Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
By Jo Nova
We’re facing the sixth mass extinction but carbon accounting games are a performance art and almost no one cares that the largest emitter on Earth has gaping holes in their numbers.
One reader in The Wall Street Journal, pointed out that The Onion saw this coming years ago:
“China Vows to Begin Aggressively Falsifying Air Pollution Numbers.” (2014)
The Paris Agreement allows everyone to set their own targets, and to define their own terms (and retrospectively as well). So China decided it would count “carbon intensity”, rather than carbon output. But it didn’t define carbon intensity. Normally it means the amount of CO2 emitted per unit GDP — which would work well for China with its rapidly growing economy. But something else is going on.
In the last five years China had promised to cut emissions by 18%, but all the official statistics suggested it was only getting 12% of the way there. Then a miracle happened and suddenly China was 17.7% of the way there.
The Ecoworriers team at Carbon Brief are probably the only ones who do care and they drilled through all the detail. But being as generous as they can, even they can’t explain where 380 megatons went.
To put that in perspective, Australia’s entire annual emissions was 459 megatons. It’s like someone just said Oopsie to 80% of our national emissions.
So the rules are loose, and China is taking advantage of every loophole. The CCP knows that the UN isn’t going to turn up with guns to say “pay up”. But there is a price. The whole renewables project that China profits from looks just that much more dodgy, and so does the CCP.
China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books
The Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Unlike the West’s green radicals, China isn’t willing to sacrifice its economy to meet its climate pledges. But Beijing isn’t above cooking its carbon books to gull Western activists into thinking it is.
At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal.
Old-style accounting implies China’s emission grew by a huge 1,430 megatonnes in the last five years. But the new carbon-intensity figures imply only 690 megatons of CO₂ growth, creating a 730 megatonnes from CO₂ gap.
By Lauri Myllyvirta, Carbon Brief
A major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years.
Here’s one slight of hand — only coal burnt in pursuit of energy counts. Not coal converted to plastics, asphalt, rubber, chemicals or fertilizer.
A footnote in China’s latest statistical communique offers a brief description of carbon intensity as relating to the CO2 emissions from “energy activities and industrial production”.
This indicates that the carbon-intensity calculation now includes industrial process emissions and excludes non-energy uses of fossil fuels, shown by the “new scope” in the figure above.
Remember China’s huge coal-to-liquids program that I wrote about two months ago? Every year nearly 400 million tons of coal are converted to fertilizer, chemicals, plastics, jet fuel and diesel.
And some of these accounting tricks make sense. The Tupperware containers for example, are legitimately holding their CO2 (for now). But even that trick doesn’t account for the missing CO2.
So China treats us like mugs and we cheer it on. Why?
I don’t know why they even bother with the dodgy* accounting.
The Left and the anti-energy lobby in general allow China to do whatever they want with their blessing.
Anti-energy (i.e. anti-CO2, anti-nuclear and anti-dams) policies are strictly for Western countries which the Left are trying their hardest to destroy, and at which they are succeeding.
*For our US friends “dodgy” means “shady” “sketchy” or “shifty” in your vernacular.
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The solution to this nightmare is to completely forget about CO2 “accounting” and renewables, and simply remove from power those who force them on us. We are nearly there – Donald Trump and Javier Milei and one or two others are in, and when we remove Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and a few others, together with their parties, then we will have got there. For this, Xi Jinping is irrelevant, just a different (major) problem.
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I fear that ultimately every Nation, every People will need to physically test the path of Communism to it’s fullest extent. I remember being told “The burnt hand teaches best,” and have by observation found that it’s true. The only way a True Believer can be broken of this mad ideology is to live it with no hope of change barring change they drive themselves.
That many Environmentalists push this collective view just amazes me. The Desolation of Communism is well known, but it’s just “it wasn’t done right.” What they seem unable to comprehend is that it cannot be done right, as it requires heavily centralised power to be placed in the hands of the absolute last people who should have it: those who want it. They not only fail to understand politics, they can’t parse Human Nature. They will only respond to Pain.
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“at this point, what difference does it make?”
[Hillary Clinton, Jan. 23, 2013]
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“It’s only a piece of paper”
[slimeball politricks everywhere every time]
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We need to run a poll. See how many people have woken up after the last 20 years of bullshit.
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I don’t think too many.
It’s because of the parallel campaign of the Left to dumb down the education system starting in about 1970.
This was the first thing essential for their plans.
They have effectively removed from students basic literacy and numeracy skills, general knowledge about science and nature, real history (they only teach revised history and a hatred of Western Civilisation), the ability to reason, think independently or do their own research etc..
And now in the Stupid Country (Australia), children have been banned from social media so they cannot have access to alternative opinions or educational materials not in conformity with the indoctrination they receive at school. It wasn’t “mere” incompetence that led to that decision but quite deliberate as the Left supercharge the level of indoctrination.
The next level is for the Left to ban home schooling so the state has complete control of the mind of your child and their indoctrination. It is already banned over much of Europe.
My grade 5 teacher is still alive and I am in contact with him. We often chat about his great beneficial influence on my education and lament what has happened to the schools. I was fortunate to have got through school and university before the dumbing-down was complete.
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China and the NON OECD countries have had a free ride for the last 38 years. Just spend 5 minutes online and look up the data, but I think even that’s too difficult for the delusional true believers and con merchants.
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BTW we were all supposed to be dead in 10 years and yet Prof Guy McPherson was so sure of his delusional fantasy in 2016.
But don’t worry there are plenty more left wing loonies stepping up to add to their latest fantasies and even silly Mann believes we have 50 more years left to atone for our sins.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/04/oh-no-were-all-dead-according-to-a-2016-arizona-mass-extinction-prediction/
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Jo,
The “Onion” is a satirical publication in much the same way is The Babylon Bee.
The headline was intended as a joke about widespread international skepticism regarding the reliability of some Chinese environmental statistics.
The satire works because, at the time:
China was experiencing severe air-pollution problems.
There had been allegations and studies suggesting some local authorities may have manipulated environmental data.
Yet the central government was publicly promising stronger action against pollution, with Premier Li Keqiang declaring a “war on pollution” in 2014.
In other words, The Onion’s joke was essentially:
“Instead of fixing the pollution problem, China will just fake the numbers.”
But that was satire, not an actual policy announcement. In fact, contemporary reporting shows Chinese leaders publicly committing to reduce pollution and strengthen enforcement, not to falsify data.
The article became well known because it was plausible enough that some readers initially mistook it for real news—something that has happened with Onion stories on several occasions.
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United Nations listed developing countries are not required to reduce emissions, after all they deserve economic growth and prosperity at the expense of developed countries.
sarc
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