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Guest essay by David Archibald
While in Beijing early this year US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that China and the US, the world’s largest emitters of such gases, had agreed to intensify information-sharing and policy discussions on their plans to limit greenhouse gas emissions after 2020. A few days later in Indonesia, he warned Indonesians that man-made climate change could threaten their entire way of life, deriding those who doubted the existence of “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction””. Last week President Obama didn’t wait for policy discussions with the Chinese to be completed and announced new EPA regulations that will gut the US economy.
But what are the Chinese doing about carbon dioxide? As per a recent US naval officer’s observation on the Chinese that “Ninety per cent of their time is spent on thinking about new and interesting ways to sink our ships and shoot down our planes”, China is adopting new and interesting ways to burn more coal. China is currently burning four billion tonnes of coal per annum while the US burns one billion tonnes for power generation. The new thing they are doing is a massive investment in plants that produce synthetic natural gas from coal according to this article from Scientific American.
Being a post-modern publication, Scientific American doesn’t tell you how much coal those plants will consume. You have to calculate that from the carbon dioxide production figure which is considered to be much more important. And the result is 400 million tonnes per annum – about 40% of the coal that the US burns in power generation. All the pain and suffering the US might endure to reach the new EPA target reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 30% will be offset by this new Chinese way of burning coal.
David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014).
Communist China certainly has come a long way commercially since it seemingly burst on the scene back in the early 90s selling us first silk shirts, and then IBM clones and PC clones, in rapid succession, and pretty soon, the Orientals were making and selling us just about everything else as well, as corporations here were “downsized” and jobs were “outsourced:” magic words to make the masses complacent and comfortable with the idea of their great country being dismantled and sold off – lock, stock, and barrel – to Red China.
In the US, we’ve shut down our industries as precious Western technology was exported to Asia in return for cheap labor. China now has so much money it can afford to build huge but vacant cities – taking urban planning to a whole new level.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, we’ll be fixing Detroit real soon now.
But hey! Why worry about China – or even the United States of America – when you’ve got Dancing with the Stars, The Chew, and LeBron James to keep you entertained?
Oh, almost forgot: We’ve also got curly light bulbs to stop the impending catastrophe of man-made global warming, so Red China can go ahead and burn all the coal it wants, the big cheese will grin that all away.
Actually, being a province of China or India doesn’t sound so bad. Lots of jobs and security.
“Our understanding of the word ‘cap’ is different from developed countries,” Sun told a conference
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A surprisingly frank statement of China’s position. We can agree to X, so long as we define what X means. If we fail to meet X, this means the definition of X was wrong and we will change the definition.
By building dirty, low-cost power plants the Chinese have been able to rapidly industrialize. This has given them the money to improve the efficiency of their power plants over time. As they use this money to make improvements they will be able to claim they are making reduction.
Had they followed the path of high-cost clean power generation they would have not been able to rapidly industrialize, nor would they have been able to make future improvements. By maximizing CO2 production today, the Chinese have a much stronger negotiating position for the future.
Clearly CO2 is not seen as a threat by China. If anything it is seen as an asset that can be exploited in future negotiations. Especially over the question of reparations.
Steve P says:
June 11, 2014 at 7:02 am
Red China? Are you fucking serious. They are more capitalist than we are these days. The biggest market worldwide for luxury goods is China. Remove your flairs and move into the 21st century
I really don’t want to sound like some sort of Chinophile. I am not. MSM is bs about climate catastrophe and it is bs about China. Its more than likely it is bs about everything else
Beijing’s stance, which included the conviction that: “Countries should be held responsible not only for their current emissions but also for their cumulative historical emissions, given that greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere over many decades.”
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By labeling CO2 as a harmful pollutant, the US has played itself into China’s hand. The Chinese position is quite clear. The US must pay the rest of the world for the years of accumulated CO2 emissions, where the US was by far the biggest polluter. Having agreed that CO2 is a harmful pollutant, the US now has no option.
A lot more on China and energy here:
China – the coal monster
Just look to the Kerrys, Pelosis, Boxers, Reids, Gores and now the Obamas for examples of how to live the good life while telling everyone else they must sacrifice.
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they are worried that if we eat from the same table as them, they will get less. thus, for the sake of “all”, we should eat from a different table.
to ensure we eat from a different table, they want to place a tax tables, so none of us will be able to afford to eat from a table, and must survive on whatever crumbs fall from theirs.
The lines on the graph might as well be economic or wealth measures. Or alternatively, they could be proxies of realistic policy management. The U.S. economy is still on life support and the stated retraction by the Fed of the unemployment rate as a key targeting indicator for monetary policy is one clue. That and flat-lined interest rates are telling.
ferdberple says:
June 11, 2014 at 7:20 am
My point exactly. The chinese have the coin and say ‘heads I win and tails you lose’. The US can’t say anything after that. Anything they disprove just proves the opposite. Chinese win and US lose.
Euan Mearns says:
June 11, 2014 at 7:23 am
Nobody in China gives a shit. Its just business as usual and nobody gives a shit. Motor vehicle registration fees have been eliminated totally. Its part of your fuel fee at the the pump. The more you use the roads then the more you pay. I can’t see anything farer than that
The really funny part is that all those burned out hippies living on the left coast that won’t build power plants or even allow coal to be shipped through their states to the docks are, due to prevailing winds, receiving a good portion of the smoke from the Chinese power plants without the benefit of the electricity.
Did anyone notice that global temperatures behave just opposite to chinese CO2 emissions?
Until 2002 global temperatures were raising while chinese CO2 emissions were growing just a little but then from 2002 til now chinese CO2 emissions sky rocketed but global temperatures didn’t raise a bit.
Johny skull bones Kerry eh ? “We all remember Secretary of State John Kerry lying through this teeth last summer, when he swore that US intelligence reports proving that Syria used chemical weapons in Ghouta were “as clear as they are compelling.” However, the US administration never provided any proof of Syria government responsibility and now we know why: there was none.”
another one of Johny’s moments “Here is John Kerry on April 8, swearing that the Russians were behind the unrest in eastern Ukraine:
“No one should be fooled — and believe me, no one is fooled — by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours.”
Here is John Kerry two months later meeting with newly-elected Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine:
Secretary of State John Kerry also spent time talking with Mr. Poroshenko, privately urging him to provide evidence of Russian involvement with separatists with which to confront Russian officials.
John Kerry is a liar.” By Daniel McAdams http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38755.htm
Alex says:
June 11, 2014 at 7:09 am
“Steve P says:
June 11, 2014 at 7:02 am
Red China? Are you [trimmed] serious. They are more capitalist than we are these days. The biggest market worldwide for luxury goods is China. Remove your flairs and move into the 21st century”
Actually, more like fascists, while we are more like crony capitalists heading for fascism. I pick Russia’s mob run economy/social system as more pure uncontrolled capitalism. Marketing in a capitalistic society is aimed at creating a monopoly for the company in question through market segmentation, distribution, innovation, etc. In Russia, as well as in US and Mexican drug businesses, these can be replaced to a great extent by shooting one’s competition.
As an old time hippie:
We thought about free love and not following the rules of the ‘establishment’ -anarchism.
The current crop of hippies are worse than the establishment. I don’t give a shit about the clothes they wear. The current crop of ‘hippies’ are activists. A real hippie doesn’t give a shit
Republicans should have paid money for commercial time on the Living Dangerously sitcom. And here is what they should have done: Have a young person read the short story about Chicken Little. That’s it. Just the story. And then include the Paid for by The Republican Party tag. Perfect.
[remember to always add a description of what a video link is about for future readers. .mod]
The good version, so many parallels
Jim G
Don’t make the mistake that Russia and China are the same. The two are as different as chalk and cheese. They may both have been communist states at some time but believe me that they were totally different. They were at loggerheads with each other more than they were with the west
China is progressive and Russia is regressive.
Jim G says:
June 11, 2014 at 8:16 am
Nice arm waving. Communists like luxury goods – who knew, and why wouldn’t they with all our money? And of course they look like capitalists, with much of our industry having gone down the rat hole all the way to China- but…
In the early 90s, upon the dissolution of the USSR, China joined with its former communist antagonist and issued a joint statement to the effect that (paraphrasing) No longer did there exist rigid models or prototypes for the realization of socialist ideals.
In other words, to make it crystal clear, the tiger was announcing that it was about to change its stripes. And it worked.
But still a tiger…
Misattribution alert:
‘Twas not Jim G but
Alex who said:
June 11, 2014 at 7:09 am
What are flairs?
Alex says:
June 11, 2014 at 8:22 am
Promotion of the Hippies was the successful establishment trick to undermine and discredit the nascent anti-war movement. And it worked.
But that depends on the residence time of emitted CO2. If much or most of the CO2 that developed nations have emitted no longer resides in the atmosphere, that portion can be deducted from the West’s “debt.” (The estimates of the residence-time figure vary widely and wildly.)
In addition, granting AGW theory for the sake of argument, the amount of warming the from the CO2 the West has and is emitting is beneficial. It’s only the the additional CO2 from developing countries, and its accelerating pace, that poses a threat.
Richard Courtney says: “And if the policy objective is totalitarian control then the Chinese government already has it while constraint of GHG emissions is the policy tool other governments want to use to obtain it.”
Very perceptive Richard. Love your comments.