Not News: IPCC Economist's Statement That 'Climate Change' Is Really About Wealth Redistribution

I owe Ottmar Edenhofer thanks for two things.

First, I am grateful that Edenhofer, a German economist who is "co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change," has a last name on which searching is easy. I quickly determined that his name last name doesn't currently come up in searches at the Associated Press's main web site, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times.

That's because he hasn't said or done anything newsworthy, right? Wrong. What's newsworthy is my second reason for thanking him. First covered at NewsBusters yesterday by Noel Sheppard, and described this evening in an Investors Business Daily editorial, Mr. Edenhofer has proffered the principal motivation behind the "climate change movement" -- redistribution of wealth (bolds are mine):

The Climate Cash Cow

 

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 Climategate 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 ... 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."

 

... 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.

 

... 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.

So science has been abused as a vehicle for justifying worldwide wealth redistribution. Gosh, that's what many of us have been saying for years. That's what the Climategate e-mails clearly demonstrated. It's nice to see that Mr. Edenhofer from his position of influence at the IPCC agrees, and I thank him for his frankness.

Those who wish to brush up on their German can go to the original NZZ interview here. Google's English translation of the article is here. The money quote, as translated, is: "But one must say clearly that we distribute by climate policy de facto the world's wealth."

Regardless of whether they do anything with the story, it must not be easy being green at the news outlets mentioned in the second paragraph of this post, or anywhere else in the establishment press where they've been swallowing the human-caused global warning propaganda all these years. It shouldn't be easy being a green collaborator either; someone should ask GE's Jeff Inmelt what he makes of Edenhofer's remark. In the pre-New Media days, all of these folks could have gotten away with ignoring mistakes like Edenhofer's. Now they all just look like fools, as they watch their credibility continue to sink into the not-rising ocean.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.