Key Points
- For the last two weeks 200 countries have been at COP26 – but not China.
- While the rest of the world talks emissions, China is breaking coal production records.
- Pledges to phase out coal mean nothing if India and China won’t play ball.
For the last two weeks, twenty-five thousand delegates from more than 200 countries – including 120 heads of state – got together for a meet up in Glasgow, Scotland to talk about all things climate change and make “very important” pledges.
We call it COP26 (Conference of the Parties). China calls it a total waste of time.
That’s right. America’s biggest threat no-showed the climate pow-wow. Xi Jinping RSVP’d “no thanks,” despite China being responsible for the largest greenhouse gas emissions on earth.
And here’s a not-so-well kept secret: they don’t care.
During COP26, China took the opportunity to announce, via its state-run newspaper Global Times, that their coal production has reached “the highest level in recent years.”
“From November 1-5, the average daily dispatch of coal reached 11.66 million tons, an increase of more than 1.2 million tons from the end of September, as coal mines have been gradually put into operation, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said on Monday,” Global Times reported.
A big point of pride for China – and they are not concerned about how bad it is for the planet.
“China, the world’s worst polluter by far, built three times as many coal plants as all other nations combined in 2020, Breitbart reports. “When power shortages and rolling blackouts began hitting China’s industrial centers in the fall of 2021, the Chinese government ordered an ‘all-out’ campaign to ‘produce as much coal as possible’ from both domestic mines and foreign suppliers.”
So China’s not really into eliminating oil pipelines or stopping offshore drilling. And they certainly aren’t going to beg OPEC for help. They crank out coal. Period. Faster and more aggressively than any other country on Earth.
And as they grow stronger and more self-reliant, America becomes very-much the opposite; American gas prices are currently surging to 7-year highs – but we have to kick coal, right?
“An ‘international alliance’ to ‘phase out coal’ was formed by COP26 attendees last Thursday – but China and India, the world’s top two coal burners, did not join,” Breitbart reports. “The summit produced some general criticism of Asia for being too slow to embrace renewable energy, but the lack of sharp criticism against China is remarkable, considering that China accounts for almost 60 percent of Asia’s coal consumption.”
“…general criticism of Asia for being too slow to embrace renewable energy?”
We’re the ones who are too slow. And we’ll pay dearly for it.
