An international organization called the Global Carbon Project published a report on Thursday that found China’s carbon emissions are projected to rise by four percent this year.

The group said China’s emissions even rose during 2020, when pandemic lockdowns reduced carbon emissions from industry and travel around the world, leaving China’s carbon output 5.5 percent higher than it was before the pandemic began.

The Global Carbon Project, which includes about a hundred researchers in 17 countries, said the rest of the world reduced its emissions by 5.4 percent during the 2020 lockdowns and is only now returning to pre-pandemic 2019 levels. China, on the other hand, never stopped getting worse.

“Last year, China emitted 31 per cent of the world’s fossil fuel carbon dioxide, followed by the U.S. at 14 per cent, the European Union at seven per cent and India also at seven per cent. The four accounted for 59 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted Thursday. 

The Global Carbon Project seemed inclined to give China the benefit of the doubt, arguing its emissions increase was understandable because “the rest of the world is asking for China for a lot of products, which has pushed the industry to really require so much energy,” as project director Pep Canadell put it.

The Chinese made no new commitments at last week’s massive (and fantastically dirty) COP26 climate summit in Scotland, but once again the climate change movement was remarkably forgiving of the world’s worst polluters, granting a great deal of credence to Chinese promises that its rapidly expanding carbon footprint will level off around 2030 and decline to “net zero” by 2060.

China, meanwhile, is hauling record-breaking mountains of coal from both domestic and overseas mines, in what Chinese officials described as an “all-out” effort to fuel their carbon-spewing coal-fired power plants and avert a severe power shortage in their industrial provinces. Beijing admitted it plans to increase its emissions every year for at least the next decade during COP26.

When teenage climate change celebrity Greta Thunberg dared to notice this week that China has embarked on a wild coal-mining and coal-burning spree while the rest of the world struggles to reduce carbon emissions, China responded by dismissing her as an uneducated bumpkin.