China’s Coal-Fired Climate Trap

The same folks who helped bring you COVID-19 are now claiming they’re going to be carbon neutral by 2060.

Anyone who has been paying attention can already hear the stilted teleprompter speech by President Biden warning the nation that American leadership on climate policy is key to winning our competition with China.

The Red Dragon’s fire-breathing economy is powered by coal. Nobody, least of all the President of the United States, should expect that to change. China’s sudden interest in climate policy is a trap Mr. Biden, and his climate profiteers are more than willing to fall into.

China accounts for a whopping 28 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. More than 100 coal-fired power plants under construction will add approximately 247 gigawatts of coal power to its grid over the next few years.

That’s nearly six times Germany’s entire coal-fired capacity. According to a Climate Action Tracker analysis, all that power amounts to as much as 14.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.

Their stated goal of the eco-scheme du jour of carbon neutrality is nonsense.

China’s recently announced carbon-trading marketplace, created literally out of thin air, is intentionally focused on its own companies, which the communist government increasingly regulates.

Starting with the world’s dirtiest power sector and later expected to expand into metals, chemicals, and aviation, the Chinese government will claim emissions reductions that will lack credibility like so much else out of the communist regime.

Even many environmental groups like Greenpeace are skeptical. They should be. The notion of carbon trading is based on dubious estimates and fungible reporting.

It’s primed for manipulation by companies and governments wanting to project a perception of environmental sustainability but may, in practice, be doing little to reduce emissions.

The Chinese Communist Party, like all authoritarian regimes, cannot be trusted to provide accurate and transparent information to the world concerning anything, let alone its environmental indicators.

China hides its human rights atrocities. It is now widely believed that the CCP hid critical information about a virus that just happened to create economic chaos in the West and ended up benefitting the economy of the world’s biggest polluter.

This week, Beijing rebuffed another WHO investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Obfuscation is the national pastime as it was for the Soviets before them.

The facts and the science are plain. The US has continued to make greater progress toward reducing our carbon emissions than Europe while protecting our competitiveness, without Kyoto and the Paris Accords.

Brussels’ new radical climate action plan, also announced this month, is more nonsensical policy summersaults.

According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, between 2005 and 2018, the United States had a total annual reduction of CO2 of about 760 million metric tons, which is nearly as much as the entire European Union.

Both states and the federal government and private industries responding to consumer demand should continue to reduce emissions, which should be a non-partisan goal.

Carbon trading in China and here will lead to higher prices for virtually everything. It will place the U.S. at a further competitive disadvantage with our greatest strategic competitor, who is prepared to dump money into subsidies and fudge their climate numbers at will.

Mr. Biden and his acolytes on the Left are dedicated to putting the business of climate change on steroids at the expense of American workers and consumers. They welcome the pressure from China. It supports their aims.

Americans, however, should be wary of any effort by states or the federal government to fundamentally change our regulations for the sake of competing with the apparition of a communist China that actually cares about climate.

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