Flashback: IPCC official admits UN climate meetings redistribute wealth in one of the “largest economic conferences since WWII”

Time to revisit the revealing quote from Ottmar Edenhoffer, IPCC leader in November 2010. He candidly said that climate policy was about redistributing wealth and has almost nothing to do with the environment. He also admitted countries who don’t sign up will be better off (so much for all the talk about creating green jobs). To give some sense of the scale of wealth transfer he described the up and coming UNFCCC Cancun meeting as “not a climate conference” but “one of the largest economic conferences since WWII”.

In 2010, ten thousand people went to Cancun. On November 30th, 50,000 people are expected to attend Paris COP21.

h/t to Egor the one. Image assembled by Cyrus Manz.

Ottmar Edenhofer is co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III. He did this interview in German in the lead up to Cancun, 2010 and GWPF translated 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. 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.

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.

Remember how carbon trading is going to make us rich, provide jobs and grow the economy? Edenhoffer, economic advisor to the UN, admits the problem is that countries will be better off if they don’t sign up for the UN climate deals, and that’s why they need “penalties and incentives”.

“But unlike the financial crisis, in climate policy a country benefits if it does not join in.

The financial crisis was an emergency operation – in the face of danger we behave more cooperatively. Such a thing will not happen in climate policy, because it will always remain questionable whether a specific event like a flood is a climate phenomenon. But there is always the risk that individual rationality leads to collective stupidity. Therefore, one cannot solve the climate problem alone, but it has to be linked to other problems. There must be penalties and incentives: global CO 2-tariffs and technology transfer.

Entire interview at GWPF.

In 2013 CFACT used the line about redistributing wealth into a billboard

h/t to Egor the one, 2015/09/07 at 6:40 pm

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