation that Typhoon Haiyan has brought to the Philippines: more than 10,000 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless. I have friends with relatives in Tacloban. With all communications severed, they have heard nothing and they fear the worst. It may have been the most powerful typhoon ever to make landfall.
The first response to this calamity is "climate change". The Filipino negotiator at a UN-sponsored climate change summit in Warsaw plans to go on a hunger strike to focus the minds of the other delegates.
But the question that he really should be asking is why the island of Leyte wasn't better prepared for this ferocious storm.
Ultimately the answer is poverty but an important element is corruption. As Maria Paz Mendez Hodes, a Filipino journalist, points out, the government is reactive in the face of natural disasters, rather than pro-active. "The country desperately needs spending on preventive infrastructure. Hence the anger when a pork barrel scam funnels key funds away from those projects, resulting in a deadly nexus of geography, poverty and government inaction," she writes.
In the days ahead, there will be plenty of people calling for action on climate change after Typhoon Haiyan. But that's not what people living in the world's most disaster-prone country need most. Regularly buffeted by typhoons, volcanic eruptions, floods and earthquakes, what Filipinos need most is an efficient, forward-planning government where disaster funds don't dribble into the pockets of corrupt politicians. That will save far more lives than carbon trading schemes.
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