In 2021, President Xi Jinping promised that China would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)”. Perhaps something got lost in the translation of “strictly limit” or should we just limit ourselves to the appropriate response – hahahahaha. Net Zero is dying around the world, no more so than in China where the appropriate lip service goes hand in hand with the full service manufacturing and sale of dud windmills and solar panels to subsidy-seekers reliant on dwindling bands of deluded politicians.
The graphs above from a recent report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and the Global Energy Monitor shows clearly the sterling attempts China has made to strictly limit coal production. Excellent progress has been achieved in retiring old capacity and replacing it 10-fold with new plant. As this new plant comes on stream, further mirth might arise as China enters its “phase down” period of coal consumption. It need hardly be added that all this coal production introduces a particularly dirty hydrocarbon into the manufacturing process, while cleaner natural gas with, incidentally, half the carbon dioxide emissions remains unfracked across large areas of Europe.
All this hypocrisy is necessary of course as deindustrialising Greens indulge their luxury beliefs and pretend to save the planet by outsourcing to China all the goods that they have lost the will to make for themselves. Neo-Marxism takes over in declining countries as insulated elites are happy to live off the revenues of a bloated state. If the trend continues, increasingly, as in the old Soviet Union, ‘ordinary’ citizens will pretend to work and the state will pretend to pay them. Already in the UK public sector, large numbers of people are ‘working from home’ despite Covid restrictions being lifted years ago. An even more dystopian future might be envisaged as the lessons of history teach that strong tribes invariably take over weak, decadent groupings.
But not every country is indulging its juvenile Greens. In the United States, Net Zero is stone dead. The election of Donald Trump is sweeping away any official concern about the invented climate crisis – the majority is swiftly coming around to the view that the science backing up the scare is mostly produced by garbage in, garbage out computer models, the ‘tipping points’ never tip, the temperature data are often a creative invention of state-employed meteorologists and the claim of ‘settled’ science is a political reaction to the scientific process that would have drawn admiration from a medieval Pope. Trust in mainstream media is falling off a cliff – people are genuinely pissed when they discover that there have been three years of record growth on the Great Barrier Reef at a time when mainstream media kept telling them that if they continued eating meat the coral will all be gone within a decade. When folk want to worry about the Gulf Stream (solid as a rock, unpublicised scientists say) they can watch the science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow rather than read the ubiquitous model predictions of imminent collapse. Recent fires in Los Angeles might be less scary to a general audience if mainstream media didn’t omit the fact that wildfires in North America are running at less than a quarter of the recent historical rate.
In the US, NASA has been told to butt out of climate speculation and go back to launching rockets – a nice change since it has been unable to send astronauts to the Space Station for over a decade. All departments such as defence must concentrate on the tasks specified in their title. The Federal Reserve will have to go back to banking and stop wasting everyone’s time by enforcing climate change regulations on the productive service economy. Days before Trump took over, the Fed withdrew from a busy-body global cartel of central banks and regulators that it is reported were exploring ways to “police climate risk in the financial system”.
Most climate funding appears to have been cut. Distributions of foreign aid are out and it is estimated that at least 10% of funding for all the UN promises has been lost. It is reported that the contribution of US federal scientists to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been halted. NASA’s Chief Scientist Kate Calvin was due to co-chair an upcoming IPCC meeting in China designed to set in motion another climate ‘assessment’ round. Her absence bodes ill for both the meeting and the ability of the IPCC to continues with its ‘Code Red’ doomsday claptrap. Perhaps most significant of all is the recent news that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency has asked the administration to rescind a 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ on the so-called greenhouse gases. “This is the holy grail of the climate agenda,” observes Marc Morano of Climate Depot. “If you want to permanently cripple the United States climate agenda you have to go at the heart of it. This is the heart of it,” he added. He is correct. Terming carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant opened a pandora’s box that has enabled Government activists to ban and regulate consumer goods to their own heart’s content. Already paper straws, wholly unsuitable for tackling the testing demands of a McDonald’s milkshake, have gone.
No such luck in the UK where the activists on the Climate Change Committee have informed the citizenry that within 15 years they will need to eat less meat and dairy, install noisy, expensive and inefficient heat pumps, pay much higher air fares and remove 80% of their popular internal combustion cars from the road. The Guardian is the mouthpiece for these lunatics and Fiona Harvey spins it as giving up two doner kababs a week. How convenient for Fiona and her comfortable chums in the North London wing of the governing elite. The Labour party gave up on the appalling working class years ago. Saving Planet Earth means clearing the roads of their frightful old bangers, removing most of them from sunny beaches in the Med and getting rid of all that ghastly food that the Holy Who Walk Amongst Us have to smell late at night on their way back from an uplifting play at the National Theatre.
Up the Miners – as the old working class Labour party used to say. Still going strong in China, needless to say.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.