There is much concern in financial markets about exit strategies. How are central banks and governments going to dig themselves out of their multi-trillion dollar monetary and fiscal stimulus holes? Frankly, it’s too late now to start worrying about that problem, which in any case is easily fixed: tax increases. Far more worthy of attention, before it’s too late, are the new mile-deep spending regimes governments are preparing to cover the cost of new climate change policies. And guess how they will get out of those trenches.
The green jungle drums are already at full volume in preparation for the Copenhagen climate policy extravaganza, even though the two week negotiation marathon isn’t set to open until Dec. 7. From now till mid-December, our days and nights are going to be filled with dark nightmares of global warming and bright utopian visions of the greatest reordering of economic activity since the industrial revolution — except run in reverse. No citizen of the world will be able to escape the run-up to Copenhagen where, one way or another, catastrophe looms.
At Copenhagen, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will attempt to get about 140 nations to approve a new global plan to reduce carbon emissions and, at the same time, engineer a major redistribution of money from developed nations to developing nations. An early draft of the Copenhagen agreement, to replace the collapsing Kyoto Protocol, suggests the focus is as much on redistribution as on carbon reduction, with no guarantee that any of it will have the slightest impact on carbon emissions or the global climate.
[More]