WHY CHINA LEADS THE WAY....



'At the United Nations climate summit in September, President Xi Jinping announced that China was committing to cut carbon dioxide and other pollution by at least 7 to 10 percent by 2035 – the first time that China has set a concrete target for reducing emissions as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement.

Credible evidence suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions have already peaked, FIVE YEARS EARLIER THAN PROMISED......

Mainstream political and economic discourse in the West has been dominated by the notion that “markets will fix everything”, consistent with the neoliberal paradigm that has reigned supreme for the last several decades. The forces of supply and demand were supposed to bring about a green transition, as fossil fuels became more expensive and renewables became cheaper.

Since this has failed to materialise, another neoliberal fantasy has taken hold: that individual consumers can save the planet by changing their lifestyles. We only have to drive electric cars, eat less meat, recycle more, fly less, take shorter showers, and so on. The crisis is thereby individualised, and the capitalist system is absolved of all responsibility...

The Biden administration was at least better at a rhetorical level, but in reality prioritised its geopolitical confrontation with China and Russia – and service to the largest of corporate capitals – above international cooperation on environmental issues. Under Biden, the US placed sanctions on Chinese solar panels and polysilicon, as well as imposing huge tariffs on Chinese EVs. The proxy war against Russia has provided an extraordinary shot in the arm for the shale gas sector in the US. This gas is extracted via hydraulic fracturing – itself a dangerous process – and is then cooled to minus 70 degrees celsius in order to liquify it, whereupon it is shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. An ecological absurdity.

Meanwhile the US military is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any institution on Earth. If it were a country, it would rank 47th globally in emissions, ahead of Sweden and Portugal.....

In the West, fossil fuel companies exert an alarming level of political influence. Major oil firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against climate action and working to dilute international agreements, in addition to funding disinformation campaigns to cast doubt on the science around climate change. Such a problem does not exist in China, because its socialist system has broken the correlation between economic wealth and political power.'




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