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.
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Let Coal Live
Kill Net Zero
On Tuesday on the Moggs show at 8pm on GB News there was a discussion between David Turver and Bob Ward. David Turver provided forthcoming costings for the grid, Bob Ward tried to bat these away looking like he was about to explode. Starts about 25 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8AhkU4Une0
Mick.
Thank you for that link – waffle from the Grantham Institute wonk, Eigen values on the money as ever.
I recall a similar discussion many years ago between Ward and Richard Tol, who defected from the IPCC. Ward was dressed in a sharp suit, Tol was dressed like a hippy, which says it all about how Big Green is now in charge.
And yet no Youtube video of last Saturday’s show when Ben Leo interviewed someone looking into the clandestine meeting between the PM and Gates, and on another occasion, a meeting with Larry Fink from Blackrock.
You will find everyone is censored if they dare to speak about the usury of the big International Private Banks. —-It is easy to censor everyone when you own everything, and the big private banks own the whole world including all of the media ofcourse. ——-So they are easily able to shut us all up.
In summary…
…Hydrocarbons lifted half of humanity out of poverty and squalor – Rejoice!
…Along with nuclear power, can elevate the other half too – Get on with it
…No climate crisis – Carbon dioxide is a Good Guy, Net Zero unnecessary
…RoW beyond Europe knows it – Net Zero irrelevant
.. Wind and solar unreliable substitutes for the real thing – Net Zero expensive
…Planet perfectly capable of saving itself, humanity prioritise humanity
Watchword – UIE (pronounced phonetically WHY), Unnecessary, Irrelevant, Expensive
I agree that Net Zero is unnecessary, but it is entirely necessary for those globalist traitors like 2TK who want to destroy us.
Therein lies the problem – decades of infamy, vested interest and deceit to be undone.
Maybe we can stop sobbing about the reduction in overseas aid because … our spending of vast sums on wind farms and solar panels has a very desirable impact, on demand for coal, and therefore on its price.
Yes, we (and like-minded countries) have blessed the world with a reduction in the price of their coal. I will sleep better tonight.
Just heard a conversation on Five Live with Andy Burnham, I hate this fake prick with a passion. Always claiming to be a Northern working class hero while pushing the climate agenda. He wants more devolved powers up north, but not devolved from the WEF and the think tanks that we fund through government ‘charities’.
Chris, I deeply admire your writing, and your calm intellectual stance against the mass hysteria that is AGW is a genuine ray of sunlight. But please don’t use the Americanism “genuinely pissed” when you mean “pissed off”. The first is what I am on Saturday night, especially after England has beaten France. The second is what I am during the rest of the week when I read about the antics of the clowns in charge.
Let’s try to retain some linguistic independence. Otherwise, couldn’t disagree less.
Snap.
There is an even darker aspect to this agenda and that is its use to obfuscate real losses all around us for example the sinister decline in insect numbers and the general feeling of toxicity within the biosphere. Something is causing it and it isn’t coal or oil. There is no way that it can be attributed to temperature changes this doesn’t match the data. They know it’s happening and yet they are silent about it despite pushing the carbon agenda. Their best hope for complete destruction of the biosphere lies in providing such red herrings for as long as possible.
Keep hearing this about insect numbers – have you seen any studies actually showing observed numbers etc or just your personal observations?
You neglected to mention that the play at the national theatre will have been generously subsidised by the horrible working classes.
”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.”
Excellent news from the US. A stake in the heart of this and the same for the awful Climate Change Committee would obliterate the justification for almost all the pernicious, money grabbing scams in our lives, based solely upon the lie that the gas of life is a “pollutant”.
It would save us taxpayers £Trillions and transform our lives.
It was from the beginning about us all in the Western World making do with less of everything. In a world that now has 8 billion people in it we cannot all have the same standard of living as the wealthy western countries. Or at least so say the Malthusians at the UN and WEF. The reason we became prosperous in the west ofcourse was by using coal oil and gas, so the Politics say that we must STOP using them, as we have apparently used up more than our fair share already. Those politics are the politics of the UN called Sustainable Development, and our own Political Class are fully onboard with impoverishing their own citizens by weaning us off of fossil fuels and therefeore lowering our standard of living and pretending to us that it is all about the planet. —-But how are China India and the rest of the developing world who emit about 60 % of all CO2 emissions not concerned about the planet? Or as someone once asked “Why are China not saving the planet??—–With the answer being “Because they already have a communist government”. —–Green=Red. —–Sustainable Development is just a fancy word for communism and it is to be hoped that the USA under Trump kicking this eco socialism into touch might just mean a stay of execution of some sort for the rest of us silly people in Europe and the rest of the west.
It was from the beginning about us all in the Western World making do with less of everything. In a world that now has 8 billion people in it we cannot all have the same standard of living as the wealthy western countries. Or at least so say the Malthusians at the UN and WEF. The reason we became prosperous in the west ofcourse was by using coal oil and gas, so the Politics say that we must STOP using them, as we have apparently used up more than our fair share already. Those politics are the politics of the UN called Sustainable Development, and our own Political Class are fully onboard with impoverishing their own citizens by weaning us off of fossil fuels and therefore lowering our standard of living and pretending to us that it is all about the planet. —-But how are China India and the rest of the developing world who emit about 60 % of all CO2 emissions not concerned about the planet? Or as someone once asked “Why are China not saving the planet??—–With the answer being “Because they already have a communist government”. —–Green=Red. —–Sustainable Development is just a fancy word for communism and it is to be hoped that the USA under Trump kicking this eco socialism into touch might just mean a stay of execution of some sort for the rest of us silly people in Europe and the rest of the west.
According to Ian Plimer’s The Little Green Book, China has 1,118 operating coal-fired power stations (EU 256, USA 224 and India 179).
As regards 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 … The Exposé writes (https://expose-news.com/2025/02/26/environmental-policies-are-destroying-tenant-farming/):
Many of Britain’s tenant farmers, who manage about a third of England’s farmland, are facing eviction or being forced to give up their tenancies.
The National Trust, a major landowner, is playing a significant role in this shift, planting trees and rewilding large areas of land, which is taking productive farmland out of use and threatening food security.
Current policies will lead to a loss of productive farmland, reduced food security and the decline of rural communities, with many farmers feeling that their livelihoods and way of life are being threatened by environmental schemes.
So the UK continues to attack hard-working farmers, all in the name of saving the planet.
Another cracking article, just love the rapier like wit. Thank you Chris, keep ‘em coming!
I’ve never eaten a doner kebab in my life, let alone two a week, so I declare myself exempt from the rest of this rubbish.