China is a tyrannical regime with a totalitarian ideology bent on conquering us, and they are rapidly developing the capacity to do so. But don’t worry, our chattering classes have decided to ignore it… unlike us. The Economist breezily says “Don’t fret over China’s new climate targets” which are noticeably less onerous and economy-crippling than, say, those of western governments. Those same governments that, with the partial exception of the one in Washington, are also weirdly willing to embed Chinese technology in their key cybersystems, including for “green” reasons. Like that of South Korea, which just had an exploding lithium battery and resulting massive scary fire (something we do worry about and they don’t seem to) shut down a data centre and with it hundreds of government systems. Despite online rumours there seems to be no evidence that the PRC was involved in manufacturing these particular batteries but Chinese-made ones are in remarkably wide use in the West as is Chinese-made telecommunications equipment often with perfectly innocent “kill switches” hidden in it. But there’s nothing to see here, folks. And anyway the smoke is too thick to see it.
According to The Economist:
“Countries were meant to submit new, more ambitious climate targets to the UN this week. China’s plan, announced before the general assembly in New York on Wednesday, was watched predictably closely. The country’s emissions matter—a lot. In recent years China has single-handedly pumped out roughly a third of the world’s total carbon dioxide and three times as much as America.”
Wait, what? So can we fret now? Heck no:
“The main promise made by President Xi Jinping was to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 7-10% by 2035, relative to an as-yet undefined ‘peak’. Reactions were mixed. On one hand, this is paltry compared with the 20% cut from 2025 that analysts reckon China must make in the next decade to prevent global temperatures from rising beyond 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century—and thereby not completely scupper the goals of the Paris agreement. But this is the first time that the country has ever committed to reducing its output of CO2.”
Oh dear. And here people like you have been calling it a climate leader for years.
And still are. According to Canada’s version of the People’s Daily, the CBC, China leads the way:
“Why the world is watching as China pledges emissions cuts/ China, the world’s largest polluter, just made a historic move: for the first time, the country is pledging actual cuts to its greenhouse gas emissions. CBC’s Johanna Wagstaffe breaks down what this means for global climate action and how it compares to the U.S. and Canada.”
Basically they rock and we stink and so does Trump. Though speaking of oh dear, and of fretting, China also has a goal of being able to conquer Taiwan by 2027, and it is cranking up its naval construction program, the heavy industry needed for it, and the coal plants needed to power that industry. Can we worry now?
The Economist doesn’t seem to think so:
“Perhaps more concrete information about China’s intentions can be gleaned from looking at what it is actually doing. As my colleague Gabriel Crossley points out, the country’s clean-energy capacity is now expanding so rapidly that in the first half of this year more than twice as much solar power was added to its grid than in the rest of the world combined. China blasted past its wind-and-solar targets for 2030 by 2024, just four years after setting them. It seems even more likely to overdeliver on the pledges it made to the UN, which included 30% of energy coming from clean sources by 2035. Its economy increasingly depends on the sector: last year 10% of China’s GDP came from solar power, electric vehicles and batteries.”
On the subject of what it’s actually doing, we might point to its use of coal or its actual emissions. Or its military and its revanchist foreign policy. Instead The Economist piece (and you knew it would) went on to rubbish Donald Trump for making inaccurate statements about energy, which to be fair he did, as well as making its own:
“China, which produces roughly 80% of the world’s solar cells and 60% of its wind turbines, is largely responsible for the fact that solar and wind are now the cheapest way to add energy generation in almost every country.”
And then it wrapped up smugly:
“China’s climate ambitions can be seen more in its actions than its words. America’s are now much harder to see in either.”
So the fact that it isn’t even promising to do anything remotely like what they think it should is proof that it is determined to do so.
See why we’re worried?
