China's Future Impact

With some campaigners estimating that in just nine years' time, global emissions of greenhouse gases are set to be roughly double the level required to meet the goal of holding the temperature rise to 1.5C, China's rush to 'modernise' its economy since 1975, and its wish to dominate the second half of the current century and beyond, has a price ..... 

China's Economic Aims Are On Target - But At A Price

 ..... not just for its immediate neighbours, who now live under its ever more aggressive political and military threat (the claim to the entire South China Sea is an example of this threat), but also for the urgent fight against global warming.

The NGO group Global Energy Monitor, recently reported that Chin's coal based power production has increased by 43 Gigawatt's in the last 18 months or so. This expansion is about the same as Germany's current total production of energy by the same method. Imagine, a new German economy every 18 months ....

 

World Greenhouse Emissions

.... of course this growth is also ravaging the Chinese homelands ecological balance, and puts even more pressure upon it to expand its trade power, and even possibly contemplate a future land grab, if it wants to continue to feed its population. 

 

China currently runs 1,058 coal plants - which more than half the world's coal power station capacity. In fact Chinese greenhouse gas emissions are now greater than the entire developed world combined. The Rhodium Group think tank says that of  the world's total greenhouse gases in emitted in 2019:

• China emitted 27%
• The USA 11%
• India  6.6%  

and while China has vowed that its emissions will peak no later than 2030, and in fact reach net-zero emissions by 2060, many think that this is unlikely, and in any case possibly two or three decades too late. So while China talks the talk, at forums such as November 2021's COP26 in Glasgow, which aims to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement ... in practice it doesn't really walk the walk.

 

Now given China's sensitivity to any, even the slightest, criticism, then perhaps its no surprise that environmental pressure groups, who blockade our motorways or picket our governments, have largely ignored China's role in the current global warming, in favour of blaming 'historic' global warmers in Europe and Noth America. They fear that any finger pointing at nationalist communist China, will simply result in their offices in Beijing being closed, and even risk their China based staff being charged (which in China means convicted), with some trumped up criminal activities.    

So groups such as WWF and Friends of the Earth downplay China's current leading role in global warming, by saying that they concentrate their campaigning on "global collective responsibility - not on any single nation," or "The UK government, with its historic contribution to climate change ..." to the detriment of the bigger picture (after all China produces 28% of global emissions and the UK just 1%). After all, most of the 'historic' warmers who are being attacked, are now making huge cuts to their emissions, while China is only making promises of possible future cuts.

 

China's Carbon Emission's Growth Since 1959 .....

So a very unvirtuous circle is developing (largely unchallenged) in China, which is pushing it and us to the very verge of global environmental collapse, as well as it in to ever more aggressive political and military stances, which could easily precipitate a war with its neighbours, the USA, or even its northern neighbour Russia (They have long eyed Siberia to the north, as under used land that they could better exploit, rather than the Russians).

China Mocks The G7 Group .....

So while China's territorial (Taiwan, and South China Seas), and political (Worlds number one economy and superpower), ambitions may or may not be thwarted, if it carries on paying only lip service to the fight against global warming, then the damage inflicted on the world via the Covid-19 pandemic, will seem like small beer compared with the global havoc China's contribution to global warming will cause.