What Copenhagen is really about: money, i.e., economic redistribution and tax revenues

They’re politicians. They can’t be honest, or we’d kick them all out.

Capping Emissions, Trading On The Future – Forbes.com

The media shills, scientists, bureaucrats and corporate rent-seekers gathered at Copenhagen won’t give much thought to what this means to the industrialized world’s middle and working class. For many of them the new carbon regime means a gradual decline in living standards. Huge increases in energy costs, taxes and a spate of regulatory mandates will restrict their access to everything from single-family housing and personal mobility to employment in carbon-intensive industries like construction, manufacturing, warehousing and agriculture.

You can get a glimpse of this future in high-unemployment California. Here a burgeoning regulatory regime tied to global warming threatens to turn the state into a total “no go” economic development zone. Not only do companies have to deal with high taxes, cascading energy prices and regulations, they now face audits of their impact on global warming. Far easier to move your project to Texas–or if necessary, China.

Politicians who can raise your taxes don’t need to care about the dangers of chasing business away to other countries. It doesn’t affect them, or at least, not directly. It affects you and me though, because it affects the economy that sustains us.

Politicians who understand how markets and economies work would realize that they benefit from a robust economy as well, in the form of higher absolute tax revenues. But they’d rather just enrich themselves by making deals under the table and then raise our taxes when the going gets tough. It’s probably easier.

I find this next part particularly interesting. It frames the debate as a class war, which is an angle that probably isn’t highlighted enough:

So why do leaders like Barack Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown continue identifying themselves with the climate change agenda and policies like cap and trade? Perhaps it’s best to see this as a clash of classes. Today’s environmental movement reflects the values of a large portion of the post-industrial upper class. The big money behind the warming industry includes many powerful corporate interests that would benefit from a super-regulated environment that would all but eliminate potential upstarts.

These people generally also do not fear the loss of millions of factory, truck, construction and agriculture-related jobs slated to be “de-developed.” These tasks can shift to China, India or Vietnam–where the net emissions would no doubt be higher–at little immediate cost to tenured professors, nonprofit executives or investment bankers. The endowments and the investment funds can just as happily mint their profits in Chongqing as in Chicago.

Global warming-driven land-use legislation possesses a similarly pro-gentry slant. Suburban single family homes need to be sacrificed in the name of climate change, but this will not threaten the large Park Avenue apartments and private retreats of media superstars, financial tycoons and the scions of former carbon-spewing fortunes. After all, you can always pay for your pleasure with “carbon offsets.”

It’s like a big game of Risk to these corrupt fools.And we are the game pieces.

I think what this gets down to is the same split that I’ve identified in the past as the key distinction in political life, despite Left vs. Right diversions: between political haves and have-nots. The corrupt and the regular folks that work for a living. More and more, this is the split that informs my worldview and is validated week after week.

Copenhagen is war all right, it’s just fought with CO2 and money instead of bullets and bombs.

[Via http://jbrokaw.wordpress.com]