Prepare yourself to be shocked.
Remember when President Barack Obama was running around telling everyone how he’d convinced China to get serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions? A new report shows that Obama was easily duped.
Over the course of three years, Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to, he said, agree to “climate targets” (in 2014), “lay out additional actions” (in 2015), and sign the Paris Agreement (2016). […]
Worse, even before Obama made his boast it was clear that China’s state-controlled emissions data were unreliable. In late 2015 it came to light that the country had far more coal plants that it had admitted, and as a result had been emitting a billion tons more CO2 that it officially proclaimed. A report in Skeptical Science last year notes that CO2 emissions for China still “aren’t known with any accuracy.”
In other words, while Obama wanted the U.S. to actually cut emissions, neither he nor anyone else in the industrialized world knew what China was up to, other than what it claimed.
Now a new study shows that while China was telling Obama that it was taking bold steps on climate change, it was business as usual inside the Middle Kingdom.
It’s hard to understand the “long view” Chinese. The act as though they think the whole climate emergency thing is just a gigantic fraud.
