At Fox News, COMMENTARY contributor George Russell has a fantastic report on a confidential gathering of UN officials that took place last October. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and others met in a Long Island mansion and brainstormed on how “to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions ‘to manage the process of globalization better.’”

The discussion centered on plans for June’s Rio + 20 Summit on Sustainable Development, and was something like Occupy Wall Street rally meets Avatar. Participants both noted that “inequity” is the “single greatest challenge and threat” to the world and “the UN in Rio should be the voice of the planet and its people.” They’ll have to fight Barack Obama for that gig, no?

Russell’s report is valuable because it exposes the scale of the green movement’s ambitions, the full integration of environmentalism into every other leftist cause du jour, and the extent of the UN’s radicalism. Environmentalism is a legitimized mainstream vehicle for everything from anti-capitalist legislation to trans-hemispheric reparations to global governance. You start with a couple of balmy summers and end up with what the meeting’s minutes described as “a means to ‘reorient public and private decision-making’ to make the world’s poorest people the new economy’s ‘main beneficiaries.’”

In some sense, the climate debate has already become irrelevant. By the time Climategate episode 4986 elicits an “oops” from Al Gore, the UN’s global redistributionist machine will have long dispensed with its initial green premise and be onto justifying global socialism on its own terms.