China plays us on a carbon fiddle

China is by far the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and the truth is it has zero commitment to “carbon reduction”.

This video grab of China's President Xi Jinping taken on January 25, 2021, from the website of the World Economic Forum. Picture (WEF/ AFP)

ON just exactly what planet in which universe does China suddenly become the “good guy on the climate change block”?

We were able to read Wednesday a heartwarming utter fairytale in the Fin Review — the one paper in the Nine “Married At First Sight” Group’s stable of broadloids formerly with pretensions to be concerned with facts and reality.

The fairytale was of how China’s “commitment to carbon reduction (sic)” was the “personal crusade of President Xi Jinping”.

Oh right, just like civil rights for Uighurs and not claiming and indeed not building islands in the South China Sea are also Xi’s personal crusades — when of course he finds time between personally closing coal-fired power stations.

The truth is China has zero commitment to “carbon reduction” — more accurately titled of course, carbon dioxide emissions.

China is by far the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 — producing something like one third of all global emissions. It has increased its emissions every year this century and it fully intends to keep increasing its emissions every year through at least the 2020s.

Indeed, under its supposed “commitments” to the Fake Paris Climate Accord it has only committed to try to have its CO2 emissions peak — to stress, to peak — in 2030, after increasing through the 2020s. It’s “promised” to, again, only try to reduce emissions relative to the size of its economy.

In 2015 it intended to grow its economy by between 100 and 130 per cent out to 2030, but it would try to increase emissions by “only” between something like 30 to 80 per cent.

That’s to say, and it needs to be spelt out and emphasised, it was actually and openly promising to increase them; promising further only to try to keep the increase lower than it would otherwise have been.

A Chinese man wears a protective mask as he stands near the CCTV building in fog and pollution during rush hour in the central business district on February 13, 2020 in Beijing. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Critically, the operative word for both “promises” was try; unlike the western industrial countries it was not even making fake promises to definitely slow the increase.

The really surprising thing about China’s commitments is that it didn’t make such fake promises.

Why not “promise” to cut total emissions by 20 per cent by 2030? Why not promise a 50 per cent cut?

And then when you get to 2030 and it hasn’t happened, oh, sorry? What would a weakened west do? Berate it for being so naughty? All China has done is move more recently in exactly that “promise anything to gull the useful idiots” direction.

So it’s more inclined to make flowery statements about reducing emissions — “crusades” even, for the more idiot of the useful idiots, and there are zillions of them in the developed countries — while building more and more coal-fired power stations.

All last year the drum beat among those useful idiots was the demand Australia commit to “net zero by 2050”.

Now that’s become too “unambitious”. Now the growing demand is that we commit to cutting emissions by 50 per cent by 2030: impossible, unless we turn every year into a replay of locked-down 2020.

This is supposed to be what US President Biden is going to demand all the major countries — excluding the only one that matters — commit to at his special summit this weekend.

The fact that this will be coming “from” a president who on a good day can remember what day it is, might be incidental.

But as he likes to say — it’s probably the one thing he can most easily remember — “come on, man!”; it’s somewhere between meaningless and an utterly self-destructive charade, unless China is locked into to an iron-clad similar commitment.

And even such a commitment wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on; even if it were written in Mandarin.

Originally published as China plays us on a carbon fiddle