The best bit about the Herald’s headline is the last two words: “for now.” The most blindly optimistic words in journalism this year:
China’s top climate change negotiator says the world’s biggest carbon polluter has no intention of capping greenhouse gas emissions for the time being.
Su Wei, who led China’s negotiating team at the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen in December, said the country’s carbon emissions had to increase because the economy is still developing, the China Daily reported on Thursday.
China “could not and should not” set an upper limit on greenhouse gas emissions at the current stage, Su told a meeting on climate change policy in Beijing on Wednesday.
However, he said China was committed to making its economy more energy-efficient.
Beijing has pledged to reduce its carbon intensity – the measure of greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of gross domestic product – by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 based on 2005 levels.
Su said that pledge would be a binding part of China’s next two five-year economic development plans.
His remarks came a day after President Hu Jintao told a high-level Communist Party meeting that China must “recognise the importance, urgency and difficulty of dealing with climate change”.
Looks like they are saying nice reassuring things to pull the wool over the UN’s eyes, but in fact carrying on exactly as before, business as usual.
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
What a concept and an irony. Communist China’s political lealders are more concerned about the properity of its people than the fauning approval of a UN committee. Leaders in western democracies seem to be under a differnt set of constaints.