Reality check needed on US-China climate change deal

THE age of miracles is not over. Apparently, carbon dioxide emitted to industrialise is different from yours and mine.

THE, ahem, age of miracles is not over. Apparently, carbon dioxide emitted to industrialise is, F. Scott Fitzgerald style, different from yours and mine. Rather than contributing to climate change, this industrialising form of CO2 actually fights it.

Well, at least that’s the claim of Fairfax’s Age newspaper. I quote the paper’s climate theology — sorry, economics — editor, Peter Martin, from Tuesday.

“China is lifting its (CO2) emissions because it is rapidly industrialising,” Martin instructed Treasurer Joe Hockey. This came after Martin had asserted: “China is getting on with tackling climate change.”

There is only one way of reconciling those two sentences: increased CO2 emissions that come from “industrialising” miraculously tackle rather than cause climate change.

Well, there is another way. As I wrote last week, have we seen a more perfect union of stupidity and dishonesty, hypocrisy and hysteria than the global warming cause and its legions of true unthinking believers?

The Age and to a lesser extent its sibling The Sydney Morning Herald spent all week trying desperately to prove the accuracy of my assertion — centred on, Martin-style, completely inverting the plain and undeniable, embarrassing and depressing (to a believer) truth of the so-called China-US climate deal.

You wouldn’t believe you could make this stuff up if The Age wasn’t doing it every day. Their Adam Morton — who, formerly as environment editor, has probably written more of that stuff than most of his colleagues — actually kicked off his effusive praise of the deal with this:

That the first thing you needed to know about the climate change deal was: “ignore the numbers”. Forget facts, bask in the intent.

Perhaps because the single tangible ‘‘commitment’’ came from China, as former Queensland Labor treasurer Keith DeLacy captured it so succinctly in these pages also on Tuesday.

In a historic press conference with US President Obama, DeLacy wrote, Chinese President Xi committed China to “increase its CO2 emissions until 2030”.

After that date it might stop increasing them; after that date it might — although, most unlikely — even start to cut them. But the one thing it is going to do between now and 2030 is increase them.

As even someone like Martin understands, China’s economic growth comes first and second. Cutting real pollution — the dirty bits of grit from old coal-fired power stations — might sneak into the third priority position.

That will be achieved not by cutting coal-fired power generation, but by closing the old plants and replacing them with the clean ones that provide most of the electricity in the developed world. That pump out CO2 but not the bits of grit.

This was very clearly underscored by Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the government’s top economic-planning body.

Speaking at a press conference, our sister paper The Wall Street Journal reported, Xei said that China’s ability to cap carbon emissions by 2030 would depend on the pace of economic growth.

Quite. And as both Hockey and Prime Minister Tony Abbott have pointed out, 16 years is a long, long time into the future. It would be touching, if it wasn’t so pathetic, the faith believers like Martin and his fellow climate Kool-Aid drinkers place in such a vague ‘‘promise’’.

What made both the climate deal and the effusive praise of it so silly and yet also so stark was the exactly different — real and tangible and almost simultaneous — free trade deal between China and Australia.

Obama went to Beijing as a lame duck president — after his policies were utterly and embarrassingly rejected in the midterm elections, totally unable to commit the US to anything.

He left Beijing to wing south as a wood-duck as well — prepared to ‘‘commit’’, at least on paper, the US to hurt its economy in return for that manana promise from China.

A Fairfax-ABC media that was doing the most basic journalism should not have failed to draw the contrast with the embarrassment of that and the resounding success of the FTA Australia had negotiated — on a clear win-win basis — with China.

Obama came to Australia to lecture us on global warming after doing a deal that would actually guarantee it happening — that’s if ‘‘you believe’’.

Xi followed him with a deal of real substance and nary a word on that. True, Xi behaved like a true diplomat: he didn’t gloat over how he’d, metaphorically speaking, sold Obama a bill of goods.

Or proverbial Florida underwater real estate, going further underwater, we presume.

As for bill of goods, Fairfax will ‘‘buy’’ them from anyone.

They bought a beauty from serial pest and self-promoter Stephen Mayne, who simply made up a claim that Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal had voted his shares in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp — publisher of this paper — against Murdoch.

Despite actually quoting a specific denial from an Alwaleed spokesman that “we never vote against our partner Mr Murdoch”, The Age knew better.

Yes, but, “the numbers speak more loudly than his words,” The Age immediately added. Actually, the numbers speak no such thing.