Peter Burrows
PA Pundits – International
There was an article in the Guardian last April that typifies the reporting, or rather non-reporting, about China’s use of coal: “China-ramps-up-coal-power-despite-carbon-neutral-pledges – local governments approved more coal power in the first three months of 2023 than all of 2021.”
The article bends over backwards to avoid criticizing China, noting that in 2020 China’s Xi Jinping had pledged that China would be carbon neutral by 2060, as if a goal that far out was meaningful given the climate change “crisis”. Furthermore, burning more coal is OK for China because as the last sentence informs us, “last year Xi said that coal will remain a mainstay of China’s energy mix that ‘would be hard to change in the short term’”.
Nowhere in the article do we learn that China and GE have teamed up and have spent a lot of time and money designing more efficient coal burning generation plants. Sounds like long-term planning to me, given new plants will have an operating life of at least 50 years.
papundits.wordpress.com/2021/05/29/coal-fired-power-dying-not-so-fast-part-one-introduction/
Also, nowhere in the article does it mention that new coal-fired generation plants are going up all over the world, by the hundreds. Add in China, which has 2,363 coal-fired power plants and is building 1,171 more, and it’s by the thousands.
papundits.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/michael-mann-you-cannot-be-serious/
Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that China’s coal consumption continues to grow rapidly. A few years ago, they were burning less than 4 billion metric tons a year and now they’re up to five billion metric tons. They burn more coal than the rest of the world combined, and their CO2 emissions are greater than the rest of the developed world combined.
energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-trends-june-snapshot/
www.iea.org/reports/coal-information-overview/consumption
rhg.com/research/chinas-emissions-surpass-developed-countries
Speaking of the rest of the world, see if you can detect any cut in CO2 emissions that resulted from the Kyoto Protocol treaty of 1992, or the Paris Agreement of 2015. (The Keeling Curve)
The bottom line is that unless China reduces its CO2 emissions there is no chance that atmospheric CO2 levels will decrease. Add in India, where coal consumption is expected to increase by over 500 million metric tons in the next few years, and the CO2 Crusade is obviously a fool’s errand.
Anyone brave enough to take the Chinese to task about this will be confronted with the argument that China’s CO2 PER CAPITA emissions are only half those of the US. When/if China’s emissions per capita equal that of the US, they will then say that what really counts is the CUMULATIVE amount of CO2 for capita put into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Sigh.
In addition, anybody who would criticize the Chinese about their CO2 emissions can count on being called a horrid-dirty-bastard-racist-Gweilo-imperialist-oppressor, a charge that would have our “Climate Czar”, John Kerry, on his knees tearfully begging forgiveness.
There are three reasons why China will be impervious to any criticism about their CO2 emissions:
- Even if the threat of CO2/Global warming is real, there are millions of Chinese who don’t have enough electricity to plug in a microwave oven, let alone a flat-screen TV or an electric vehicle. These people need electricity, and the cheapest way to get them electricity is to build coal-fired plants. If you think those people give a damn if Manhattan is under five feet of water, then I have a bridge to sell you, happens to be near to the soon-to-be-submerged Manhattan.
- Even if the threat of CO2/Global warming is real, renewable energy sources will do nothing to solve the problem and will only ruin the economies that try to substitute them for reliable, year around, 24/7, sources. China is only too happy to help the Western nations destroy their economies. This will make China’s manufacturing the cheapest and most dominant in the world, and of course, that means their military will also be the most dominant in the world. China is building coal plants and tearing down mosques, and we’re doing just the opposite. This is not going to end well for us unless we change our ways. Don’t expect China to change its ways.
- The Chinese do not accept the ‘science’ that CO2 drives climate change. I detailed why in an article I wrote two years ago, “China’s Climate Con, Part 2”, reprinted below. (Anybody interested can read part one at: https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/863)
China’s Climate Con, Part 2 – 6/17/21
Why is China building military bases on coral reefs in the South China Sea? Don’t they know that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is going to inundate entire island nations, not just coral reefs? Are they crazy?
They probably didn’t see this 2011 article from Scientific American that details a grim sea-rise scenario, which today reads more like a Grimm scenario, as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-nations-most-risk-climate-change/
That same year, a special edition of the Chinese Science Bulletin (October 2011) had eight articles about a climate project begun in 2009: “Research on tree-ring and millennium climate change in China.” The introductory editorial noted that “research on global climate change has been at the frontier of contemporary sciences”. That, and “whether the greenhouse effect produced by human activities is a major factor responsible for modern global warming”.
The most important conclusions of the Chinese study were: (1) that temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (950 AD to 1250 AD) were “comparable to those in the current warm period over China”, and (2) that “the effect of solar activity on climate cannot be neglected in any period of the millennium”.
Both conclusions were at odds with the idea that carbon dioxide, CO2, is the driving force behind climate change. Most importantly, the Chinese not only confirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period, MWP, they determined that temperatures in that 300-year period a millennium ago were as warm as today’s.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Since the MWP was not caused by increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, perhaps the same is true today. Thus, both the political establishment and the scientific establishment are desperate to eliminate the MWP. It reminds me of the old Soviet Union rewriting history by air-brushing out-of-favor people from official photos. Goodby Trotsky.
The poster-child of the effort to eliminate the MWP is climatologist Michael Mann. In 1999 Mann published a study of the climate history of the Northern Hemisphere over the last 1000 years. That study was both a political and scientific sensation because it purported to show that the MWP – drum roll, please – NEVER EXISTED!!
Mann became an instant celebrity. His graph of temperature changes since 1000 AD was reproduced five times in the UN’s 2001 report on global warming. This was the now-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, that showed flat temperatures for 900 years and then a sharp upward trend in the last 100 years or so, thus resembling a hockey stick.
If you are unfamiliar with the ongoing controversy surrounding Mann’s research, you can Google up thousands of pages of material in only a minute or so. After over 20 years, the fact that the ‘hockey stick’ is still controversial is proof of a hopelessly politicized scientific establishment, at least in the US.
Not in China, however. The 2009 tree-ring study was only one of many that disputes the general CO2 hypothesis. A study detailed in Chinese Science Bulletin 58 in 2013 showed that sediment cores from two lakes on the Tibetan Plateau “clearly identified” the MWP and the Little Ice Age of AD 1350–1850, which had also failed to show up in Mann’s ‘hockey stick’.
Chinese Science Bulletin 59 published in 2014 detailed the results of studies on giant clam shells collected from the South China Sea that showed sea surface temperatures in AD 990 and AD 50 averaged .8C to 1.4C degrees HIGHER than sea surface temperatures in 1994–2005. The researchers said their “well-calibrated high resolution” findings “did not agree with the results of the IPCC fourth report, which suggested that the recent decades were the warmest in at least the past 1,300 years”.
The IPCC is the UN’s “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” and is essentially a political body tasked with proving that CO2 is causing global warming. Chinese research does not support that hypothesis, and while there is plenty of other research that also questions the CO2-climate connection, China’s is the most unassailable.
This is because, rightly or wrongly, research done by a government has instant credibility with leftists, and leftists dominate climate science. Also, China has no financial interest in promoting the use of fossil fuels. In fact, China is a heavy importer of coal and petroleum and can’t be accused of being paid off by the Koch brothers, or some such nonsense.
Thus, there has been little or no criticism of China’s climate research in the leftist-dominated media. There hasn’t been any publicizing of it either, which is a disgrace. The politicization of Western science means that the Chinese are only a generation or two from world domination. Maybe India and Japan can hold them at bay, but certainly not any nation that teaches “white math”.
China won’t be burdened with such stupidity. Chinese science has persuaded Chinese leaders, most of whom have technical educations, that the Western CO2 climate-change hype is, in a word, bullshit. Hence, the coral reef build-outs, the continued push to build new coal-fired generating plants, both domestically and abroad, and lip-service-only climate diplomacy.
If you think they are making us look like fools, you’re wrong: We ARE fools.
Sources:
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N3/C3.php
notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/evidence-of-mwp-in-china/
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V16/N34/C2.php
www.skeptical-science.com/science/the-medieval-warm-period-myth/
judithcurry.com/2021/06/09/death-spiral-of-american-academia/
gineersnow.com/leadership/chinese-government-dominated-scientists-engineers
Reprinted from PA Pundits – International.