China cudgel backfires on liberals as its greenhouse gases grow rapidly

Washington Examiner:

The New York Times' climate reporter tweeted last year: "The irony is rich: as US abandons #climate policy under @realDonaldTrump, China becomes a new #climate leader.”

“It is a new world order," said Erik Solheim around the time, head of the United Nations Environment Program. "Leadership on climate change policy has now gone to the developing countries, China among them."

In a sense, these liberals were right. China is leading the world — in growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Global emissions are estimated to grow by 2.7 percent from 2017 to 2018. The United States is seeing an increase but below that global average. China, meanwhile, is increasing its emissions by 4.7 percent. In sheer volume of greenhouse gases, China has the largest increase. Half of the world’s 10-billion-ton increase in greenhouse gas emissions this year will come from China.

All this growth, despite China’s command economy, its green-five-year plans, and its much-vaunted “leadership” on the issue. One main reason: China is rapidly ramping up its burning of coal. A report this fall found that China is bringing on a fleet of new coal-fired plants equal in output to every coal-fired plant in the U.S.

Leadership, indeed.

We point out China’s role in greenhouse gas growth not merely to poke fun at the confident and gullible pronouncements of the folks at the U.N. and the New York Times. China’s fierce expansion of coal use and hypocrisy on emissions is the same story we’ve seen for years, and it’s always sat at the heart of conservative objections to liberals’ climate control plans.

If the U.S. implements climate regulations that add to the cost of manufacturing, that will simply drive business overseas to places like China that will have no concern about greenhouse emissions and will certainly have inferior controls on pollution. This doesn’t help the planet; it clearly harms it.

Liberals have frantically looked for evidence that this time China is serious about curbing emissions. China’s government is happy to talk this talk, and liberals, with their outsized trust in the efficacy of central planning, buy the tales.
...

It is unlikely that the liberals at the NY Times will ever say Trump was right, but do you think they will ever admit they were wrong about China?  Probably not.  They continue to pretend that China is a leader on issues that are dear to them.

Meanwhile, green activist at Harvard failed to get one percent of students to sign up to get divestment of fossil fuel investments.