Secret Chinese campaign poses a threat to global net zero efforts
A secret Chinese campaign to infiltrate global environmental bodies with their own agenda threatens united efforts to move to net zero.
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A secret Chinese campaign to infiltrate global environmental bodies, including those associated with the UN, is threatening global efforts to move to net zero.
Two years after the world watched as China manipulated the World Health Organisation to promote its narrative about the pandemic, evidence is mounting that Beijing is also working to reshape the way the world regulates the environment to suit its own ends.
At the same time, China is also continuing to build coal fired power plants as energy shortages bite – and quietly easing its previous bans on using Australian coal.
Analysis by the free market Institute of Public Affairs think tank found that China operates 57 coal fired power stations for every one operated in Australia. Additionally China is bingeing on new coal fired power plants, with 92 more plants under construction and over 100 more in pre-construction phases.
As world leaders prepare to meet in Scotland for the COP26 climate summit, China’s energy agency has indicated that it will make supply stability its key priority. Critically, Chinese supremo Xi Jinping is set to snub the summit.
Experts say there is a broader program to supplant Western views of human rights, health, individual rights, and the environment with narratives favourable to the Chinese Communist Party.
“At a basic level, rather than offer a unique perspective on the environment, China wants to be seen as a leader of environmental issues, irrespective of its halting performance,” says American researcher Alexander Sullivan.
An adjunct fellow at the Centre for a New American Security in Washington, DC, Sullivan says that China is looking to become the predominant player in the world of global environmental governance, just as it is looking to supplant the US as the dominant voice in other parts of the world system.
And that, he warns, comes with a potentially heavy price.
“It’s forward-leaning promises on climate change need to be seen alongside the other philosophies it pushes in the international system: Namely, that the state’s interests predominate over those of individuals or vulnerable minorities – the real people who, after all, are most vulnerable to our changing climate.”
Just as with the way China hijacked the World Health Organisation to do its bidding at the start of the pandemic, Beijing’s activities in trying to manipulate global environmental organisations will come with a potentially very heavy price.
Most Australians likely first became aware of the international horse trading that takes place behind the scenes of environmental protection agencies more than a decade ago, when Japan was accused of using its foreign aid budget to buy support on the International Whaling Commission.
But experts say that Tokyo’s efforts were small beer compared to moves by China to take over global governance organisations to shape international regulations to its benefit while remaining one of the world’s leading polluters.
In July, when Australia narrowly avoided an attempt by the China-chaired UNESCO world heritage organisation to classify the Great Barrier Reef as endangered, many believed that the push to condemn our environmental stewardship was being engineered, hypocritically, by Beijing.
“As China gets more and more into these committees, they use their well-practised consensus-based approach to drive their own agenda,” one insider says.
“They’ll say they will make a declaration and push through to where they want to go – they get more and more spots in committee structures, and then use them to distract everyone and say, ‘don’t look here, look there’.” The “look there” is the important bit, he says, as China has an increasing reputation for running global environmental committees very smoothly, but with the ultimate aim of “hijacking” their outcomes.
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Originally published as Secret Chinese campaign poses a threat to global net zero efforts
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