"Joe Biden said it best: “I’m not going to speak out against what [Chinese President for Life Xi Jinping] is doing in Hong Kong, what he’s doing with the Uighurs in western mountains of China and Taiwan.… Culturally, there are different norms that each country and they — their leaders — are expected to follow.”
Biden’s acquiescence to China extends to protecting the Middle Kingdom from the Green war against coal, which was launched as an official Sierra Club campaign well over a decade ago.
In 2017, Sierra went “Beyond the War on Coal” with its video “From the Ashes,” a film condemning the U.S. coal industry as an “outdated form of energy.”
... So it’s okay that China, the world’s largest consumer of coal, not only added 28.8 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity in 2020 but is also building over 300 coal plants in countries from Turkey to the Philippines.
As Obama climate czar John Podesta explained, the new Biden directive to consider blocking the World Bank and similar institutions from funding overseas power plants “leaves China isolated” as a funder of coal projects.
The more likely result, admits Politico, of this “delicate by high-stakes waltz” is pushing energy-poor countries further into China’s orbit and threatening the U.S. position is a leading financier for the developing world.
China now has more than three times the coal-fired power capacity than the rest of the world combined and is the leading financier of coal plant construction.
This dovetails with China’s strong position on rare-earth metals.
And now China is weighing limits on exports of rare-eath metals to the U.S.
And that’s okay?
A new BBC report details accounts of Uighur women in China’s reeducation camps being “systematically raped, sexually abused, and tortured.”
Over a million men and women have been detained in these camps.
Elsewhere in China, rare-earth mining has “poisoned water and soil and caused abnormal disease rates in ‘cancer villages’ from which impoverished residents cannot afford to move.”
The Los Angeles Times report adds that, “Crops and animals have died around a crusty lake of radioactive black sludge formed from mining waste near a major mining site in Baotou, Inner Mongolia.
It’s so large that it is visible by satellite.”
... When villagers protest, they are met by riot police.
Chinese coal mining is also hazardous.
One of Joe Biden’s first acts as President was to put an end to new oil, gas, and coal leasing on federal lands.
... His former boss, Barack Obama, in his 2008 campaign promised to “bankrupt” the coal industry and make electricity prices “skyrocket.”
... Coal companies had been eying exports to Asia (including China) for years.
Reuters reported in July 2017 that U.S. coal exports had jumped more than 60 percent over the previous year “due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia.”
... West Coast cities therefore began banning coal exports through their ports.
In 2016 the Oakland (CA) City Council voted unanimously to ban the storing and handling of coal for shipment, violating a 2013 agreement with the developer of a planned $250 million bulk terminal.
The city’s ordinance was voided by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, who ruled the city’s arguments were “riddled with inaccuracies, major evidentiary gaps, erroneous assumptions, and faulty analyses.”
Last May the Ninth Circuit Court upheld Judge Chhabria’s ruling.
Other state agencies ... refused permits.
Millennium challenged these denials in both state and federal court, with little success, and last December its parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In 2020 the Richmond (CA) City Council passed an ordinance ordering businesses to phase out shipments of coal and petroleum coke from a port operated by Levin-Richmond Terminal Corp.
The port in 2019 had loaded almost a million tons bound for Japan and South Korea.
... Coastal state opposition to mountain state mining had left Vancouver, Canada, as North America’s largest exporter of coal in 2018.
Multiple facilities exported nearly 37 million metric tons of coal in 2017, much to the dismay of Environment Canada’s James Kerr, who in 2019 wrote a scathing article insisting that Canada should not be shipping U.S. coal to Asia.
... Chinese coal, though, is not too dirty for Joe Biden, who at times has pledged to fully decarbonize America.
... the Paris climate accords, which Biden quickly rejoined, protect China’s coal industry from any sanctions. ... "