At Glasgow climate change talks, the world will have a China problem

The Chinese Communist Party knows that the only way it can stay in power is by continuing the expansion in goods produced by factories running on cheap energy.

The world has once again got all worked up over climate change. This happens every now and then. Everyone is meeting in Glasgow to talk about it. Countries will make promises they can’t keep. Or have no intention of keeping.

Thus, if I may be permitted a low pun, is a copout. CoP26, as Greta Thunberg the much-celebrated climate activist has said, isn’t going to achieve anything much. 

So the big question today is not if enough countries will cooperate to do whatever is necessary to achieve the target for global warming, which is an increase of 1.5 degrees over the next 25-30 years. This falls in the first type of promises--the ones they can’t keep.

The big question is of the second type of promises: the ones they have no intention of keeping. So have no doubt: China will not do what it promises to do. It is a master of deception.

It’s record also inspires zero confidence. You only have to see the sort of groveling promises it made to the US as a way of getting into the WTO--and then how it systematically broke them.

Indeed, it has already refused to do what other countries are doing and are likely to do, namely impose a carbon tax. It says it will prefer carbon trading instead which basically means it will buy the right to pollute. 

But no one knows how if, as seems likely, the market for carbon permits gets extinguished as countries become really serious about reducing emissions.

How will China buy the right to pollute then? The answer is clear: it won’t, because it can’t and it will then go on polluting, blaming the world for not allowing it to pay for the right to pollute. Playing the innocent victim is a classic communist trick.

The China problem

‘Communist’ China is a problem not because it doesn’t realise that global warming could lead to huge hardships. It is a problem because its ruling dispensation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows that the only way it can stay in power forever is by continuing the expansion in goods--forever. 

For this it needs to provide employment for which it needs factories which need cheap energy which means fossil fuels. 

So, for China the existential threat is not the same as it is for the rest of the world, that is, for mankind; it is for the CCP. That’s the long and short of it. The world is up against a single-minded, ruthless and very focused regime which will stop at nothing to stay on in power.

It is worth being warned in this context that even if the coal and oil producing countries agree to reduce their sales of these things to China, it will very likely turn very belligerent. 

But the chances of the sheikhdoms stopping to supply China with oil is remote. Nor are many coal-producing countries likely to do so. And there is always Putin’s Russia from which to buy gas.

Yossarian’s question 

China brings to life the Yossarian question. In Joseph Heller’s 1962 classic 'Catch-22' there is a character called Yossarian who refuses to go on bombing missions during the Second World War. When asked what would happen if everyone refused, he says “Then I’d be a fool to go, isn’t it?”

In folk wisdom, there this is old story of the king who ordered that only pure milk be supplied from the next day. Every milkman thought that since all others would be supplying pure milk, he could supply pure water.

Result: the next day the palace got only pure water. This is what could happen because of China.