CCP Proves ‘Climate’ Fight Not Really About Climate

A worker uses a torch to cut steel pipes near the coal-powered Datang International Zhangjiakou Power Station at Zhangjiakou, in China's northern Hebei Province on Nov. 12, 2021. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the ringleaders of the “climate change” bandwagon don’t truly believe the narrative they’re selling.

And it isn’t just because they jet around the world in private jets to lecture you about your car and your hamburgers.

In fact, if the people at the top bought into the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are really “pollution” producing a “climate crisis,” they'd be doing exactly the opposite of what they’re actually doing.

Examining climate policy and communist China proves the point.

Consider the United Nations’ Paris Agreement. Negotiated at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the global deal calls on national governments to make their own pledges about what they'll force on their populations to combat the alleged “climate crisis.”

Under the deal, the Obama administration unilaterally pledged to slash CO2 emissions in the United States by more than 25 percent by 2025. That was to be imposed on Americans through executive orders and federal regulations, to avoid involving Congress. Other Western governments made similar promises.

The Chinese communist regime, by contrast, was already emitting far more CO2 than the United States and now spews more than the entire Western world combined by far—and yet it pledged only to keep increasing its emissions for the next 15 years. Seriously.

In its submission to the U.N. (pdf), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agreed “to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.”

In other words, the regime proudly announced to the world that its CO2 output would continue to grow for at least 15 years, at which point nobody will even remember the Paris pledges.

When I asked members of the Chinese delegation for comment at the U.N. summit, instead of responding, they sent one of their minions to follow me around the conference and take pictures of me, something I promptly reported to U.N. security and the French police.

It’s a good thing for the CCP that nobody will remember its promises by 2030, because virtually every analyst who has looked at the regime’s coal-fired power plant construction binge has acknowledged there’s no way its emissions will “peak” by 2030. Communist promises have never been worth the paper they’re printed on anyway, as history has shown.

The CCP wasn’t kidding about increasing its emissions, though: Beijing is currently bringing more coal-fired power plants online just between now and 2025 than the United States has in total.

According to Global Energy Monitor’s February 2021 briefing (pdf), the CCP built up more than three times as much coal-power capacity as the rest of the world combined in 2020. And it already has about half of the world’s coal power capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor’s “Boom and Bust 2020: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline.”

China already emits more than twice as much CO2 as the United States, according to data from the Global Carbon Project. Its emissions are rising meteorically even as U.S. emissions and emissions from other Western nations continue to plunge.

In 2021, Americans released about 5 billion tons of CO2, while China released about 11.5 billion. If current trends continue, the CCP may release more CO2 than the rest of the world combined in the not-too-distant future.

Think about this. If one was truly concerned about CO2 emissions producing “climate hell,” as world leaders claimed at the latest U.N. “climate” summit in Egypt, they'd be panicking, not celebrating.

Moving Production

Again, all of the production being moved out of the West and into China will result in vastly more CO2 entering the atmosphere than if that production had remained in the United States, Canada, or Europe.

And yet, Western governments, tax-funded climate activists, U.N. leaders, and their media allies all celebrated and continue to celebrate the Paris Agreement and subsequent follow-ups as a huge success in saving the climate.

Perhaps Donald Trump was on to something in 2012 when he wrote on Twitter, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

That’s exactly what happened, of course, as electricity rates got pushed higher and higher over time. In 1975, electricity was averaging around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, helping U.S. industry remain competitive globally. By 2010, thanks in part to President Barack Obama’s policies, it had tripled. And by 2021, it was approaching 15 cents.

For perspective, electricity prices in China are about half that.

There are many reasons for the shifting of production from the United States to China—many of them directly related to U.S. policy—but one key factor has been the cost of energy.

Yet, higher energy prices were openly touted as a policy objective by Obama. As he made clear in a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Later that year, he expressed similar sentiments as gas prices soared to around $4, saying only that he would’ve “preferred” a “gradual adjustment” instead.

Faced with higher labor costs and a tougher regulatory environment, American companies and entrepreneurs were already struggling to keep production in the United States amid a rigged global trading regime benefiting the CCP at America’s expense.

Soaring energy costs in many cases pushed firms over the edge, forcing them to shift production to China or shut down in the face of Chinese competition.

Again, if you truly believe CO2 is pollution, the worst possible outcome of “climate” negotiations would be to transfer even more production to China, where CO2 emissions per unit of economic production are massively higher.

But this is precisely the result of the much-celebrated U.N. “climate” process.

The shift into so-called “renewable energy” being engineered by the Biden administration and federal policymakers has been and will continue to be a huge boon to the CCP–and not just because it will force prices higher while making the U.S. energy grid more unstable.

Almost 80 percent of solar cells produced in 2019 were made in China, according to Bloomberg data (pdf). The CCP dominates production in the wind sector and battery industries as well. It also controls the supply chain for rare-earth materials needed to produce all of these “green energy” products.

The U.S. government, for its part, is offering massive subsidies to these CCP-dominated industrial sectors while forcing Americans into dependence on them through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and other policies. How this is supposed to help the environment is never made clear.

For some perspective on the economic carnage inflicted on America by Obama’s Paris scheme, which he claimed was an “executive agreement” and thus not subject to Senate ratification as required by the Constitution, The Heritage Foundation crunched the numbers in a 2016 study.

Among other findings, the conservative-leaning think tank said Obama’s Paris pledges would increase electricity costs for a family of four between 13 and 20 percent annually while vaporizing almost half a million jobs, including around 200,000 in manufacturing.

That damage translates to about $20,000 in lost income for American families by 2035 and a reduction in GDP of over $2.5 trillion.

Who Benefits?

Who benefits from all this? Certainly not the “climate.” Again, shipping U.S. industry to China will result in more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less. And in any case, based on the U.N.’s own debunked “models,” complete elimination of all U.S. CO2 emissions would result in virtually no reduction in global temperatures.

According to a peer-reviewed paper by Bjorn Lomborg published in the journal Global Policy, even if all the significant pledges made in Paris were fulfilled, global temperatures would be just 0.05 degrees C (0.086 degrees F) cooler by 2100—a statistically insignificant rounding error.

The big winner, of course, was the CCP, which has been laughing all the way to the bank as it absorbs the factories, jobs, and wealth production that the United States and other Western authorities are shutting down to “save the climate.”

This appears to be deliberate, as statements by leading officials in the Obama administration and the U.N. have made clear.

Obama’s “science czar” John Holdren openly advocated a deindustrialization of the United States in his 1973 book “Human Ecology.”

“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology.”

Then consider the seemingly bizarre comments made by then-Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres.

Speaking to Bloomberg a few months after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his unsettling admiration for the CCP, Figueres claimed that the regime in Beijing—overseeing about one-third of global CO2 output—was “doing it right” on climate policy.

In separate comments, while pushing for major climate policies, Figueres also suggested the goal of “climate” policy was really economic transformation.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said on Feb. 4, 2015.

Five years before those comments, one of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s top officials, Ottmar Edenhofer, revealed a similar agenda in comments to Germany’s NZZ Online.

“One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” he said. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Wealth redistribution? Changing the economic model of the world? “De-developing” the United States? And here Americans are being told this is about “saving the climate.”

Remember, too, that when Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, climate alarmists from around the world declared that Beijing was the new global “leader” of the effort to save the climate—the same regime that’s overseeing the most CO2 emissions, building coal plants faster than can be counted, and promising to keep increasing its CO2 emissions until 2030.

If this is really about saving the climate from CO2, how can the CCP be the new leader? It’s beyond absurd.

Despite all this, the Biden administration continues to intensify “cooperation” on “climate action” and the Paris Agreement with Beijing, no doubt causing amusement and joy among members of the CCP’s Politburo.

It’s not just the Chinese regime that benefits. In fact, congressional researchers discovered that state-backed Russian energy interests were funding U.S. “green” groups opposed to U.S. energy via a shell company in Bermuda called Klein Ltd.

The regime in Venezuela, too, is laughing all the way to the bank as the Biden administration sabotages U.S. energy and begs the Maduro dictatorship to send oil to America.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge the CO2 emissions of China or anyone else. In fact, many scientists have told me that more of this “gas of life” would be enormously beneficial for the planet and humanity.

Retired Princeton physics professor Dr. William Happer, who served as Trump’s climate adviser, told me years ago at a climate conference we both spoke at that the planet needed more CO2 and that plants were designed to live in an atmosphere with quite a bit more CO2 than the planet currently has.

Plus, human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of 1 percent of all the so-called “greenhouse gases” present naturally in the atmosphere.

To summarize, if one truly believes that CO2 is bad for the climate, shipping U.S. production and industry to China is the worst possible way to deal with it. Logically, then, the policymakers behind this must have an ulterior motive.

Of course, the CCP loves the Paris deal: They do nothing but build more coal plants to power the industries and factories fleeing America for China as the U.S. government forces the United States to commit economic suicide.

This isn’t just an economic or “climate” issue, either. As the United States is “de-developed,” the economic destruction produces a major threat to national security. A strong military can’t be funded without a strong economy, obviously.

It’s time for lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to shut down the administration’s “climate” policies that do nothing but expand CCP CO2 emissions and harm the United States.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.