Letting China Off the Hook

China is the world’s number one emitter of carbon dioxide. If you take the Left’s global warming hysteria seriously, nothing can be done without China (and also India) drastically curbing their emissions. If everyone in North America dropped dead, it would do no measurable good for the world’s climate, if you believe the Leftists’ numbers.

So if liberals were really serious about climate change, they would be looking hard at China. If carbon dioxide is an existential threat, shouldn’t we be invading China, or at least bombing the hundreds of coal-fired power plants they have under construction?

One would think so. But instead, liberals treat China with kid gloves, perhaps because China’s Communist regime is the sort of government they admire. John Kerry’s apologia at last week’s World Economic Forum meeting is a good example:

During an interview with CNN International aired on Wednesday’s “First Move,” Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry stated that while China should do more to move away from coal, “China is doing a lot more than people think in trying to deploy renewables, manufacture the renewables.”

Kerry stated, “Well, we should be hopeful, certainly. No, the world cannot get to where we have to get to to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis without China being there and being helpful.

A valuable admission if you believe the climate hype, although we need to define “helpful.” But see what follows:

Now, we’re engaged, again, in conversations with China.

Conversations! I’m guessing Xi’s regime could keep conversations going for a long, long time.

I’m encouraged. I think China is doing a lot more than people think in trying to deploy renewables, manufacture the renewables.

Note those two verbs: Kerry began with “deploy,” then shifted to “manufacture.” Yes: China holds near-monopoly market shares in the manufacture of both solar panels (it is hard to compete on price with slave labor) and wind turbines. But they manufacture these products to sell them to suckers in the U.S. and Europe. To meet their own energy needs, the Chinese are building hundreds of coal-fired power plants.

We’d like to see more in terms of moving away from coal and so forth.

So, when it comes to Americans, Kerry and his allies are full of zeal: blackouts are a small price to pay for ridiculously expensive and unreliable “green” energy. But when it comes to the Chinese, “we’d like to see more in terms of moving away from coal.”

What follows is classic left-wing word salad. It means nothing, because Kerry and his American and European allies have no intention of doing anything whatsoever to address the world’s largest sources of CO2 emissions.

But we have to work together. We have to work together with an ability to recognize our common responsibility and to come to the table and help the rest of the world. And if China and the United States can move on some of these things right now in these next months, that will make a gigantic difference. It’s one of the top things that one should try to achieve, because it will accelerate action by everybody else and it will facilitate that transformation. It will also help a lot of people in various parts of the world who are suspicious of what China is doing or not doing to see that China is there, is part of the solution, not the problem and at least addressing the problem in a very serious way. And that would help everybody.

These people want you to suffer, and they frankly don’t care whether the Chinese suffer or not. It really is as simple as that.