In pursuit of serious, practical and effective policies on climate we now turn to China. Ba-dum bum. We never tire of that old gag. But an amazing number of people don’t even think it’s a joke. Scientific Communism for instance gushes “Solar panels, wind turbines, a hydrogen energy system and lithium-ion batteries are powering China’s newest polar research station”. But when China deliberately subsidizes Western climate activists to try to cripple our economies and the defence capacities that depend on prosperity, while itself roaring ahead with coal plants (and yes, China now accounts for 56 percent of total world coal output, more than everyone else combined) it’s no longer a laughing matter.

The strange affinity of the Western mainstream media for enemies of the free societies is not new. The New York Times among others was infamously blind to Stalin’s atrocities when it mattered, in the 1930s. (So was the Guardian which now shamelessly boasts of its coverage by Malcolm Muggeridge that, at the time, was so shamelessly censored to favour the regime that Muggeridge quit in protest.) And now the Times regularly peddles stories like:

“As U.S. Retreats on Climate, China and Europe Pledge to Go Green Together/ A joint statement promised new efforts to cut emissions at a time when China is positioning itself as the world’s one-stop shop for clean energy technologies.”

We understand that the Times does not agree with what Donald Trump is doing on climate or the reasoning behind it. But it does nobody any favours, including them, when it describes things that are not happening to make the wrong people look smart and nice. Including, in this piece, conceding that:

“European officials have in the past been vocal in criticizing China’s widespread use of coal: China burns more coal than any country ever has. European officials have also criticized what they call China’s dumping of inexpensive electric vehicles on the global market.”

But then it insists that:

“China has staked out an ambitious long-term policy of dominating the sale of clean-energy technologies to the world including solar panels, wind turbines, next-generation batteries and electric vehicles…. With years of generous state support for private companies, China is now the global front-runner in building and selling clean energy technologies.”

No. What China has is a subsidized house of cards designed to collapse our own first. And just as someone reading Walter Duranty in the Times on the lack of deliberate genocidal collectivization-driven famine in Ukraine in the 1930s would not have understood anything about actual conditions in the Soviet Union, someone reading this kind of thing in the Times today will not understand anything about actual conditions in China (for instance no big company in China is “private” as we use that term) or that nation’s impact on the global economic system or, if you care about such things, GHG emissions.

Notice that it doesn’t say China has an ambitious policy of using clean energy. Just that it has said it has an ambitious policy of profiting from our doing so, as Communists define profit, which is geopolitical not economic. Including getting a stranglehold on rare earths and related technologies that we will need to have power but they won’t. And making promises they have no intention of keeping in return for real concessions from us.

Actually even the frilly stuff is not just fandom. The Scientific American piece goes on and on about the incredible lengths they went to in order to produce energy from wind, solar and batteries in conditions legendarily hostile to such power sources (and everything else except Emperor Penguins), including specially shaped wind turbine blades whose “design reduces the surface area of the blade being pushed on by the wind”, aka deliberately inefficient, others made of carbon fiber that are also, again, “shorter than standard ones so as to reduce contact with the winds” and so forth. And it mocks the habitual use of diesel at Antarctic research stations:

“The main reason this is the case is simply that ‘they are used to using diesel,’ says Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley.”

UC Berkely being, we note not in passing, a place whose climate could scarely be less like that of Antarctica. But here’s the punchline. After blatting on endlessly about these wonderful renewables, the third-last sentence concedes that:

“The renewable system can currently produce 60 percent of the overall output of Qinling’s energy system when it’s running at full blast, with the remaining 40 percent coming from diesel. But Sun and his team are determined to raise that percentage – and to bring clean-energy systems to other Chinese polar bases as well.”

So it’s all hyper-expensive hype, with a diesel generator out back so they don’t freeze to death.