China Continues to Boost Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Op-Ed

Despite a declining population and market for its exports, China is massively expanding its fossil fueled power generation.

Just as China built thousands of ghost cities with no one to inhabit them and ended up demolishing many of them, it is now building massive electrical power generation using dirty fossil fuels when the need for energy is actually declining.

Already the world's leader by far in greenhouse gas emissions, China is in a mad race with itself to accelerate planetary destruction. 

China's National Energy Administration (NEA) recently issued its "guiding opinions" for its energy work in 2024 and stated that total national energy production should reach "about 5bn tons of standard coal"; crude oil production should stabilize at "more than 200m tons"; natural gas production should continue on its "rapid upward trend"; power generation capacity should reach 3.2 terawatts and that wind and solar power should account for only 17% of national power generation. 

According to Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, China's Australian coal imports rose by "3,188% year-on-year to $1.3bn" in January and February 2024. Australia is more than happy to do its part to boost global warming and catastrophic runaway climate disaster. 

Solar is by far the least expensive way to generate power, especially in China where solar panels can sell for less than $0.15/watt. China has substantial solar power in place but needs much more. 

Not content to destroy the Earth from China, the dictatorship is also keen on building as many coal-fired power plants in other countries as possible. 

Communist party propaganda newspaper People's Daily says that Chinese clean-energy companies have been "continuing to expand into overseas markets" and that "vast" market opportunities exist for Chinese firms.

At yesterday's opening ceremony of the China Development Forum 2024 in Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Qiang promised to intensify macro-policy adjustments, expand domestic demand, promote a new type of people-centered urbanization, and advance large-scale equipment renewal and trade-ins of durable consumer goods. He also said that China will promote industrial innovation through scientific and technological innovation, accelerate the development of new quality productive forces, and push forward green transformation, while also addressing both symptoms and root causes of challenges to prevent and defuse risks and hidden dangers.

China's geriatric rulers are caught in the flawed thinking that China must continue to grow in every aspect and that making the climate crisis worse won't impact them, even though it already is. As a totalitarian dictatorship, China's government consistently fails to lead the nation in a direction towards sustainability and only towards certain doom.