Climate Change Conference: All About Spreading the Wealth
In the “Confirming-What-We-Already-Know” Department comes an entry from German economist and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) official Ottmar Edenhofer. (Over at the American Thinker, Marc Shepard reminds us Edenhofer is the IPCC “Co-chair of Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change“.)
Given that the only solutions put forward to the supposed problem of global warming have been schemes which increase the power of governments, decrease the control individuals and private enterprises have over their own affairs and operations while promoting policies in line with the statist dreams of past utopian movements, we’ve thought their repetition of the dogma of climate change had more to do with economics than the environment.
And Mr. Edenhofer spells it out in terms so simple a child could understand it:
Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. . . .
First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
Nothing to do with environmental policy? Hmm. . . . To borrow an express, it’s all about spreading the wealth.
UPDATE: Commenting on Edendorfer’s remarks, James Delingpole calls the unelected bureaucrat and his environmental ilk, “Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling, poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement.” (H/t: Instapundit.)