On April 2nd, The New York Post reported:
Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed in the 2016 Paris accords to bring his country’s climate-warming greenhouse-gas emissions to a peak before 2030 and make China “carbon-neutral” by 2060, but reality tells the opposite story.
A new study shows that the People’s Republic generated over half of the world’s coal-fired power in 2020, up nine points (to 53 percent) from 2015 — the year before Xi made his pledge.
And China actually opened more coal plants in 2020 than it had in the prior three years combined — three times as many new coal plants as the entire rest of the world.
On February 19th, CBS News reported:
When the U.S. signed the agreement in 2016, its first NDC target was to get “in the range” of an economy-wide 17% drop below 2005 greenhouse gas levels by 2020. It also aimed to achieve a subsequent decrease of 9-11% of 2005 levels by 2025, meaning the U.S. would reduce greenhouse emissions by 26%-28% in the first ten years of the Paris Agreement.
So China gets to increase greenhouse gases until 2030 while we have to drop our greenhouse gas levels by 2025. Has anyone thought through the economic implications of this for each country?
Yesterday the U.K. Daily Mail reported that China released a greater volume of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere in 2019 than all of the world’s developed nations put together.
The article reports:
The analysis considered six greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulphur hexafluoride.
Global emissions have risen 11.4 per cent in the last decade to reach 52 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, with China responsible for 27 per cent of this.
The second-worst emitter was the US — accounting for 11 per cent of the total — with India edging out the EU for the first time to come in third at 6.6 per cent.
The article at the U.K. Daily Mail paints a sympathetic picture of China’s increase in greenhouse emissions, stating that since greenhouse gases linger, other civilized nations have been contributing to the total for many more years than China. That still does not change the fact that the Paris climate accord ties the hands of the United States economy while giving China a free ride.