Gainor Column: Ready to Pay Your $6 Trillion 'Climate Justice' Bill?

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The $1,000 bill has President Grover Cleveland’s face on it. The $100,000 bill has the dour image of President Woodrow Wilson.

We’ve already seen President Barack Obama attach his name and face to the $787 billion stimulus bill. And if the left has its way, the face on the $6 trillion “climate justice” bill will also be Obama’s. Or maybe it will belong to Al Gore.

December’s global warming conference in Copenhagen looms like a dark cloud on the horizon – just a few weeks away. The greedy left (and that’s pretty much all of them) is calling for “climate reparations.” A recent Rolling Stone article made it clear where lefties stand on American money going overseas. Writer Naomi Klein, who gained notoriety bashing ‘disaster capitalism,” said,  “shifting to renewable energy, according to a team of United Nations researchers, will raise the cost far more: to as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade.”

For those who can’t count that high (all of us) or don’t care (members of Congress), that’s $6 trillion in just 10 years – double the entire 2009 U.S. budget. And we’re supposed to pay most or all of it. Of course, the article was titled “Climate Rage,” so we feel extra guilty and are that much more willing to pay off third worlders. You want to see real rage, try giving that bill to the American public. (Just the tip on that bill would be $900 billion. Can we order self serve?)

But that’s the liberal plan going into Copenhagen. Obama and a globe full of global warming believers wanted a big agreement to come out of the conference. It appears that won’t happen because American sanity stands in the way.

“President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement,” according to the Nov. 14 New York Times.

That strategic retreat showed the left didn’t have the muscle to ram through another climate treaty when the last one – Kyoto – failed so miserably. Congress took one informal vote and the treaty idea was squashed 95-0.

And if this trillion-dollar-scheme  seems like news to you, that’s only because the major media don’t report it. In fact, America’s bid for the Olympics and Obama’s related trip to Copenhagen received eight times more coverage on the evening broadcast newscasts this year than plans for the climate conference in the exact same location.

Journalists on ABC, CBS and NBC told us everything about the Olympic bid, Obama’s trip, his wife’s involvement and more. The media hardly report anything about Copenhagen when it comes to the climate. They’re almost more willing to talk about Copenhagen smokeless tobacco than they are to talk about the climate talks.

You can’t blame that on the likely failure of the event. That’s only become obvious in recent weeks. No, there’s only one reason why the major networks aren’t touching this story – money.

That’s been the story all along for climate treaties. The United States has money and the rest of the world wants it. That was the idea behind the Kyoto Treaty. Take American money out of wallet a) insert into lefty charity b) and repeat.

But until now, eco-thieves were more discreet. They didn’t admit they just wanted our cash. They claimed they wanted a climate agreement to help Mother Earth. This next climate agreement is one big global Lotto.

Rolling Stone painted the picture green saying, “the U.S. negotiating position appears to be to pretend that 200 years of over-emissions never happened.” Then it criticized U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern because he “scoffed at a Chinese and African proposal that developed countries pay as much as $400 billion a year in climate financing as ‘wildly unrealistic’ and ‘untethered to reality.’” Nice. A compromise proposal so outlandish even the Obama team had to reject it.

Some lefties claim the cost is much lower, just so they can get their hands in our pockets – figuring we won’t be able to ever get them out. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, a cofounder of 350.org, wrote a piece for the liberal magazine Mother Jones calling Congress a “climate cheapskate.” He claimed in the Nov. 9 article that even a bad climate solution would “still leave about a good $10 or $20 billion-with-a-B for the U.S. to put up each year.”

Compared to $6 trillion, $20 billion seems reasonable.

OK, I had you going there. Of course it’s not reasonable. No one is rolling back the clock and repaying the United States for its help in World I or II or any of the countless humanitarian efforts we’ve handled from floods to earthquakes. No responsible American president expected to get paid for doing those good deeds.

But no responsible American president should entertain paying climate extortion. Harry Truman once said of the oval office, “the buck stops here.” Under a “climate justice” pact that would no longer be true. Six trillion dollars would stop everywhere but here.

Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He is a frequent contributor to the Fox Forum and he can also be seen on Foxnews.com’s “The Strategy Room.” He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.