From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
China is prepared to hold its cooperation on climate issues hostage to Western concessions elsewhere.
Few cities in China represent the country’s addiction to coal more than Tianjin, where Alok Sharma travelled this week to talk about cooperation on climate issues. It sits on the coast of one of China’s most polluted regions, and its port is a key hub for trading 100 million tons a year of the stuff – that’s roughly 12 times Britain’s annual coal burn.
Chinese coal consumption is on track to increase this year by around ten per cent. To meet that demand, vast new open cast pits are being rushed into service in Inner Mongolia, China’s biggest coal production region, from where supplies are brought down the coast to Tianjin. There is a chance that Sharma might have caught a glimpse of the vast port, the piles of coal, or the traffic jam of ships waiting to dock, as he flew in. If so, it will have presented a far clearer picture of China’s commitment to a ‘sustainable future’ than the empty platitudes and vague promises of his hosts.
China has pledged that its greenhouse gas emissions will reach their highest point before 2030 and the country will reach carbon neutrality before 2060. Sharma, who will preside over the United Nations Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow in November, would like China to bring its targets forward. At the very least he was looking for more detail from special representative for climate change affairs, Xie Zhenhua, as to how China will achieve its targets. He got none – because China is taking a big leap in the opposite direction.
China is the world’s biggest polluter, responsible for 27 per cent of global emissions of greenhouse gases – and that’s about to get worse. It is opening new coal-fired power stations and increasing emissions at an annual rate that is greater than the savings of the rest of the world put together. Last year, coal plants with a combined capacity of 37.75 gigawatts were retired globally, more than half in the United States and European Union, according to an analysis by Global Energy Monitor, which analysis fossil fuel trends. During that time, China opened 38.4 gigawatts of new plants – that’s three times more new coal fired capacity than the rest of the world combined.
China has refused to budge on its target dates and refused to give detail as to how it intends to achieve them. This week, a prickly editorial in Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, said:
‘China has already announced its own climate road map and will stick to its own pace.’
Meanwhile, China is currently building new coal plants at more than 60 locations across the country, and local authorities are planning for still more. Far from providing a plan to work towards its 2030 ‘peak emissions’ date, it is as if China sees this as a finishing line in a race to build as many coal-burning plants as possible. It’s a construction frenzy that makes a mockery of the efforts of the rest of the world to reduce emissions.
The only bright spot is an apparent reduction in the number of new coal plants that China is financing in developing countries as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. This fall off appears to be more a result of the soaring price of coal and concern over debt than a change in Chinese policy, although Beijing might well present it as a concession.
China certainly talks the talk on clean energy and sustainability. It does generate more energy from solar power than any other country, and is seeking to corner the global market in many green technologies. But fossil fuels still account for 85 per cent of energy used, and coal represents 57 per cent of that.
Three days before Sharma’s visit, John Kerry, the US climate envoy, had his own meetings in China – also in Tianjin, which provided a useful insight into China’s tactics. Kerry had hoped that climate issues, of such critical importance to the whole world, could be divorced from prickly bilateral tensions. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister told him to forget it, that climate cooperation could not be separated and that the US should ‘cease containing and suppressing China in the world.’
This suggests that China is prepared to hold its cooperation on climate issues hostage to concessions elsewhere. If that’s the case, Western negotiators should be very wary. Those who have sat opposite Chinese officials during negotiations over trade, cyber espionage and much more will be familiar with the tactics: playing the victim, veiled threats, vague promises, a lack of detail in any concessions – and ultimately ignoring any agreement reached.
Former president Barack Obama, a strong advocate of engagement with China, wrote in his memoir, A Promised Land, that China’s economic rise has seen Beijing ‘evading, bending, or breaking just about every agreed-about rule of international commerce’. China has been a master of gaming that system to its advantage. It is naive to think that climate issues are any different.
Somebody has to make The Stuff® because Gang Green sure isn’t paving the way for reliable production.
China is more than happy to sell the green weapons of economic destruction the warmists ask for in order to feel better about themselves. As a bonus, China gets to watch their biggest economic and military rivals self destruct under repressive green policies, Meanwhile, they use mostly coal power to manufacture these weapons of economic destruction.
Is the Biden administration aware of this because it’s their ultimate goal, or has unwarranted guilt and fear turned their collective brains into mush?
Why not both?
China see Climate Change as “a goose that lays golden eggs”.
They get to sell the warmists tools to remediate Climate Change, while producing more carbon to make even more remediation required.
Few cities in China represent the country’s addiction to coal more than Tianjin,
Words mean things. Somehow it is the amorphous, faceless “country” that has an “addiction”. Would they screech if we identified individual politicians who had an admitted “addiction” to unreliable energy sources?
China is the world’s biggest polluter, responsible for 27 per cent of global emissions of greenhouse gases – and that’s about to get worse. It is opening new coal-fired power stations and increasing emissions at an annual rate that is greater than the savings of the rest of the world put together.
CO2 isn’t pollution, never was. As H2O isn’t pollution. Can’t be compared to SO2 or NOx
USA emits significantly more CO2 than China on a per capita basis.
So what?
That means that China has too many capitas. They must be forced to cut down.
They seem to do that spontaneously with no provocation, from time to time. “Capitas” are dirt cheap in China.
Dave, I think you’ll find that a comparative demographic comparison puts the China middle class emissions per capita on the same level as the US middle class.
Of course, the numbers of poor in China completely overwhelms the comparative numbers in the USA and all the rest of the world.
So “per capita” emissions comparisons is, well – just bullshit.
Nonsense. Per capita means “by head”. There are 3 billion Chinese exhaling CO2 daily. In the US only 300 million exhale.
So using your measure, a per capita basis, China emits 10X the CO2 that the US does.
It’s simple math.
Is your knowledge of the population of China rectally derived?
You need to learn what per capita means, because it’s the opposite of what you think.
ROFL no Simon he has it right he just changed the discussion around in a clever way .. to clever for you obviously. It’s like the joke that went over your head.
Right, so you think per capita means total output…. OK. I can see why you struggle with the concept of AGW. I’m sorry but per capita, the US (15 tons) emits more than China (7 tons).
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
You will note that is more than twice what China produces (per capita). So you can ROFL all you like Einstein.
You still don’t get the joke 🙂
Lets see if we can make it SIMPLE SIMON enough for you to catch on … the only emissions he spoke about were exhaled from people. Technically all people will exhale the same and he then turned that to a total figure.
You are dribbling on about emission as in fossil fuel emissions and not getting the joke … I think that makes you the butt of the joke.
I guess we should give simple Simon the Kiddie version of the joke.
Q.) How much fossil fuel emission do humans make?
A.) None fossil fuels are burnt by engines, fires etc.
“I guess we should give simple Simon the Kiddie version of the joke.”
If you insist on making a complete fool of yourself be my guest. Your explanation just digs a deeper hole for you and your “per capita”buddy.
But let me make it plain. It makes no difference how many Chinese breath out how much CO2 in terms of per capita. It is still per capita… i.e per person. That’s the whole point.
ROFL …. So how much more does a USA person expire CO2 than a Chinese person 🙂
.
So if we play strict SIMPLE SIMON the per capita CO2 emissions are identical … AND THAT IS THE JOKE they bend it at the end to mess with adults.
.
This is the joke that keeps on giving.
.
Perhaps you need to try some more kiddie jokes .. no looking at the answer
https://puzzlefry.com/puzzles/which-way-does-the-smoke-blow/
So which way does the smoke blow?
So the US is doing more than anyone else to increase life in the biosphere. Take a collective bow!!
Chinas pollution will be second to the international disaster of them taking over Taiwan and finishing control of the South China Sea. The good news here is that they are choking their own people with their pollution and maybe someday there will be an accounting. Or not. Don’t wait for it.
That doesn’t bother the Chinese at all and never did. One thing they have lots of is people. As Stalin said; “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of one million, just a statistic.”
And he was a bit of an expert
The Chinese are also experts. See the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, Tiananmen Square, Xinjiang, etc. etc.
When he was Prime Minister of Australia in 2007, John Howard stated that his intent was that Australia would undertake emissions reduction measures in line with what its main international trading partners were doing.
If all the G20 governments took this rational approach, and the UN still wanted to have a Paris-style binding global agreement, they’d have to start leaning on China for results, instead of giving them a “developing country” bullshit pass.
I was brought in the 70’s in South Wales at the end of the coal mining era.
I was a young drafty in the coal industry and I suppose I’m steeped in it.
Now I just love the way China is using it’s coal. We called it ‘King Coal’.
Good one on Florida hurricanes Pilot!
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/74788/
Florida’s worst MAJOR hurricane periods:
1. Between 1944-1950, there were 7 MAJOR hurricanes that hit Florida……..during modest global cooling.
1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950 X2.
2. In 2004-2005, there were 5 MAJOR hurricanes that hit Florida, after 1 deg C of warming and during the global warming pause.
2004 X3, 2005 X2.
List of United States hurricanes
The decades with the most US hurricanes were:
1. 1990’s -31(during global warming)
2. 1940’s -26 (during global cooling)
3. (Tie) 1880’s -25(global cooling)
4. 2000’s -25(warming pause after +1 deg. C)
5. 1950’s -23 (global cooling)
6. 1910’s -23 (end/peak of cooling phase)
Just brilliant ! !
China never intends to abide to any “climate change” promises, because they know that more CO2 is good for our climate …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Iu9D5RhqQ
Well, according to the ironclad laws of the social sciences, an international environmental disaster will bring the world together into a Utopian, Open Society, one world government:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their ‘Science’
In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”
Speaking at the 2000 U.N. Conference on Climate Change in the Hague, former President Jacques Chirac of France explained why the IPCC’s climate initiative supported a key Western European Kyoto Protocol objective: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”
Angela Merkel, at her press conference (about Trump leaving the Paris Climate Accord), said, “This Paris climate accord is not just some accord or the other. It is a central accord in defining the contours of globalization.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/05/in-their-own-words-climate-alarmists-debunk-their-science/?sh=1152f49968a3
However, if you fake an international environmental disaster, the likelihood will be that a one world government will not form, and the governments who went along with the ruse and brainwashed their citizens, will need to make good on their environmental promises, regardless.
Last week, George Soros reversed course and named China as the world’s greatest threat… if that is indeed true, I wonder how Soros plans to prevail, given that for the last two decades his NGOs have jacked Western energy prices up to the point where all of the world’s heavy industries are now located in China?
China does not need any new weapons systems, it just needs to keep Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion well funded and let time and pressure do the rest. IMHO
Excellent post. You are absolutely right regarding the woke Greens doing the heavy lifting needed to maintain China’s ongoing and growing manufacturing hegemony. We have reached the point where if a hostile engagement began anywhere in the world with China on the opposing side, then no Western nation with the possible exception of the USA would be able to stand against the threat,
The USA also has a time limited period when it might be able to oppose China, using diplomacy. At the present rate of decline in key areas of US security, such as infrastructure and energy the USA is failing. The risk, that pursuit of weakness creates (entirely caused by false Green anxieties) is, any serious difference in foreign policies between China and the USA, could go hot far too quickly to be moderated by diplomacy.
I hope the Greens and woke folk are happy with their work, because China certainly is.
“China has been a master of gaming that system to its advantage.”
It has not been a matter of gaming the “system”. They were allowed to do as they wish by Obama and all others of the leftist world who are admirers of China, and its communist system.
This had been an invitation to do as they wish and and to enjoy the huge windfall for their industry to make “green energy” products for global idiot sycophants. They were amazed that “The West” was so stupid. The lesson was clear. We can do what we want – there is no one to stop us.
Exactly !!! You might find this video interesting, as it is about “gaming the system“. The video is from 1994, but it is even more relevant today. IMHO The first part of the video is all of the usual hackneyed military stuff, but the last section (@36:54) is about eastern psychology and it fits with what you are saying:
Sun-Tzu: art of war (1994)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x70xuqa?start=2214
Normally, this kind of fluff video is something I would have skipped over, but I ended up learning something. So, I think it will be worth 20 minutes of your time.
Former president Barack Obama, a strong advocate of engagement with China, wrote in his memoir, A Promised Land, that China’s economic rise has seen Beijing ‘evading, bending, or breaking just about every agreed-about rule of international commerce’. China has been a master of gaming that system to its advantage. It is naive to think that climate issues are any different.
For once, at least, he was right.
Stopped clocks, and all that.
After safely being out of power
Not a peep while president
So brave
We should find out who wrote his memoir and congratulate them for their astute observation….
Many of the green useless idiots seem to be taking the CCP’s statements as facts. These statements are not backed by concrete plans by which the plans could become reality. These CCP “green” plans are stated to fool the West.
The CCP lies as much as Joey Biden…CCP just lied about Hong Kong…denies Tianamen Square Massacre happened….denies putting Uighurs in concentration camps…
By their actions I believe that the Chinese realize that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control and that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is really zero. But if they can make some money off of us they will shine it on.
This has nothing to do with xi’s “promises” or anything remotely related to honest exchange,
xi is playing a bluff hand. He has an embedded demographic disaster (failed one-child policy). PRC cannot feed itself, much less stumble on until it can. It will grow old before it gets rich.
Right now, xi is guilt-baiting the West and exploiting the treacherous left here.
Stop tolerating that stupidity. Pull the rug out from under CCP and end it!
It’s hypocrisy on steroids for Obama to be critical of China’s ‘gaming of the system’ when he was the one that agreed to their uncapped 2030 emissions target. It has always been obvious that China would never reduce their emissions and the 2060 commitment is a fake line cast out to allow left-leaning media to proclaim the holiness of the CCP in line with their other Marxist propaganda. Obama has always been part of that Marxist team, but wants us to believe otherwise.
Seems to me that China is already ruling the World and its institutions without any intelligent opposition from the woke western world more fearful of hurting feelings rather than economic repercussions .
Logic and fact has disappeared from common sense in science and the politics that pay for it.
The Earth has been doomed for the last 10,20,30,40,50 years plus yet China can carry on as usual according to the hypocritical Greenies .
If things continue as they are heading , 1/2 of EU will be under Sharia law , China will ‘own’ 1/2 Africa and the Pacific , without any weapons being involved .
If Xi decides he wants Taiwan while he is Leader , who knows how that will turn out .
But while the Western world thinks our greatest threat is the climate , it doesn’t look promising .
“Seems to me that China is already ruling the World and its institutions without any intelligent opposition from the woke western world more fearful of hurting feelings rather than economic repercussions .”
Is there any hope that we can move the UN in NYC to China?
I would like those criminals, out of here.
All the evidence is that the Chinese establishment, whether political or scientific, simply do not believe in CAGW. Likewise the Indians.
In fact most of the world show every sign of not believing in it. This is a fact which should, but never does, dominate all planning.
Even if you think CAGW is real and that there is a climate crisis, policy has to be made on the basis that the emitters of 75% of the global CO2 emissions don’t agree with you and have no intention of limiting or reducing. In fact, they intend increasing as fast as they can.
All the rhetoric from the alarmists in the West has to do with how we (as in the global ‘we’) have to reduce. All policies are based on the idea that the global ‘we’ is going to do it.
However the only rational basis for policy, for alarmists, is what they want to do under the realistic scenario that no-one outside the West does anything but increases. That is the reality of what is happening. So given that, what do you want to do, and why?
“All the evidence is that the Chinese establishment, whether political or scientific, simply do not believe in CAGW. Likewise the Indians.” Well, that makes them far more intelligent than all the wests’ greentards combined.
Bit like Covid ” we’re all in this together ”
apart from those who are exempt or have other means .
Rhetoric does not compare with reality .
Except maybe in super computer modelling .
Currently CCP is trying to force its’ women to birth more babies, problem is it already indoctrinated them to NOT have more babies. All their coal burning is irrelevant, their population is aging faster than America’s is, hell, only Italy is ahead of them in that race.
More CO2 good, less CO2 bad. That is the inconvenient truth leftards are so desperate to hide. Screw what CCP is doing, in the long run it means nothing.
It looks to me that you, without any disclaimer what so ever, are in total agreement with this nonsense.
Or China-bashing, are we?
As what goes for the article, it is not CO2-bashing per se, it is COAL-bashing. The Chinese MIGHT take an interest in capturing the non-pollutant CO2 (to early to tell).
At which point the COAL-bashers has lost the entire emission-argument.
Oddgeir
who knows?
Anyone who visits Chinese cities sees the smoke and smog and smells the pollution – but CO2 is a colorless odorless gas that benefits man and is necessary for life.
griff, a simple question.
We know that China mines and burns more coal than the rest of the world put together. We also know it is building coal fired generating plants domestically and around the world. And finally we know its emitting a third of global CO2 emissions, and rising.
Question: Do you think they should reduce emissions? By when and by how much.
Do you think they should immediately stop building more coal fired plants, both domestically and internationally?
Simple questions just give a straight answer.
Obama: “China has been a master of gaming that system to its advantage. It is naive to think that climate issues are any different.”
That is amusing coming from the guy who attempted to end game the Chinese delegation at COP21 in 2009. He tried to cobble together a behind the scenes “agreement” with other western nations and them present it as a fait acompli for the Chinese to sign on to.
When the Chinese found out what was going on, they simply retired to their hotel and refused to come out. The rest of the conference consisted of the west coming up with new plans and sending messengers to the Chinese to timidly ask : ” will this one be OK ? ”
This was the first assertion of Chinese world dominance provoked by Obama trying to “game the system”.
Obama was also the one who managed to get the Chinese to sign up to the Paris Accord by promising the destroy western economies in exchange for China continuing to expand unconstrained as a “developing nation”.