Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to BBC’s Roger Harrabin, “… Greenpeace and WWF have offices in Beijing and if they rattle China too hard, they could be swiftly closed down”.
Climate change: Should green campaigners put more pressure on China to slash emissions?
By Roger Harrabin
BBC environment analystChina will be urged at the UN next week to speed up the timetable for curbing its planet-heating carbon emissions.
It will be nudged by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’s experiencing climate pressure himself from activists blocking motorways.
But is the UK, with its world-leading emissions targets, the right target for demonstrators?
China produces 28% of global emissions and the UK just 1%. So shouldn’t they be picketing the Chinese embassy instead of the M25 motorway?
On the face of it, that seems a reasonable question. And some veteran activists would indeed support a well-judged China protest – we’ll come to that later.
But when I initially asked the radical green group Extinction Rebellion (XR) if they had considered demonstrating against China, it triggered a furious response.
An XR member tweeted accusing me of perpetuating anti-Chinese racist stereotypes and failing to report climate change properly.
Why so vitriolic?
Well, there are two reasons. The first is practical: climate campaigning groups like Greenpeace and WWF have offices in Beijing and if they rattle China too hard, they could be swiftly closed down.
…
“I would put small, polite pickets at every Chinese embassy worldwide. The Chinese authorities listen most to something coming from several different sources at the same time.
“It would also preserve Chinese “face” more than a big single demonstration, and would almost certainly not make news – so it wouldn’t be picked up by the deniers.”
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58584976
I understand why greens don’t want to target China on the ground inside China. China is pretty scary when you annoy them, if you are in their power. On the way to Taipei, three names read out in Hong Kong, I was the only person present. I was taken to a room, no words, a red army guard just glared at me for a full minute, before finally waving me towards the door. I can take a hint.
And there was that time Greenpeace tried to occupy an oil rig in the Russian arctic. I don’t think they’ll try that again in a hurry.
But being diffident about protesting in front of the Chinese Embassy, in a free country like Britain, making ridiculous excuses about how the “deniers” might notice them targeting China, is just pathetic.
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Skeptics have known that China is the biggest emitter of CO2 for a long time. We don’t need them to point it out for us.
Using per capita logic the economic and lifestyle impact/person of lowering fossil fuel use should be the lowest in the world with the greatest affect on CC (if AGW were true).
In China……
Seems no different to CND not campaigning against Russian nukes. Got to keep one’s paymasters happy.
That’s not true. CND opposed all nuclear weapons but as a UK based organisation it’s first priority was UK nuclear weapons and opposition to the siting of US nukes (Cruise Missiles) in the UK
Greenpeace and WWF will not target China as that would obviously be RACIST!
The fact that their offices in Beijing would be immediately closed is irrelevant.
China is actively buying friends and blocking any criticism. The con job at World Bank is the latest example of caught red handed.
Belt & Road trade and foreign aid programme from China to win friends and influence people of authority in foreign nations.
Included in foreign aid construction of coal fired power stations for developing nations.
Please consider: 1975 when Australia and other UN member nations signed the UN Lima Protocol/Agreement that “developing nations” would benefit from the transfer of manufacturing industries and know how to them over time. Later around 1990 the UN Agenda 21 (2021) was signed under the heading “Sustainability”, since extended into Agenda 30) that encompassed many areas of a nation’s wealth. And example being creation of National Parks listed with the UN in which minerals, energy, timber and even new dams were banned. Marine Parks banning commercial fishing and even amateur fishers from vast areas.
In short economic vandalism – undermining a nation’s future prosperity.
And today one of those “developing nations” is close to overtaking the economy of the United States of America, but remains a developing nation with benefits including being able to ignore the UN IPCC Paris Agreement emissions reduction and net zero emissions by 2050.
So ask yourself what the UN-Globalist political motives involve.
“It would also preserve Chinese “face” more than a big single demonstration, and would almost certainly not make news – so it wouldn’t be picked up by the deniers.”
What on earth does this mean? What does Harriban think so-called ‘deniers’ would be picking up? It would indeed be newsworthy if the woke were to have the cojones to acknowledge China presents a towering barrier to getting rid of fossil fuels (and ultimately this barrier will most likely reveal that there is no climate emergency after all!).
Marginalized science and tech savvy dissenters certainly aren’t a barrier (words to deaf ears vs deeds).
Not going after the Chinese on the fossil fuel aspect actually serves dissenters well. After over 40 years of end-of-world climate change haranguing and despite galloping CO2 emissions, we have bupkes of the emergency we were promised. What we do have is a Garden of Eden Global Greening and bumper crops to show for it.
Dissenters and the Chinese are on the same page as far as CO2 and the climate are concerned. Their totalitarian governance, greatly admired by “Western néomarxistes, not so much.
Is there anything not pathetic about ER?
China must not have paid off all the agitators yet. Maybe they have another virus to infect the world, Covid didn’t seem to do the job.
Last year alone [2020] the CCP/PRC built more than three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world. Now, The CCP is planning toto build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces — equivalent to adding about 1.5% to its current annual emissions, according to a new report by the Helsinki-based research organization the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and the U.S. group Global Energy Monitor (GEM). The CCP is the world’s leading coal investor, with plans to increase its existing 1,100-gigawatt fleet of coal-fired power plants by another 187 gigawatts, according to the report. [While Australia’s total requirement is 19GW, for which we have chronic insufficient capacity, with AEMO issuing blackout warnings at record rates of up to 4 per week, while we have everything ‘ready to hand’ to rectify this Third World debacle except political will and responsibility.]
And the left eats itself….
You can’t expect the green, anti-capitalism eco-nutters to bite the (chinese) hand that funds them.
funny Aus isnt in the list yet WE are told here that we’re the worst per capita emitters?
wtf?
The warmunistas know who fills their rice bowl and they ain’t gonna tip it over.
There is so very much to climate and that has so very very little to do with CO2 with which even so man has so very little to do. This is in fact the consensus.
WWF Business Plan is based on the Al Capone Protection Racket.
Pay WWF enough cash and they will not slag your business in the media.
Particularly WWF are an insidious Drain on vulnerable businesses. Look no further than the current salmon farming saga in Tasmania.
If in UK you cannot miss the bizarre ads by WWF. For varying donations to WWF you can save a Snow Leopard, an elephant, save a 3rd world child and/or the child’s family simply by txting to a mobile number.
Labeled as a “not for profit” simply means they pay no tax on their scams.
But, but, but,…..per capita. China has less per capita emissions….
And like the intelligent COVID that doesn’t spread among liberal functions, global warming knows that it will only cause bad things to happen where the per capita is higher, not based on overall emissions….. (note: This post makes the assumption that global warming causes bad weather events – which I do not agree with).
“On the way to Taipei, three names read out in Hong Kong, I was the only person present.”
Does this sentence mean something?