Four years ago, Vox wrote, ‘China is tackling climate change with all guns blazing.’ Go figure, that turns out to not be true.
Way back in 2017, I jotted a quick tweet, “if your climate plan is that I give up beef or my light SUV, but you’ve got no plan to deal with this over in China . . . I’m unpersuaded.”
The folks at Vox — the publication that launched with the slogan, “the smartest minds, the toughest questions”– took issue with that perspective, and wrote that their review of China’s policies “utterly destroy the conservative argument” and concluded, “China is waging an aggressive, multi-front campaign to clean up coal before eventually phasing it out . . . China is tackling climate change with all guns blazing. The US, not China, is the laggard in this relationship.”
Here we are, four years later, and the Vox assessment has proven spectacularly wrong.
China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, now promises that his country’s carbon emissions will begin to decline by 2030, while they’re growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade. Meanwhile, U.S. carbon emissions have slightly declined most years since 2007 — although last year’s significant drop is partially attributed to the drastic change in Americans’ behavior because of the coronavirus pandemic. Year by year, the United States is using less and less coal for energy production. In 2007, the U.S. generated 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide; last year, it generated 4.5 billion metric tons. China, by contrast, generated an estimated 14.4 billion metric tons in 2020.
Earlier this year, Jordan McGillis, deputy director of policy at the Institute for Energy Research, pointed out “with its March release of a new five-year plan (FYP), the 14th in its history, China has embarrassed its climate cheerleaders in the West. Beijing’s plan institutes no carbon cap, no coal phase-out, and no roadmap by which it will execute upon Xi’s words. Despite the carbon-neutral-by-2060 pledge, the FYP emphasizes the importance of coal to China’s continued development, not the emissions that come with its use.”
And now we learn from Reuters a new measurement of how much Chinese cities contribute to the generation of climate-warming gases: “Just 25 big cities — almost all of them in China — accounted for more than half of the climate-warming gases pumped out by a sample of 167 urban hubs around the world.”
It turns out that China is not, in fact, “waging an aggressive, multi-front campaign to clean up coal before eventually phasing it out,” nor is the regime in Beijing “tackling climate change with all guns blazing.” (The only things that Chinese rulers tackle “with all guns blazing” are Tiananmen Square protesters, Hong Kong dissidents, Tibet, and someday possibly Taiwan.) Lo and behold, it turns out that China, not the U.S., is the laggard in this relationship.
Go figure, the people who crow the loudest about being “the smartest minds, the toughest questions” turn out to be the most gullible and credulous when it comes to the promises of habitually duplicitous authoritarian regimes.