The Climate Cash Cow

Source: Investors

Hoaxes: A high-ranking member of the U.N.'s Panel on Climate Change admits the group's primary goal is the redistribution of wealth and not environmental protection or saving the Earth.

Money, they say, is the root of all evil. It's also the motivating force behind what is left of the climate change movement after the devastating Climate-gate and IPCC scandals that saw the deliberate manipulation of scientific data to spur the world into taking draconian regulatory action.

Left for dead, global warm-mongers are busy planning their next move, which should occur at a climate conference in relatively balmy Cancun at month's end. Certainly it should provide a more appropriate venue for discussing global warming than the site of the last failed climate conference — chilly Copenhagen.

Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change (say that twice), told the Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week: "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." After all, redistributing global wealth is no small matter.

Edenhofer let the environmental cat out of the bag when he said "climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth" and that "it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization."

In his IPCC post, Edenhofer was a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Based on anecdotal evidence, it contained unsubstantiated claims that the Himalayan glaciers would soon disappear and Bangladesh would be totally submerged.

Edenhofer claims "developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community" and so they must have their wealth expropriated and redistributed to the victims of their alleged crimes, the postage stamp countries of the world. He admits this "has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole."

It has everything to do with a different kind of green. U.N. warm-mongers are seeking to impose a global climate reparations tax on everything from airline flights and international shipping to fuel and financial transactions. At first, this punitive tax on progress is expected to net $100 billion annually, though that amount, like our energy costs, is expected to necessarily skyrocket.

We've seen such plans before. Just before Copenhagen, a group of "chicken littles" along with some gullible corporations ran an ad campaign titled "Hopenhagen." It pushed a global wealth redistribution scheme based on the theory that Western nations, particularly the U.S., owe a "climate debt" for having initiated the Industrial Revolution and plundered the world's fossil fuel resources in the name of unbridled capitalism.

According to a Hopenhagen pocket guide, there will be a "Green New Deal" that "will be based on the polluter-pays principle, on the historically high emissions of developed nations and on the capacity of the rich nations to help the poor."

This sounds like the Marxist principle: to each according to his need from each according to his ability — with a guilty conscience thrown in for good measure. As President Obama might put it, U.N. officials are seeking a "fundamental transformation" of the globe.

Given this administration's willingness to compromise American sovereignty, we could soon see Americans taxed to fund a global scam — the ultimate form of taxation without representation.