Remember when President Barack Obama was running around telling everyone how he’d convinced China to get serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions? A new report shows that Obama was easily duped.
Over the course of three years, Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to, he said, agree to “climate targets” (in 2014), “lay out additional actions” (in 2015), and sign the Paris Agreement (2016).
In typical Obama understatement, he declared that “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”
Of course, anyone who looked at what China was promising could see that it was a sucker’s bet. China said only that it would try to “stabilize” CO2 emissions by 2030, while the rest of the industrialized world dumped money and resources into “decarbonizing” their economies.
Worse, even before Obama made his boast it was clear that China’s state-controlled emissions data were unreliable. In late 2015 it came to light that the country had far more coal plants that it had admitted, and as a result had been emitting a billion tons more CO2 that it officially proclaimed. A report in Skeptical Science last year notes that CO2 emissions for China still “aren’t known with any accuracy.”
In other words, while Obama wanted the U.S. to actually cut emissions, neither he nor anyone else in the industrialized world knew what China was up to, other than what it claimed.
Now a new study shows that while China was telling Obama that it was taking bold steps on climate change, it was business as usual inside the Middle Kingdom.
In the past two years, China increased its energy production from coal by nearly 43 gigawatts, more than offsetting the decline in coal production in the rest of the world, Global Energy Monitor found. Just the coal plants now under construction in China and the ones that could be revived at any time would produce the same energy as the entire coal-generating capacity of the European Union.
“China’s recent growth is due to a brief but massive spree of project permitting that occurred from September 2014 to March 2016,” the Global Energy Monitor report found. Not that those years just happen to coincide with when Xi was promising Obama that it was serious about global warming.
China is also, the report says, busy financing coal plants in countries such as South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
“The continued growth of China’s coal fleet and consideration of plans to significantly raise the nation’s coal power cap show that while the country is often hailed as a clean energy leader, the momentum of coal power expansion has yet to be halted,” the report says.
Who could have possibly imagined that communist China wasn’t being sincere? Not Obama, obviously. But nor did anyone else baying for the Paris Agreement.
We’ve been pointing out in this space all along that the climate change alarmists are more interested in taking control of every aspect of our lives than they are preventing slight planetary warming. China was clearly trying to dupe a naïve Obama into squandering massive sums on expensive and unreliable “clean” energy while it busied itself building cheap “dirty” sources for itself.
Thankfully, President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement farce first chance he got.
In our view, the entire “clean energy” campaign is a waste of time and money. If climate change does happen, we can easily adapt to the changes. Even without advanced technology, humans have learned how to survive and thrive in the most inhospitable climates that already exist on earth.
And if the horror stories peddled by climate scientists and the environmentalists and the Greta Thunburgs of the world don’t come to pass – which is far more likely – we won’t have wasted trillions of dollars and impoverished millions in an attempt to “decarbonize” the economy.
— Written by John Merline
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Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
if you consider AGW real the actual solution would be to build as many coal power plants as possible to cool things down
[look up 18hundred and froze to death]
I think you give Obama too much credit for sincerity. He knew bloody well that the Chinese were lying, but didn’t care. It was all for show. The appearance of compliance from other nations was useful to help him make America do what he wanted, which in my opinion was to shrink. He always felt that America was too big for its britches, and needed to be taken down a few pegs.
This is no different than Medicare for all, it is totalitarianism. The ruling class wants and needs to have a way to control the masses. Reminds me of the Hunger Games
I don’t think Obama was alone in being duped. All across the Western world people really believed the Chinese were serious.
Not that I’m some kind of genius, but I knew it was just a con job because I’d spent time in China and dealt with Chinese businessmen. Their stock in trade is deceit. They almost see it as a national sport duping the white dogs. And apparently black dogs in Obama’s case.
Just add China to the list of nation’s that Obama let off the hook. He wasn’t duped. This was his plan, lower the standing of America and drive us toward Third World status. It almost worked.
Obama was/is a total jackazz. I’m sure he was a “Roads” scholar rather than the other type.
The media were the dupes. Willing dupes, that is.
The global warming cult isn’t concerned about China’s pollution and CO2 emissions because China is already communist.
Worldwide Marxism is their only goal.
This paragraph is the whole climate story.
In our view, the entire “clean energy” campaign is a waste of time and money. If climate change does happen, we can easily adapt to the changes. Even without advanced technology, humans have learned how to survive and thrive in the most inhospitable climates that already exist on earth.
Humans are already living just fine in minus 0 degrees to 100 plus degrees all over the world. Just bundle up, or sit in the shade!
There is no evidence of climate stasis on a global scale, over an appropriate time frame, anywhere in the climate record, it always changes.