Hayward: China, World’s Worst Polluter, Condemns U.S. and Europe for Coal Plants

China’s state-run Global Times on Friday harangued America and Europe for using coal power to make up for electricity shortfalls, even though China is building coal plants with wild abandon, digging up and importing mountains of coal to fuel them, and making it very clear that China’s industrial goals will not be compromised in any way to satisfy climate activists.

There is a legitimate point to be made about the lunacy of Western societies spending billions on unreliable “green energy,” ruling out nuclear power for pseudo-religious environmentalist reasons, and then frantically turning back to dirty coal when solar panels and windmills prove utterly inadequate for the power needs of modern industrial societies during hot summers and cold winters.

The brutal coal-munching, carbon-spewing authoritarian regime in Beijing is the last entity on Earth that should be attempting to make that point, but the Global Times took a stab at it anyway:

Meanwhile, many European countries, including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark have been quietly restarting coal-fired power. They seem to be embarking on a “shift back” to ramp up carbon emissions. It is undoubtedly a setback in terms of joint efforts in reducing emissions on a global scale. It should be said it’s a helpless choice for Europe to a large extent. The US pulled together its allies to launch “extreme sanctions” against Russia, and almost wanted to cut off all Russian energy pipelines. The resulting oil and gas shortage has seriously affected the basic life of ordinary people in Europe and “everyone wants to buy coal to hoard.”

It is understandable that the goal of reducing emissions has to give way to basic livelihood. But on the other hand, such a situation could have been completely avoided. If a peaceful and stable development environment could have been maintained, would they have arrived at such a plight? If the Cold War mentality and bloc confrontation could have been resisted, would they have arrived at such a plight?

#环球时报Editorial: When it comes to dealing with climate change, the US, which is regarded by the world as a bottom student, is not qualified to find fault with a top student at all. https://t.co/zNCrISxkr9

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 25, 2022

The Chinese Communist paper went on a long rant blaming the United States for causing Europe’s energy crisis, bizarrely raving that Washington is the “initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict” and even looping in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan as somehow making climate change worse.

Left unmentioned was the carbon footprint of the massive aerial and naval fleet China dispatched to the waters around Taiwan for temper-tantrum military exercises after Pelosi departed. Those swarms of Chinese fighters and bombers that keep buzzing across the median line of the Taiwan Strait do not run on solar power.

The Global Times then tried casing the climate-change racket as a sinister instrument of American hegemonic control:

Washington’s motives have never been pure when it comes to tackling climate change. According to the Financial Times, new emission disclosure rules proposed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission will effectively bring a large part of the global business community under US oversight, taking extraterritoriality to the “next level.” On the surface, Washington wears a noble moral guise, but what it’s calculating is to use the global crisis to control the right to formulate global rules and standards, and to form a global carbon emission pattern that is beneficial to itself. At the same time, it tries to contain, suppress or even interrupt the industrialization process of large and medium-sized developing countries such as China and India.

The proof of this allegation is, supposedly, that U.S. commitment to climate change is “incomparably flexible” because it makes developing countries “bleed” with environmental regulations, but gives itself and its European allies a pass whenever fealty to the climate movement threatens to choke off power supplies and inflict economic ruin. 

Somehow the Global Times worked Western criticism of China’s slavery and genocide atrocities in East Turkistan province into this argument, vaguely claiming sanctions such as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) are merely a ploy to choke off the supply of solar panels and battery components from China to the Third World — driving up green energy prices in yet another Underpants Gnome scheme by Washington to control the world.

It would be a lot to expect coherent arguments from the undisputed world heavyweight champion of pollution, a regime that only weeks ago was bragging about how its massive reliance on coal power would protect it from the blackouts that will plague Europe, as it fumbles for a way to criticize other nations for using coal power. 

China wound up having huge, industry-crippling blackouts anyway, so it needs to make itself feel better by slamming others as insufficiently devoted to the Net Zero cause — and to lay the political groundwork for whatever Beijing does to avoid more blackouts next year.