China announced its plans for future cuts to greenhouse gas emissions on Wednesday, producing a scathing response from experts who said they were much too weak to stave off global catastrophe.
Oh, right.
But experts said China was failing to show leadership in its climate commitments. Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and governance at the E3G thinktank, said: “China’s 2035 target falls critically short of what is needed. It’s neither aligned with China’s economic decarbonisation, nor its own 2060 carbon neutrality goal.
“Without stronger near-term ambition, China risks undermining its claim to upholding multilateralism and its clean economy leadership, and sending mixed signals to global markets.”
Who pays for that think tank?
Well, we do. DfID, DBEIS, Bristol City Council (who would have guessed that wicks would get dipped into the finances of a Green Party council?), FCO, London Sustainable Development Commission (which I assume is us taxpayers again) and so on.
Aren’t we lucky that we get to pay for some grifter to advise Mr Xi on how to burnish his international reputation?
And they say there is no room for cuts in public spending…
Reuters reported this story as:
A headline which indicates Reuters cannot be trusted on anything. Its hacks are activists and liars.
To be fair to the various useless mouths Tim quotes above, at least they have recognised the utter meaninglessness of China’s ‘target’.
And the E3G Board is a sunset home for ageing environmentalists, like Isabel Hilton and Tom Burke…
Ms Browns Instagram pages shows that she keeps a careful eye on her carbon footprint with holidays in the Turks&Caicos, Hawaii, regular European trips and a nice SUV.
I’m so glad these people make such sacrifices for us little people.
It’s all just a grift, a status thing. Like I got berated by a woman at work for putting a can in the wrong bin. I asked her to tell me what car she drove to work, how far and how many foreign holidays. She shut up at that point.
Without being a Gaia worshipper, I’m greener than most of the people who claim to be. Work from home, get around on public transport, nearly all foreign holidays in Europe (honestly, I don’t get why you’d bother with long haul generally).
Likewise. I’m as anti-Green as you can get, yet my lifestyle is probably far more eco-friendly than the vast majority of people. I haven’t been on a plane in nearly 20 years (travelled a lot in my 30s, bored with it now), I drive several vehicles, the youngest of which is 15 years old, my house is heated largely from wood, my house is furnished with second hand items, I only throw stuff out when its totally worn out, I mend items as much as I can.
WB, Jim, I’m much the same. Homebody, mostly public transport, occasional flights for work but we’re talking 500km puddle jumpers here, not across the world. Stuff gets used until it can’t be repaired. The missus has much the same attitude. But people consider us right wing and anti green (apparently these are synonyms these days). Go figure.
When did the climate crisis escalate into a climate catastrophe?
Because of Journalistic One-Uppance, and ever louder REEEEE!!!-ing by the usual suspects.
It’s really all under the “Divers Alarums” in the Ankh-Morpork Almanack.
Also: Incentives… Climate Catastrophe gets you more seats at comfy Commissions, and outranks the people doing mere “Climate Crisis”….. Those are yesterday’s has-beens…
If what they said was that mild I assume some significant support from the country under analysis.
China increases its CO2 emissions every couple of years by than the UK produces in total.
UK produces much less than 1% of man made CO2 emissions and the overall amount is going down as we destroy our economy, If we stopped tomorrow it would make sod all difference to the planet. (Even if you do happen to believe that the difference man-made CO2 makes to overall CO2 is material, and that CO2 is in some way driving whatever change in climate might be happening).
Remarkable resemblance to the imbecilic policies Oz has adopted.
I of course believe that Liberals should promptly dump net zero and offer a sensible alternative to Labor’s idiotic climate change policies. I think the reason Dutton’s policy of building nukes to make sure we had plentiful reliable electricity failed was because the campaign against nukes has going on much longer than the net zero garbage.
Just keep the coal burners running, and make sure all transport is powered by petrol. The moronism of the Greens will eventually mean that even the stupidest voters will agree that nothing else works.
Why anyone cares what China’s targets are I don’t know. The numbers will be whatever they need to be when the time comes.
I once had to deal with a problem with some electronic signage we had supplied. The quick disconnect system worked very well for the prototypes, type testing for six months in the field. Our vendor substituted the original connectors sourced from the US with a Chinese “equivalent” product for the production run, without our knowledge. They leaked like hell. As a start, we requested confirmation of the IP rating. Next day we got a page entirely in Chinese except for a very prominent “IP65” which had obviously been pasted in. You want that spec, no problem!
It was obviously a vendor problem so they carried most of cost of retrofitting every sign, *after* they had gone up, but it was still a major pain in the arse for us.
I’m not particularly inclined to believe any number coming out of China.
Mrs Nerd of blessed memory was an electronics component purchaser. She would not touch anything from China, no matter how cheap.
She was a wise woman CJ Nerd. Sorry for your loss.
It can be done. Western companies with a local presence there and direct supervision over the factory, sure, that can work. “We’re getting the circuit boards made in China” or “they can supply these parts to the same spec, it will save a fortune” , show me the exit.
I worked for an auto parts importer and wholesaler. When I joined them they were a few months away from bankruptcy. Fortunately about the same time we got a new buyer. Up to that point the company philosophy had been to buy parts of a quality you would fit on your own car. Danny (not his real name) understood that we bought parts not to use them ourselves, but to sell to spares shops. Who in turn bought the parts not to use themselves, but to sell to garages and backyard mechanics.
So, we bought the parts for half the price from China.
Many of our parts were for minbus taxis. Whenever I read a headline “Thirteen killed in taxi horror smash,” I had a good idea where they got their parts from.
What a thoroughly British thing to say. No one else in the world gives a shit about ‘leadership.’
Not sure it’s a particularly British thing. I could imagine an American counterpart saying the same thing.
Either way, it’s prating humbug performed by pious priggish prodnoses.
China promises to continue to tell lies about its pollution but you Gwailos had better keep impoverishing yourselves n the meantime and sending your jobs and money to China.
Seems fair.
Yep. Britain needs to pay for sins committed 300 years ago . . . when they weren’t sins.
This is a great article about China’s centrally planned car industry, which has succeeded in ensuring that car manufacturing and sales is wildly unprofitable in China, and created an enormous glut of unsellable cars they’re desperate to offload to foreigners:
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-world-beating-auto-industry-into-tailspin-2025-09-17/
People follow incentives, and in China senior government figures are incentivised to do whatever it takes to not be removed and jailed by the Chinese Communist Party, so they do economically stupid things and constantly lie. It’s a bit like Britain.
China risks us thinking less favorably of them! Yeah, that’ll get them to react.
Reminded of when the Autopen admin abandoned Afghanistan & the press sec’y explained that things would be OK for women, girls & gays, etc. because otherwise Afghanistan risked being frowned at by Western nations.
Consider yourself sternly harrumphed sir!
On the subject of “Who pays?”. Mr Coffee & Covid writes today about Routh, the man just found guilty of attempting to assassinate Trump.
“I would still like to know how the unemployed contractor paid for all his international travel, full-time advocacy for Ukraine, vehicles, and weapons, and $150K assassination offer money though. I smell USAID and NGOs.”
Remember most of us expected them to either jail or kill Trump before the election?
And they did try. Seems the modern, diverse CIA is no longer competent enough to assassinate their president.
Btw it’s strange how that other young man – mysteriously with no internet footprint – nearly succeeded in murdering Donald Trump and we haven’t heard a peep about him since. You don’t need Mulder and Scully to clue you in to that one.
(A) The catastrophe will never happen, except in the minds of catastrophists who are obscenely well-paid to think so.
(B) China is sitting in what the transatlantic people call the catbird seat. China has seen its Western competitors cripple themselves with obscenely high energy costs, carbon taxes, and ten-year planning delays. David Ricardo wrote at length about competitive advantage, which the West has handed to China on a solid gold platter.
Very kind of Germany to offer up their auto industry and their chemicals industry to China and India on a plate.
It’s a bloodbath over there. Bosch is the latest to announce massive job losses. So the EU is continuing down the path of:
* The largest migration of human beings in history to the smallest, most crowded continent on Earth
* The most expensive forms of generating electricity known to science
* Enraging the native population with anti-democratic, anti-free speech gayops and the two tier criminal justice system
* Continuing to borrow money to pay for its own economic and demographic destruction
And if you oppose this, you’re far right.
Nice one, Steve!
If you ever have doubts about the whole climate change/crisis/catastrophe stuff being utter nonsense, I would recommend regular visits to the excellent blog of Paul Homewood. He systematically demolishes the claims of the climate alarmists on a regular basis. A recent example is a post about worldwide grain production, this has long been claimed by the climate alarmists to be under threat, but just keeps going up. Another recent post is about repeated failed predictions that the North Pole will be ice free.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/