The Red and the Green -- China's Useful Idiots ..... by Patricia Adams

 Source:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/12/Green-reds.pdf

Briefing 51,
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
by Patricia Adams

"For those who were under the illusion that China’s Communist regime is a force for good in the world, the last few years have been a wakeup call. Under President Xi, China incarcerated over a million Turkic Uighur Muslims in ‘re-education’ camps, unleashed the coronavirus pandemic on the world, violated its treaty with Britain by ending Hong Kong’s self-rule, exacerbated its territorial disputes with virtually all its neighbours and has vowed to invade Taiwan.

... those who have yet to have their eyes opened to the dangers posed by the CCP – are Western environmentalists and their funders.

... The embrace by environmental groups and their funders of the CCP is understandable. Their desire to rid the world of fossil fuels depends entirely on China, which accounts for more than 75% of the world’s net global energy growth.22 Without the country coming on board, carbon-curbing efforts elsewhere would be futile, dashing the environmentalists’ dream.

... Environmentalists’ claims that China is committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2060, ten years after it has become the world’s dominant economy, is pure fantasy. China today relies on fossil fuels for 86% of its total primary energy consumption (58% from coal, 20% from petroleum and other liquids, and 8% from natural gas).28 Rather than curbing its appetite for fossil fuels, Beijing is voraciously seeking more.

In the case of coal, China has aggressively relaxed regulations that restricted domestic coal production, seeking to rapidly raise production ca- pacity. ‘In the first half of 2020 China approved 23 gigawatts worth of new coal power projects, more than the previous two years combined,’ reported AFP, citing Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based environmental NGO.29 The CCP approved 141 million tons of new annual coal mining capacity in the first half of 2019. In all of 2018, it approved 25 million tons.

... President Xi may claim to be going off fossil fuels, but China is pursuing coal at a breakneck pace, with hundreds more coal-fired plants in the planning phase. In fact, says OilPrice.com, ‘China has already added 11.4 gigawatts of coal power capacity just in the first half of 2020, which accounts for more than half of the coal capacity added in the entire world in the same six months.

Despite the climate-friendly rhetoric, reports Quartz, ‘in the short term, China is still moving full steam ahead on coal – its post-Covid stimulus spending on fossil fuels is three times larger than its spending on clean energy, including nearly $25 billion on coal power plants and even more on mining and processing.

... Conclusion
... A government that is genocidal and totalitarian is one that cannot be trusted.
...  China does not respect rule of law. lt does not share liberal democratic values, and it does not protect human rights. ... China’s tool of domestic governance, its detention of over one million Uighurs, its censorship of expression, and its social credit system should not be a model for the rest of the world. For most, China is not a model for the rest of the world. For western environmentalists, sadly, all too often it is."

Patricia Adams is "an economist and the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based NGO that has been involved in the Chinese environmental movement since its beginnings in the mid-1980s through the publication of books such as Damming the Three Gorges and Three Gorges Probe, a news portal published in English and Chinese. As editor of the English language translation of Yangtze! Yangtze!, the book that helped inspire China’s democracy movement, and as an author and contributor to books and journals on China’s environmental crises, she is an authority on China’s environmental policy. Ms Adams, a founder of the World Rainforest Movement and the International Rivers Network, has testified before Congressional and Parliamentary Committees in the US and Canada, and has often appeared in major media, including the BBC, CBC, NPR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail and National Post."

 

"About the Global Warming Policy Foundation

The Global Warming Policy Foundation is an all-party and non-party think tank and a registered educational charity which, while openminded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.

Our main focus is to analyse global warming policies and their economic and other implications. Our aim is to provide the most robust and reliable economic analysis and advice. Above all we seek to inform the media, politicians and the public, in a newsworthy way, on the subject in general and on the misinformation to which they are all too frequently being subjected at the present time."