A $Trillion here, a $Trillion there—pretty soon you’re talking real money.

No, I’m not talking about the U.S. national debt, now at over $18 trillion. That’s a very bad thing that threatens to impoverish our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

I’m talking about the $Trillions being demanded by developing-world countries from rich countries (primarily the United States) as the price of their signing onto a global agreement to cut CO2 emissions at COP21 in Paris in December.

India says it needs $2.5 trillion to meet its energy-and-climate policy goals. Okay, some of that will come from within India itself, but a big portion, it’s clear, will have to come from the US and other rich countries—or it won’t happen.

The Philippines says that without major cash influx from rich countries, it won’t be able to make any CO2 emission cuts.

This is all good news for those of us who know that increased atmospheric CO2 won’t warm things much but will improve plant growth, and hence crop yields, and hence food supplies, around the world.

But for the bureaucrats eager for their share of the global wealth redistribution pie that is the real aim of UN climate negotiations, it’s bad news indeed. How will they fund their retirements after they get run out of their countries for embezzlement and other crimes?

That redistribution is the real goal is clear enough from UN leaders’ own statements. E.g., Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the IPCC, said back in 2010:

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. … 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.

Featured Image Courtesy of José Antonio Morcillo Valenciano/ Flickr CC