China’s CO2 emissions are shooting to the moon.
Several studies released by the Global Carbon Project say worldwide carbon emissions are projected to jump about 2 percent this year after staying flat for three years, according to preliminary estimates.
The culprit, the data show, is China, which has kept its emissions in check in recent years but now shows a massive rise in pollution. Under the Paris pact, China agreed to cap its emissions by 2030, meaning it is still free to increase pollution.
China’s uptick this year, after a 1 percent drop in 2015 and flat emissions last year, is largely a result of the country’s increased use of fossil fuels.
This is very bad news if you believe in the man-made global warming fairy.
But it’s great news if you’re Donald Trump. It means that his decision to pull out of the UN Paris Accord is vindicated – and for all the reasons he gave.
Here is the key section from the President’s Rose Garden speech in June this year when he announced the U.S. withdrawal.
For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years — 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us. India makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries. There are many other examples. But the bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States.
Further, while the current agreement effectively blocks the development of clean coal in America — which it does, and the mines are starting to open up. We’re having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of. For many, many years, that hasn’t happened. They asked me if I’d go. I’m going to try.
China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it: India can double their coal production. We’re supposed to get rid of ours. Even Europe is allowed to continue construction of coal plants.
Exactly. The Paris Accord was a bad deal for the U.S. It would have needlessly handled a huge competitive advantage to economies like India and China, while doing next to nothing – actually, let’s be honest, nothing – to combat climate change.
Trump would have been mad to ratify it. So he didn’t.
China’s contempt for the West’s ludicrous CO2 emissions reductions targets has long been an open secret.
As we reported in 2015 in this Breitbart article titled China Shows How Much It Cares About Emissions Targets – With A Single Upraised Finger – China has always prioritized industrial growth above pointless sacrifices to imaginary green sky fairies. Sure it will sign treaties like the Paris Accord if it keeps the dumb gweilo happy. But nobody in China seriously believes in man-made global warming – why would they when all the evidence says otherwise? – so it’s not like they have any intention of acting on it.
The only surprising part of this story is that anyone, anywhere, is gullible enough to believe that China’s CO2 emissions increase is a surprise.
Yet this, astonishingly, is the game they’ve all been playing at the Bonn UN Climate Conference this week. The U.S. delegation – the only one to tell the truth about the ongoing global need to burn fossil fuels – has been treated as a pariah, a rogue state akin to Syria or North Korea or worse. While all of the other countries have been applauding themselves for their pretend good intentions.
The utter hypocrisy on display at Bonn is neatly summarised in this commentary by Rupert Darwall.
The story of this climate conference should be Germany’s epic climate fail. Already the German government has admitted that it will overshoot its 2020 emissions-reduction target by 12.5 percent (an estimate since raised to 25 percent) and that it is likely to miss its 2040 target by an even larger amount. Apart from a few isolated protesters outside the conference hall, you wouldn’t know that a few miles from Bonn, a forest is being dug up to make way for a lignite-coal mine. Thanks to Germany’s reliance on lignite and its low heat-energy content, German power-station emissions increased by 17.2 million metric tons between 1999 and 2012. Over the same period, American power-station emissions cut theirs by nearly ten times that amount — 170.1 million tons.
Would Germany be put in the climate stocks and pelted with rotting fruit? Not a bit of it. Greenpeace activists awarded Germany its “Fossil of the Day” award and promise a “thunderclap” when Angela Merkel speaks tomorrow. Climate conferences are exercises in organized hypocrisy, and this one was hardly going to turn on the biggest climate hypocrite of all. Instead it would be the United States. While delegates spent their time drafting mind-numbing rules to monitor the Paris agreement, the U.S. delegation provided the focus of the drama at a side meeting yesterday evening, in a climate version of George Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate. It had been preceded by Democratic governors Jay Inslee (Wash.) and Kate Brown (Ore.) denouncing President Trump for the crime of climate denialism, pledging to phase out coal — it helps being in the Pacific Northwest, where rainfall is plentiful, which makes hydropower a natural — and boost renewables.
So, to recap, the U.S. – which has one of the best CO2-emissions-reduction track records in the world – is being held up as the bad guy, while the countries busily increasing their CO2 emissions, including number one culprit China (now responsible for around 30 per cent of the world’s total emissions) get a free pass.
Those criticizing Trump’s environmental policies are a bunch of lying, cheating hypocrites who don’t have a leg to stand on. Trump should go his own sweet way – and reap the benefits for the U.S.