China building hundreds of coal plants

The New York Times, one of the most angry critics of president Trump’s decision to pull out of former president Barack Obama’s Paris climate deal, has admitted that China’s coal plans make it “virtually impossible” to meet the Paris accord goals.

“When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to ‘bring back coal’ in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change,” the NYT reported. “But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants, paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.”

“Over all, 1600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries,” the daily added. And Chinese companies such as SPIC, China Datang, Shenhua, China Huadian, China Huaneng, and China Guodian account for 45 percent of the construction. “These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

“The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord.”

So why is China not singled out as a culprit in the UN’s Paris climate agreement? They offered only a non-binding intention to clean up in the distant future, which should alarm climate activists.

Despite China’s terrible record, California Governor Jerry Brown traveled to Beijing to voice his “resistance” against president Trump’s position on the UN’s Paris climate accord. Governor Brown, who poses as a human-rights activist, believes in fighting “climate change”, but strangely not in China.

The climate issue is beginning to look a lot like another UN charade, a fictitious commitment to reform, called an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), by which each country sets out its energy plan for the next 13 years, up to 2030.

As Christopher Booker noted on July 15 in the British Telegraph, the INDC is a typical UN scam: “Donald Trump took the heat, but the rest of the G20’s posturing won’t hide their rising emissions.”

Developing countries China and India, say they will be investing in “renewables” such as wind and solar, so long as they are generously subsidised by the US and Europe through the Green Climate Fund worth $100 billion a year.

Despite many promises to clean up, these countries nevertheless plan to build huge numbers of new fossil fuel power stations, which would lead to a massive increase in CO2 emissions. In fact, 13 of the signatories of the most recent G20 communiqué, intend to contribute to what the INDCs show will within 13 years be a 46 percent rise in global emissions.

The UN Paris deal has been promoted as the only solution to what would otherwise be an apocalyptic increase of less than 2°C over pre-industrial levels. However, and despite enough hard evidence that CO2 levels have great impact on global temperatures, any conceivable UN climate solution scenario, will be so miniscule as to be undetectable.

Danish climate researcher Dr. Bjørn Lomborg believes that “if we measure the impact of every nation fulfilling every promise by 2030, the total temperature reduction will be 0.048°C (0.086°F) by 2100.” That’s less than five-hundredths of one degree. As many scientists and statisticians have observed, that amount is not even distinguishable from the various “noise” factors included in the temperature data.

Lomborg used the same MAGICC climate model software that was developed with funding from the US EPA and that has been used in all five of the UN IPCC reports. “Even if we assume that these promises would be extended for another 70 years, there is still little impact: if every nation fulfills every promise by 2030, and continues to fulfill these promises faithfully until the end of the century… the entirety of the Paris promises will reduce temperature rises by just 0.17°C (0.306°F) by 2100.” Such measures will thus have virtually zero effect on global temperatures.

Lomborg also admits that “subsidizing inefficient renewables is expensive and doesn’t work. The IEA estimates that we get 0.4 percent of our energy from wind and solar PV right now, and even in optimistic scenarios the fraction will only rise to 2.2 percent by 2040. Over the next 25 years, we’ll spend about $2.5 trillion in subsidies and reduce global warming temperatures by less than 0.02°C.”

Essentially the Paris accord will have negligible impact on global temperatures as well as cost trillions of dollars. And who is going to pay?

As former UN climate chief Christiana Figuerres stated in 2012 at the UN’s Doha Conference: “It must be understood that what is occurring here, not just in Doha, but in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”