Recently, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), both in terms of personnel and priorities, has made some changes. China has now abandoned the Paris Climate Agreements, a move which should not surprise anyone.
Anyone who believed that China would work with the United States to reduce emissions had a very bad week. According to Bloomberg and the Washington Post, President Xi Jinping said that China would not be influenced in its decision-making by external factors. This is contrary to Xi’s 2015 Paris Agreement commitments that his country would reduce its carbon emission by 2030 at the latest.
Xi made his remarks while former Secretary of State John Kerry, a climate envoy, was in Beijing to reopen a dialog. It was just a few days after the arrival of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and before Henry Kissinger, who was the architect of the opening of China to the West in the 1950s, visited Beijing.
It is rare that I say it, but the Chinese have this time been right. It puts Western nations that still adhere to Paris Agreement in a difficult position. Why? If you are concerned about carbon emissions, then China (and India), together with the rest of the world, cannot be trusted to reduce them. Here is what Xi said:
Time reported that he said, “Based on China’s energy and resources endowments we will advance initiatives in order to reach peak CO2 emissions in a planned and phased manner, in accordance with the principle to get the new before throwing out the old.”
Xi’s comments should reverberate in the halls of the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency is planning to impose costs of billions of dollars on Americans to lower U.S. emission levels. China has stated repeatedly that it does not intend to follow the Western drive towards net zero.
China is the largest emitter of CO2 in the entire world. The United States, Europe or anyone else will not be able to reduce carbon emissions in a significant way without China’s help. This is not to debate whether or not we should be concerned about carbon emissions. I don’t believe we should; I find this whole argument a little silly. This is the stated goal of both the Biden administration and all signatories of the Paris Agreement. China has now slapped them in the face.
China, on the other hand, is doing something the American government – if not since 2021, then certainly before that – isn’t interested in taking action that will lead to a higher standard of living for Chinese citizens.
Modern technological society requires abundant, reliable, and inexpensive energy. A modern technological society is impossible without it. The reliability of “renewables”, on the other hand, is becoming increasingly unreliable. China gets it. Washington is full of people who don’t understand. With fossil fuels, and importantly nuclear power, we can produce cheap and reliable energy in abundance.
In the supposedly free United States, meanwhile, the EPA has proposed a regulation requiring that 60% of all new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. Seven years is seven years. No matter how often EV proponents boast about it, electrical vehicles (EVs), are not emission-free. Electricity must come from somewhere and this is likely to be a coal- or natural gas-fired power plant. Our green policies help, but they also help China, just like the CCP.
Donald Trump was right to see the potential damage that the Paris Agreement would cause to the American Economy. He pulled us from that agreement and advocated policies that made the United States independent in energy for the first since 1957. This is a pattern that the next GOP president, whether it’s Trump or someone else should follow. The Paris Agreement is also a bad idea. If President Xi Jinping is able to recognize that this move is right for China, any American president with half a brain can also see that it is right for the United States.
President Xi in China did something right. We can only hope that we will have a president in 2024 who is the same.
The Swedish Doom Pixie was not available for comment as of the date this article was written.
