From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
April 22, 2021 / Francis Menton
It’s Earth Day again. The first such day was 51 years ago, April 22, 1970.
Since that first day, Earth Day has been an annual opportunity for hypocritical socialist-minded apocalyptists to make prophecies about an impending environmental fate. Here, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is a large list of roughly 50 predictions that have been made since the late 1960s and have since been proven wrong. Interestingly, those from the time of Earth’s first day were mostly related to overpopulation, famine, and global cooling. Today these things seem so strange.
At some point the prophecy of an ice age to come vanished, and global warming soared as the much more fashionable prediction of the end of the world. Fidelity to the orthodoxy of the apocalypse of global warming is now a prerequisite for admission to polite society. Our President repeats the mantra that climate change is an “existential threat” even as he signs executive orders and diverts half the energies of the vast federal government to combat it.
And what better opportunity than the annual Earth Day return for our great leaders to demonstrate their deep climate change sincerity? So last week we had President Biden’s personal climate envoy to the world, John Kerry, who traveled to Shanghai to triumphantly welcome China on board with an official plan to save the planet by ending fossil fuel use. and today, Biden himself continued his Earth Day Climate Change Summit, a virtual event allegedly attended by leaders from around 40 nations including China, India and Russia. Surely things have changed completely now since the bad trump card was banned, and the world will shortly be saved by the revival of the glorious Paris Climate Agreement.
The problem, of course, is that China, Russia, India and, by the way, all the other developing countries don’t care about all climate change, and they also know that the Paris Agreement is a total fraud. For a developing country, the basic strategy reflected in Paris is to beat the US and Europe for big bucks while making the more developed countries cripple their own economies, even if you make absolutely nothing to commit yourself.
China, Russia, and India each have their own approaches to implementing this strategy, but in general, Russia and India have been relatively frank about not complying with the fossil fuel restrictions on their own. China has proven itself to be utterly cynical and Machiavellian for taking advantage of and even humiliating the incredibly unintelligent individuals Biden and Kerry who are supposed to lead the United States in their endeavors.
Just a few weeks ago, in March, high-ranking diplomats from the USA and China met in Alaska. The US delegation briefly mentioned the issue of the genocide of the Uighur minority that is currently taking place in western China. and the Chinese delegation then took the opportunity to disguise the Americans for about 20 minutes for allegedly comparable human rights violations of the USA. The US team members appointed by Biden, all from the guilty, America-hating progressive movement, were speechless. They have no vague idea of how to stand up for their own country or why they should.
Immediately afterwards, John picks up Kerry and goes to China, all happy and happy because he is supposed to get the Chinese to sacrifice and curtail their economy in the name of fighting climate change. This guy goes way beyond being stupid to being completely delusional. He must know (or not?) That China is by far the world’s largest emitter of “greenhouse gases” and is now almost twice as fast as the USA. He has to know that too (right?) Under the Paris Agreement, China has not made any commitments to reduce emissions, but has only promised to “peak” its emissions by 2030, with the right to increase emissions by then until then as it will. But does he know that there are currently around 250 GW more coal-fired power plants in development in China – more than the entire existing US fleet of coal-fired power plants? These Chinese plants will all be built in the next few years and will continue to exist for many decades. And then there are hundreds of other coal-fired power plants that China is planning or building for other countries around the world. With all of this in mind, the South China Morning Post stated on April 17th, ahead of the trip, “Kerry and other government officials in Biden have stated that it is important to work with China on the climate.” There’s nothing like starting a negotiation from a position of strength.
And so, last week in China, Kerry got exactly the treatment you would expect. In short, the Chinese gave him the contempt and contempt he deserved. As usual, China made no specific commitments to reduce its own emissions and took the opportunity to brief Kerry on US compliance with its commitments. Chinese Vice Prime Minister Han Zheng had this to say (from the SCMP):
“China welcomes the US return to the Paris Agreement and expects the US to honor the agreement, take responsibility and make appropriate contributions.”
And from the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hua Chunying:
“[The U.S.] return [to the Paris Agreement] is by no means a glorious comeback, but rather a poor return to the classroom, ”said Hua of the United States. She called on the United States to “offer how to make up for the lost four years,” including payments to the United Nations-backed Green Climate Fund, which supports developing countries hardest hit by climate change.
That brings us to President Biden’s climate summit today. You may know that President Obama’s previous “commitment” under the Paris Agreement was that the US would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% from 2005 by 2025. (I say “commitment” in quotation marks because the Paris Agreement was never submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty and was therefore never binding on the United States.) Either way, Biden, who had absolutely nothing to do with China today after Kerry’s failed mission last week, essentially doubled the US promise to cut emissions. From the New York Times today:
In a token of renewed determination after four years of blatant climate denial by the Trump administration, Mr Biden officially promised that the United States would cut its emissions in at least half by 2030 compared to 2005.
And how about giving every third world kleptocrat tens or hundreds of billions of US infinite free tax dollars?
[The Biden] The administration also announced that it intends to double the amount of money it is offering to help developing countries by 2024, compared to what the United States spent annually during the latter half of the Obama administration.
It is estimated that annual greenhouse gas emissions in the US are currently about 15% below 2005 levels, with the reduction due to the fracking revolution being almost complete – and almost nothing to do with increasing amounts of wind and solar power, insignificant. That leaves around 35% of 2005 levels to meet Biden’s newly announced target. You can be sure that Biden himself has absolutely no idea how this could be achieved. Indeed, it will not be achieved. However, Biden promises to cause enormous damage to the US economy in a futile effort.
Meanwhile, Xi rubs his hands together in delight at the stupidity of the US leaders. He pocketed every successive US promise to destroy his own economy and then responded with empty words and no specific commitments on his part. Xi actually showed up on Biden’s summit today. Here’s what he had to say, as quoted in the New York Times:
President Xi Jinping of China said his country would “strictly limit” increasing coal consumption over the next five years and phase it out in the next five years. . . . Mr. Xi reiterated his promise from last year to reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2060. In a clear reminder to his host, President Biden, he said that the developed countries of the West had a historic responsibility to act faster to reduce emissions.
I love this part about “strictly limit[ing]Coal consumption. What does that even mean when 250 GW of new coal-fired power plants are under development? I think that building more new coal-fired power plants than in the US is now a “strict limit”. China’s emissions, already by far the largest in the world, will continue to grow rapidly with no quantitative promise to do anything else. Oh, there’s this mention of “net zero” emissions by 2060. Xi must be watching some sort of fraud on purchased credit. But don’t worry, he’s almost 68 years old and knows he’ll be dead long before 2060. Most of the others who attended this summit, too. No one will be there to remember this meaningless statement.
Read the full original article here.
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