Reblogged:China: Have the Greens Ever Heard of It?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

The rhetorical question above answers itself, so let's take a gander at a recent piece at Issues and Insights, which takes as its point of departure this finding in a study from China:

[M]ore than half of the world's urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, and 23 of them are located in China. [link omitted]

Not a single city of these top 25 is in the United States.

The piece goes on, drawing a parallel between China's roles in global warming climate change "the climate crisis" and plastic debris in the ocean -- another thing Americans are constantly being pestered about:

Image by Mike Marrah, via Unsplash, license.

The data show 90% of ocean plastic pours into the sea from "the top 10 rivers with the highest loads" of plastic debris, according to the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. None are in the U.S., which contributes only about 1% percent of all plastic debris found at sea. Eight of them though are in Asia, while two are in Africa.

While it provides useful information, the Sun Yat-sen study isn't a shocking revelation. We've known for at least a decade that while agitators campaigned to force developed economies to eliminate fossil fuel use, China and India have been busy building hundreds of coal plants in an effort to spread the First World prosperity that the climate alarmists have enjoyed their entire lives. Late last year, the Canadian Energy Centre, affiliated with the Alberta government, reported that as of 2020, 350 coal-fired power plants were under construction worldwide. Seven were in South Korea, another 13 in Japan. But China and India were building 184 and 52 plants, respectively. [links omitted]

One minor correction is in order: Whatever component of the waste in the oceans ultimately wound up there from the U.S. quite likely came from recycling programs: Until recently, China and other Asian countries bought our plastic waste and then failed to landfill what they didn't use as chemical feedstocks. Much of that ends up in rivers, unlike anything that is buried in a well-contructed landfill.

If ever there was a case for leave it in the ground -- or at least in this case, put it there, plastic waste -- and not the fuel that we need -- fits the bill.

But back to whatever the left is currently calling its crusade for myopically blaming the West for everything, turning a blind eye to the rest of the world, and cajoling the West into suicide: Either the catastrophist left has never heard of China, or it doesn't care about such facts.

The corollary questions all of us should ask: (1) Why take advice from someone with such breathtaking ignorance? Or (2) Why take advice from someone who is blatantly concerned with only one fact: Whether we are obeying them or not.

And do note we are being charitable here: We haven't even asked them to explain why they regard reducing fossil fuel use is on balance a good thing, which is highly questionable, to say the least.

-- CAV

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