So Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just made news by landing in Copenhagen and immediately announcing $100 billion through 2020 in additional new money to developing countries, in the name of “climate change.” She was a little vague on how much of that total would come from us.

Climate changes. Always has. Always will. And so long as a country remains poor, its climate and weather will be among the greatest challenges to its people. Just like it was to us until we industrialized and got wealthy. But you can’t blame the weather for the fact that they remain poor. And now we promise billions more in overseas development aid ostensibly to deal with climate change. We know how wealth transfers to kleptocracies work out. We should expect nothing different here. It’s just waste and an invitation to fraud — this time, on a far grander scale.

For perspective, in 2008, total U.S. overseas development aid was $26 billion. So you see we’re talking about a spectacular increase in foreign aid in the name of something the case for which is collapsing all around us.

Now comes the cynicism. Clinton’s offer carries two caveats. First, that the money will go only to the poorest developing countries and not to richer ones like China; and second, that it is conditioned on richer countries like China making binding and verifiable emission reductions.

So you see the disconnect. Here’s a bag of money to incent and assist Party A, but only if Party B agrees to harm itself. I’m pretty sure every law student studies this fact pattern in contracts class.

But there is a loophole in that second caveat such that Party B doesn’t really have to self-inflict harm in order to trigger Party A’s lucre. Further, bear in mind that Party B — China, India et al. — already clean up via the jobs and wealth transferred to them when rich countries undertake Kyoto-style schemes, the continuation of which is also an implicit part of the deal. So it isn’t like Party B walks away empty-handed, whatever the perils of the funding model.

This loophole is that China’s “reductions” are actually huge emission increases. For example, China’s offer of a 45-percent reduction in emission intensity (emissions per unit of economic output) would, by 2020, produce a 130 percent increase of what is already the world’s largest emissions source. This is being hailed as a massive cut, despite the fact that over the last 15 years of its economic maturation, China has reduced its emissions intensity by over 46 percent (and in the process become the world’s leading emitter).

Better yet, the compromise over how to verify whether China et al. actually do what they promise is to allow those countries to tell us in the reports they already file with the U.N. I feel better already.

This is a political commitment, and it will be up to Congress to appropriate the money. The Obama administration has now promised that they will agree to such a spectacular undertaking. But the key to an actual Kyoto II rising to the level of Senate ratification is some binding promise of U.S. emissions reductions, not just more wealth transfer. That can is being kicked down the road, and whatever agreement comes out of Copenhagen will not remotely resemble what Obama and others have been urging as absolutely necessary — a fact that will largely be lost in the fanfare of Uncle Sam’s jingling pockets.

So now it’s off to Mexico City next year — that’s when the U.S. will have to agree to real emissions cuts through cap-and-trade, etc. We will be expected to harm ourselves as the price of admission in order to pay to upgrade the infrastructure of other nations on an unprecedented scale.

But for now (just as predicted), by signaling that he would come to Copenhagen, President Obama has cornered himself. Politically, he can’t now fly off to catcalls and no achievement, so he has by this told the rest of the world that they can hold him — meaning us — up for billions. He would do anything for a deal, and is doing it. The framework has been erected in anticipation of his arrival.