China the elephant in climate change room

China has zero intention of embracing the delusional insanity that has enveloped the western elites.

People crossing a road on a polluted day in Beijing in 2020. Picture: AFP

I hesitate to reference Crikey — giving it, in the process, some seeming legitimacy by recognition and exposure in the sunlight of media reality and indeed the world of just basic above-ground sanity that it so desperately craves from its cellar-sewer padded cell.

But a piece by its Bernard Keane — someone who in the famous words of British writer Kitty Muggeridge has risen unspectacularly (my gratuitous addition) “without trace”; and shows he knows and bitterly resents it, in virtually every bilious sentence he excretes — so perfectly, exactly and totally captures the utter delusional dishonesty of the climate change hysterics, that it would be remiss of me to leave his spewings to the oblivion that is their due and their usual destination.

For Keane managed to write an entire piece about “Australia’s climate criminal status” — ah, nothing that the Keanes of padded cells of the mind like better, than to stew in self-hatred — by refusing to commit to much more savage 2030 emissions cuts, without writing at any point one five-letter word: China.

Here was Keane highlighting and enthusing and self-hating over the US of President ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden — again, I have to note the sobriquet is mine not Keane’s: that would require an intellectual honesty that eludes him — committing to 50-52 per cent cuts, the EU to 55 per cent, Japan 46 per cent, and so on.

“Our lack of a meaningful target is one thing … we are, along with the likes of Saudia (sic) Arabia and Russia, one of the world’s climate criminals,” he ranted and raged and spat from the depths of the Crikey cellar-sewer padded cell.

Surely, you would think, that even from Keane there were some missing words?

Climate criminals, the likes of Saudia (sic) Arabia and Russia … and … and … China?

Surely even a Keane, deep in that Crikey cellar-sewer padded cell, could not fail to notice, or smell, the carbon dioxide-belching elephant in the room: the said China?

China already emits nearly a third of the world’s emissions of CO2. What China does is not just the most important thing in relation to the — yes, fake, but let’s pretend it’s real — climate emergency, it’s the only thing that matters.

Not only is China not making the sort of commitments to cuts that Keane eulogised, it’s not even making the 26-28 per cent cuts commitment that gets Australia branded a climate criminal by the hallucinating Keane.

Indeed China was and continues to make a public commitment to increasing its CO2 emissions through the 2020s to that now, to the climate hysterics, new midnight on the “save the earth” clock, 2030.

Everybody was supposed to come to Sleepy Joe’s summit with bold new commitments — that are of course, fake and sheer fantasy and have not the remotest chance of being delivered and will only be approached if we turn every year of the 2020s into a replay of lockdown 2020.

Oh, how the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the useful climate idiots enthused about the cuts to fossil fuel use through 2020; with our pair of prime ministerial twittering twerps Kevin and Malcolm, hailing the end of coal-fired power generation in the UK.

Except of course it wasn’t the end; yes, you close down an economy, demand for power drops. But even then, when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, the power — from those useless sources that our ancestors stopped using when they discovered real power generation — don’t flow. And so you turn on the coal-generators; even in locked down Britain in summer.

China knows full well that reality; and it has zero intention of embracing the delusional insanity that has enveloped the western elites — and intellectual strait-jacketed cellar dwellers — like some seeping sleep and coma-inducing cloud of sci-fi invention.

Its 2015 “commitments” to the Fake Paris Accord were only to try to reduce its energy-use intensity by 65 per cent by 2030.

As it was intending to grow its economy by 100 to 130 per cent, that meant unambiguously and in clear sight — to those with some mean arithmetic ability; true a big ask to the average climate hysteridiot – a commitment to increase its emissions by something between only 30 to 50 per cent.

Further, the operative word in all this was try.

It wasn’t even making the fake commitments that every developed country — apart from Australia — was and continue to make and indeed double down on; and which only the US had any hope of meeting, thanks to President Trump not to Sleepy Joe, because of his embrace of lower CO2-emitting gas.

Think of this delusional insanity: Sleepy Joe has doubled the Obama-Trump CO2 cuts target and imposed the very anti-gas policies that will make even the previous lower target impossible to reach!

Well, what did China come up with at Sleepy Joe’s summit? Zero, zip, nada, nothing.

It’s still trying to peak its emissions by 2030; it’s still trailing the bone for the useful climate hysteridiots of net zero, but not in even 2050 but 2060. Right, of course, take it to the bank.

It’s now also pledged to “strictly control” coal-fired power plants in China’s five-year plan and “phase it down” over the following five years.

Let me translate for the useful hysteridiots.

China will keep building new coal-fired stations. It will keep closing the older, smaller, real pollution-emitting stations.

Its coal-fired generation will increase in net terms; it will keep increasing CO2 emissions, while cutting emissions of the real pollution that blights its cities, those dirty pieces of — real carbon, not CO2 — grit.

This to a useful hysteridiot like the Fin Review’s Chanticleer columnist Tony Boyd no doubt shows how China’s “commitment to carbon reduction (sic)” is the “personal crusade of President Xi Jinping”.

Sure, when he finds time between promoting civil rights for Uighurs and Hong Kongers and not building islands in the South China Sea.