Other than climaidiots, is there anyone who truly believes that China has any intention of keeping their pledges for being net zero/carbon neutral? Seriously, you can’t believe China is doing anything more than paying lip service to sucker the weak cult minds, right?
China aims to be carbon neutral by 2060. Its new 5-year plan won’t cut it.
0n Friday, China released a draft summary of its 14th Five-Year Plan, the all-important document that not only guides the country’s economic development but also has huge consequences for global carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
The new plan’s 2025 emissions goals reflect an ongoing contradiction between China’s short-term and long-term climate goals.
In the long run, China has expressed a strong commitment to climate action. President Xi Jinping surprised the world last September when he announced that China would aim to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. Climate scientists have called for countries to hit that goal by 2050, but it was still a significant step forward for China — the first time the country made any formal commitment to zeroing out its emissions.
And yet, even as Xi made that announcement, CO2 emissions in China were soaring. Like the rest of the world, the pandemic had initially caused economic activity to plummet in China in early 2020. But after swiftly bringing the pandemic under control within its borders, the Chinese government funneled stimulus dollars into the heavily polluting construction and manufacturing sectors, stoking steel and cement production. As a result, China’s emissions rose an estimated 1.5 percent in 2020, even accounting for the initial drop.
“China’s economic recovery from the pandemic so far has been anything but green,†Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, said during a press conference on Monday.
Vox’s climahysteric Lili Pike seems rather surprised by this. She’s going to continue being surprised all the way up to 2050 when China still has a big “carbon footprint”, unless there is some big breakthrough in power production. China is happy to sell substandard wind turbines and solar panels, created by mining and lots of fossil fuels, to climate cultists.
The biggest question remains whether China will reverse its coal consumption, which increased slightly last year even during the pandemic. Environmentalists grew increasingly concerned as China built 38.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plant capacity in 2020 alone — three-quarters of new coal construction globally.
They’ll pledge to do so and then won’t
What happens internationally may also play a role in shaping China’s emissions. The Biden administration has pledged to reassert US global leadership on climate change and is planning to host a global climate summit on Earth Day in April. In the lead-up, the administration has said it will release a new, more ambitious 2030 target for the US.
That could potentially free up China to also increase its 2030 goals. In December, President Xi announced new targets, which experts said were not strong enough. However, they have not been formalized under the Paris agreement yet, so there is still room for China to make its targets more aggressive by the deadline: the next big round of UN climate negotiations to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland.
Pledges are nice. And, just like most New Year’s pledges they are roundly ignored. China has no intention of actually following through on them, but, they’ll be happy to help other nations do so, selling them products, seeing other countries harm their economies for this scam while China never does so.
