By Paul Homewood
Since Trump’s election, there has been a concerted and clearly well organised attempt to portray China as stepping up to take the global lead in the fight against climate change. As public interest in Net Zero wanes, both here and in much of the Western world, to the climate establishment it is important to gaslight us that the rest of the world is still going hell for leather in the fight and that we must continue to do our bit.
The same happened, I recall, during Trump’s first term, but apparently nobody at the time told China!
Accordingly, the BBC News have just published a glowing report called “As Trump retreats from climate goals, China is becoming a green superpower” – see here. It starts:
“How the world’s biggest carbon emitter is now at the helm of a renewables revolution”
Using fancy graphics, it concocts a picture of the country rapidly changing to green energy, in the process putting the rest of us to shame. Becoming a renewables superpower, as they put it. The report goes on:
“China has added more capacity for generating solar energy than the rest of the world combined for several years. The same is true for wind power.”
What the BBC fail to mention is the fact that everything in China happens on a giant scale, because the country itself is so big. China produces 35 times as much electricity as the UK and more than the US and EU combined. So of course they produce more solar and power than we do.
But as a percentage of total electricity generation, it is a completely different story. Let’s start with CO2 emissions, which give the lie to the claim that China has any interest in meaningful reductions:
There has been a gradual rise in the share of renewable and nuclear in the overall energy mix since 2010, but it remains well below the UK. Here, wind and solar power accounted for 35% of our electricity in 2024; in China the figure was just 18%.
But most significant of all, China’s consumption of fossil fuels continues to rocket, in stark contrast to a steady decline here. Interestingly, for those with Trump Derangement Syndrome, fossil fuel use in the States has barely changed since Obama came to power, regardless of who was President.
China, of course, has plenty of deserts, which are ideal for building solar farms on. But they know full well they can’t run a power grid on intermittent renewable energy alone. That is why they opened another 78 GW of coal power plants last year, adding 6% to the total capacity. Another 83 GW is currently under construction.
As we know, what China is very good at is making all of the green paraphernalia and selling it to us – solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, rare earths and so on. All, by the way, made with the use of cheap coal power and often leaving behind appalling environmental devastation.
While we farm out our energy security to China and send them billions to buy products made with Uighur slave labour, the BBC praises them for “saving the planet”!
