China the climate hero in La-La Land

On what planet in which solar system – ours or in a galaxy, far, far away – could China be considered a Climate Change Hero?

ON just exactly what planet in which solar system – ours or in a galaxy, far, far away – could China be considered a Climate Change Hero?

Oh yes, it must be that very same planet on which the sainted Jacinda Ardern is considered a Climate Pariah.

For you see, it wasn’t only our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who got specifically snubbed by not being invited to grandstand at the big Climate Conference earlier this month.

The NZ Prime Minister was similarly snubbed, despite ticking so many – maybe even all – of the 2020 “Woke” boxes.

Yet China’s President, Xi Jinping, was given centre stage – virtually speaking of course – for promising to slash its CO2 emissions by a thumping 65 per cent by 2030.

Take that, you climate pussy ScoMo; you’ll have to promise – well, not so much “better” but – more punishingly pointless CO2 cuts to get your invite to grandstand next year.

Well, actually, what sounded impressive, like everything – and I mean everything – in and about climate change, the endless conferences, the targets, the never-never promises, was all just complete crap.

NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

What China actually committed to – and even then, only maybe – achieve, was an only slightly less massive increase in its CO2 emissions out to 2030 than it was already heading for and indeed has already locked in right now. What China said it would “aim for” is to cut CO2 emissions by 65 per cent “per unit of GDP” by 2030 on the 2005 levels.

Well, China has already increased its GDP by more than 200 per cent since 2005.

If it grows by a – for it – relatively modest 6 per cent a year through the 2020s, GDP in 2030 will be 450 per cent bigger than in 2005.

If it grows by a – again, for it – near recessionary 5 per cent a year, GDP in 2030 will still be at least 380 per cent bigger than it was in 2005.

As schoolkids used to be taught when they were taught weird things like, you know, arithmetic (and before central banks discovered the Magic Pudding of zero interest rates), that’s the power of compound interest.

So in effect, China is promising to lift its CO2 emissions in 2030 by between 70 per cent (5 per cent GDP growth from now) and 90 per cent (6 per cent GDP growth) over 2005.

And for that China – which is already the biggest CO2 emitter by far at around one third of all global emissions – is hailed as “saving the planet’; while ScoMo and Australia are vilified for promising a real cut of 26-28 per cent by 2030 and NZ and the sainted Jacinda are, well, just ignored.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo: Noel Celis/AFP

After all, China has the money – spelt b-e-l-t and r-o-a-d, and including for (don’t mention the planet-saving war) coal-fired power stations.

That buys a lot of grandstanding at freebie-feasting UN conferences.

The way China gets hailed for condemning the planet to the very thing that the Paris Climate Accord was supposed to save it from is even more exquisitely ironic in this year of the virus.

For it seems that China’s CO2 emissions – the ones we get already each year and the even much bigger ones to come, every year out to 2030 and then beyond – are the equivalent of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Just as the protesters “couldn’t” spread the virus, unlike people fishing or on the beach, so China’s CO2 emissions miraculously don’t warm the planet. Gee, we’re lucky aren’t we?

That’s unlike a certain former finance minister, who on the measure of all this, has got zero chance of emitting his personal CO2 emissions in Paris over the next few years, in that cushy tax-free OECD job. Spending taxpayer money to pursue the job was as utterly pointless as China’s climate promises.