While President Bush has been struggling at the G-8 summit to fend off the climate-change hysterics of Angela Merkel, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been helpfully reminding us that the UN would love to offer its services as the command center for a grand plan to control the weather of the entire planet.

He’s got to be kidding. This is the same UN you shouldn’t leave alone with your kid’s piggybank. This is the UN that won’t account for its own money (well, actually, it won’t account for your money), covered up graft during seven years of Oil-for-Food, didn’t notice the bribe shop in its own procurement department, had a now-convicted money-launderer as head of the budget oversight committee, and has yet to explain why UN Development Program officials were storing counterfeit $100 bills in their Pyongyang office safe.

But the UN has spotted a way to squeeze money out of traffic in hype and hot air. Having laid the groundwork — courtesy of Maurice Strong and his pals — for the usual arrangements of penalizing the U.S. while rewarding dictators, the UN is now positioning itself to preside as a global clearing house for trade in carbon dioxide emission offsets.

Hey, why stop there? There’s more to the world climate than just the weather — there’s also a financial environment, political environment, and even a moral ethos, in which carbon dioxide is the least of the vapors. How about a UN program to trade corruption offsets? Despotism offsets? If Ban really wants to help out, here’s a modest proposal, in my column today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.