IPCC official admits climate policy for redistributing wealth, according to an interview reported with German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) 14 November 2010 and The Global Warming Policy Foundation 18 Nov 2010.
Ottmar Edenhofer is deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology. He was joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. He will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and Youba Sokona from Mali. The following is an excerpt from an English translation of the interview with NZZ.
NZZ: The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.
Edenhofer: That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
NZZ: That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.
Edenhofer: 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.
NZZ: 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.
Edenhofer: 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.
Editorial Comment: We were never under the illusion that international climate policy was environmental policy and it certainly is not a science or fact based policy, and that is the real reason that any academics or media personalities who questioned the belief in man-made global warming, such as Ian Plimer, David Bellamy and Bob Carter and ourselves, etc., have been ridiculed with names like “climate change deniers” and excluded from mainstream academic and popular media. This kind of scorn-pouring is what happens when power and money are at stake, rather than truth.
After a proven decade of no warming, along with revelations such as the “climategate” e-mail and data leak, it seems the facade of scientific consensus is cracking and Edenhofer, an economist rather than an environmental scientist, is honest enough to say what the IPCC agenda really is. It is a good Biblical principle that the rich should help the poor, but extracting funds from the rich by deception is not.
Evidence News 24 Nov 2010
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