"Low carbon" China
See? Australia is lagging behind China in cutting emissions. Disgraceful. We must follow China’s lead and implement Julia and Greg’s wonderful carbon tax to cut our emissions from 1.3% of the global total to just a teensy-weensy bit less than 1.3%, at a cost of several billion dollars each year, which will be slugged mercilessly from the wallets of every family in Australia…, every year…, for ever…
CLIMATE change adviser Ross Garnaut says China is experimenting with carbon trading in a number of large cities because it knows that’s the cheapest way to reduce emissions.
The economist held talks today with the man responsible for China’s climate change policies, Xie Zhenhua, ahead of ministerial-level meetings.
Professor Garnaut said the emerging power was trialling carbon trading in five provinces and three cities – Tianjin, Shanghai and Beijing.
“The way China tends to do these things is they try them out, sometimes in different ways, and if they seem to be working they adopt them nationally,” Prof Garnaut told reporters, adding he wouldn’t presume what China’s next step would be.
“(But) they are experimenting with broader approaches like a carbon price because the economists in China as well as other places have worked out that’s a lower-cost way of doing things.”
Maybe we should copy China in other ways, like building a new coal fired power station every fortnight… no, wait. Laughably, even Greg Combet is citing China as a shining example of “tackling climate change”:
Mr Combet’s climate change department put out a briefing paper today, outlining the action China and other countries were taking to reduce emissions.
“Thirty-two countries and 10 US states already have emissions trading schemes in place,” the paper states. [24 of those countries are in the fraud-riddled EU ETS, aren’t they? And it’s nine US states now that New Hampshire has bailed out of the RGGI, isn’t it – Ed]
On China, it notes that Beijing’s latest 12-year plan speaks of an imperative for the country to establish a “green, low-carbon development concept”.
China’s new targets include:
- increasing the proportion of non-fossil fuels in energy consumption to 11.4 per cent by 2015;
- reducing energy per unit of GDP by 16 per cent by 2015;
- reducing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 17 per cent by 2015.
China? Low carbon? My aching sides. Of course, the “trick” to “hide the incline” is the magic words “per unit of GDP”. So let’s do the math, as our US friends would say. China is likely to have a GDP growth over the next four years of, say, approximately 9% per year, so if we take 2011 as a baseline 100 units of GDP, 2012 will be 109 units, 2013 will be 118.8 units, 2014 will be 129.5 units and 2015 will be approximately 141 units. So reducing emissions by 17% per unit of GDP actually works out as an increase of 17% on 2011 figures in absolute terms.
If we take China’s 2007 emissions figure of 6.5 Gigatons of CO2, which is probably far less than in reality today, that means an increase of about 1.1 Gt CO2 per year by 2015. For comparison, Australia emitted just 0.3 Gt per year in 2007. Which means in just four years, China will increase its emissions by nearly FOUR TIMES Australia’s annual total. Any reduction our pointless carbon tax might make will be simply lost in the noise. If we manage to reduce emissions by 10% by 2015 (highly unlikely), that equates to one fortieth of China’s increase – a joke in other words.
The reality of China is that it is far more concerned with raising its population out of poverty than “tackling climate change”, and nothing Australia does will make the slightest bit of difference.
More spin than a launderette from Garnaut and Combet – but what else do we expect?
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
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