Seeking rent at the climate conference, by Craig Rucker of CFACT.

Las Vegas, they say, was not built with the money of winners.

Similarly, the lush corporate pavilion at COP 22, the UN climate conference in Morocco, was not built with money from voluntary purchasers.

Climate politics already redistributes hundreds of billions of dollars through grants, subsidies, set asides, mandates and prohibitions.  Developing nations are anxious to get their hands climate cash, but they are amateurs compared to crony capitalists. …

New to the concept of “rent-seeking”?

One of the definitions of corporate “rent-seeking” is seeking to obtain revenue “in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.  Rent-seeking implies extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity.”

Climate-rent seekers are after all those taxpayer dollars:

When a corporate giant such as Germany’s Siemens sets up shop at the climate conference it would like you to think it is doing so for altruistic reasons.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  They are in Morocco seeking to sell their products at prices no consumer would freely choose to pay.

The same goes for the rest of the carbon carpetbaggers here at the COP.  The shameful part is that they revel in unearned moral advantage by claiming that they are here to save the Earth. …

Corporations don’t get into the climate business to change the temperature of the planet or help mitigate the harmful effects (which have yet to occur) of climate change.  They are here to fleece tax and ratepayers and put competitors at disadvantage.