China Announces Bogus Climate Target, The Left Swoons. Rinse Repeat.

Liberal environmentalists are swooning over the fact that China has recently announced that it will be “climate neutral” by 2060. State Representative Jamie Long (DFL), who authored a bill that would require Minnesota to get 100 percent of its electricity from wind, solar and battery storage by 2050, said China’s announcement meant the U.S. was out of excuses and needs to act now.

Michael Noble, who is the executive director at Fresh Energy, called it a BFD (Google it).

However, if liberal wind and solar advocates believe China will actually be carbon neutral by 2060, I’ve got a whole slew of bridges for sale.

The Long Con

China is no stranger to making bogus pledges to cut emissions, only to be caught cheating later. In 2015, China wasn’t even asked to reduce emissions with the Paris Climate accord. Instead, the Chinese government said “China’s carbon dioxide emission will peak by around 2030 and China will work hard to achieve the target at an even earlier date.” In other words, China can increase their carbon dioxide emissions without limit until “around 2030,” after which time the Chinese government will voluntarily reduce emissions, if you believe them.

Why It Won’t Happen

China is, by far, the largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions in the world. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (a liberal renewable energy advocacy group), China accounted for 28 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2018, which is nearly double the 14 percent emitted by the United States that year. Furthermore, China’ share of the global emissions will grow in the coming years the Communist country plans to keep building more coal-fired power plants.

China is building coal-fired power plants like crazy. In fact, China already operates more than 5.6 times as much coal capacity as the United States, and they are building or planning to build even more coal plants in the coming years. Once these plants are built, China would operate 6.84 times more coal capacity than the United States currently operates. Many of these coal plants will be young, efficient plants that will be able to operate for longer than 40 years, when China will supposedly be carbon neutral.

The left has always coddled China and criticized America when it comes to global warming, but the data are clear — China is increasing their carbon dioxide emissions dramatically, while emission in the United States have fallen 12 percent since peaking in 2005. Emissions could have fallen even more if California, New York and Vermont had not shut down their nuclear power plants.

So You’re Trusting the Country Holding 3 Million People in Concentration Camps…

Liberal environmentalists want us to adopt bad energy policies that will increase the cost of electricity and make our families subjected to higher risk of blackouts (see California) today in exchange for a totally unenforceable promise by China to be carbon neutral 40 years in the future. But why would we believe China will reduce CO2 emissions when they currently have up to three million of their own people in concentration camps?

According to Vox:

“In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has arbitrarily detained between 1 million and 3 million other Uighurs in so-called “reeducation centers” and forced them to undergo psychological indoctrination programs, such as studying communist propaganda and giving thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese officials have also reportedly used waterboarding and other forms of torture,including sexual abuse, as part of the indoctrination process.

It is the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since World War II.”

“At first, the Chinese government denied these camps even existed. China’s state-run media at one time dismissed the reports of detention camps as Western media “baselessly criticizing China’s human rights.”

But China has since stopped pretending that the camps aren’t real.”

It’s impossible to think that China will “do the right thing” regarding carbon dioxide emissions when they are currently persecuting and torturing up to 3 million of their own people in concentration camps. China clearly has zero regard for the human rights of their own people, so why do we think they would have any regard for how their emissions impact the entire planet?

China will say and do whatever it needs to promote their own interests and if saying they will be carbon neutral by 2060 will embolden liberals to enact bad energy policy that weakens the United States by making us more dependent upon Chinese solar panels and sends good manufacturing jobs overseas, then they will be more than happy to do it.

It would be beyond foolish to trust China when they have no scruples about cheating emissions targets and detaining and torturing up to three million of their own people.