Oops. Someone went off his talking points! An IPCC official named Ottmar Edenhofer admitted to a German publication that the intent of Cancun—Copenhagen’s next step—is really about redistributing wealth. From the interview:
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. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.
Q: De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.
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.
Brown outs, anyone?
The West is not going to profoundly depress its own economy, and then allow international bureaucrats to shift massive amounts of wealth earned over the last centuries to the developing world, turning them for all intents and purposes into welfare nations mired in hopeless poverty. Not. Going. To. Happen. We need to encourage the destitute to develop wealth of their own, if we have any humanity. And we should put money into developing cleaner methods of doing this. But destroy our own prosperity? Nope. Nyet. Nein. Non. Nay. Ochi.
But I appreciate the candor. It’s like I have been saying...
P.S. For those who are interested, James Fallow, writing in The Atlantic, has an article out about how coal remains necessary to human prosperity, and how China, working with the USA, is developing cleaner ways to extract and use it. That is the right direction.
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