Copenhagen Conference: The United Nations summit was promoted as a serious effort to mitigate climate change. But it's turned into an attack on capitalism. So what does the U.S. do? It pledges money.

Any international meeting that invites Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe to speak has no legitimacy. But that's not the worst of it.

When these fellows spoke in Copenhagen, their asinine remarks were cheered and applauded by attendees who seemed to think they were in the presence of great men. Surely the world now gets what the global warming alarmists are about.

Doesn't it?

For reasons that remain a mystery to us, Chavez was celebrated as if he were a popularly elected president who has led his country toward greater freedom and prosperity instead of a socialist who rigged his election to be president for life, crushed civil liberties and wrecked his nation's economy.

Nevertheless, "President Chavez brought the house down," according to newspaper the Australian, when he addressed the U.N. Climate Change Conference on Wednesday. "When he said there was a 'silent and terrible ghost in the room' and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening."

Socialism, Chavez told the fawning audience, is "the way to save the planet" while "the destructive model of capitalism is the eradication of life." And: "Capitalism is the road to hell. ... Let's fight against capitalism and make it obey us."

For that nugget of nonsense, Chavez received a standing ovation.

Proceeding Chavez to the rostrum was Evo Morales, a pal of Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro and the first fully "indigenous" head of state in Bolivia. Morales set the table for Chavez, declaring the real cause of climate change to be "the capitalist system."

"If we want to save the earth," he said, "then we must end that economic model."

This man, a socialist who also fixed his election and consolidated his power, proposed an "international climate court of justice to prosecute countries for climate 'crimes.'"

Mugabe, who has beaten, tortured and killed his opponents and has been sanctioned for human-rights abuses, held forth on the anti-capitalist theme. He scolded the "capitalist gods of carbon" who "burp and belch their dangerous emissions," leaving "the lesser mortals of the developing sphere" to "gasp and sink and eventually die."

The gasping, sinking and dying who Mugabe is most familiar with are within his own country. Tens of thousands have been killed by the poverty, cholera, famine and outright murder brought on by his socialist policies that ruined a once-thriving economy.

On Thursday, the day before the conference wrap-up, Ahmadinejad, another unsavory character, kept alive the narrative that the developed nations should pay for "improving the welfare of people and reducing pollution."

And pay we apparently will. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Thursday the U.S. will contribute to an annual $100 billion-a-year climate protection fund. The money will ostensibly cover costs in developing countries associated with global warming.

But who's she kidding? As with almost all foreign aid, the money will instead be stolen by Third World kleptocrats and never used for its intended purpose.

As economist Gary Becker has said, "Foreign aid programs other than of a humanitarian nature are destined to fail because they involve transfers of resources from one government to another." Mugabe, for example, has been accused of misusing hundreds of millions in aid from the U.S. and Britain.

The speakers' rants, the attendees' raves and the pledges of greenmail payments from guilt-ridden leaders of developed nations are almost comical.

It's particularly dispiriting to know that there are those among us who think that living under capitalism — the only system that has improved human existence — is a burden; that handing money to dictators will improve the lives of those they oppress and that the United Nations has only the planet's interest in mind when it pushes for international global-warming agreements.

Their lack of understanding is far more of a threat than man's carbon emissions.