When Presidentish Joe Biden and Communist Chinese strongman Xi Jinping virtually shook hands in San Francisco last week over a new agreement "to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar, and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels," Xi kept his left hand behind his back, fingers crossed, while smiling and thinking, "Shǎguā!"
In simplified Chinese, it looks like this: "傻瓜!" The English, roughly translated, is "sucker!"
And I've got the receipts to show what a sucker — or perhaps "stooge" might be the better word — Biden is for Xi's "green" agenda.
(Any mistakes in translation are courtesy of Google.)
Despite public promises that both countries will "pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030” and “anticipate post-peaking meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction, in this critical decade of the 2020s," Xi's China will continue "mining record amounts of coal and also importing record volumes of coal as it looks to boost its energy security," according to Tsvetana Paraskova at OilPrice.
There's also that word "globally" that sticks out like a purple-haired vegan Green Nude Eel protestor at a Midland, Texas, burger joint on a Friday night.
Xi didn't commit to tripling its own renewables by 2030. It committed to nothing more than "pursuing efforts" to triple capacity around the world. That means China will keep burning all the coal it wants while making billions selling us the solar panels whose unreliable energy production — and expensive disposal — will help hamstring our economy, relative to China's, for decades to come.
And how much coal will China burn, really? Before today, I understood the vague outline — that China was building more and more carbon-emitting coal-burning power plants, while Biden was giving away millions in corporate welfare to force Americans off our efficient gas furnaces and onto lame heat pumps that don't produce much heat when it's freezing outside.
But the actual numbers shocked even my jaded self.
In a piece from Monday headlined "Beijing’s Coal Boom Is Here to Stay," RealClearEnergy's Vijay Jayaraj laid out the figures.
"Last year, 82% of the total energy consumed by China came from coal, oil and natural gas," Jayaraj reported. "Wind and solar, despite significant investments by Beijing, represented just 7% of all energy consumed in 2022." It's enough to make you wonder how much of China's "significant investments" in renewables are merely Potemkin villages for fooling America's willing (or well-paid) suckers.
"At 159 exajoules, China’s primary energy consumption in 2022 was the highest in the world and 40% more than that consumed [by] the U.S. -- the second largest user." And they're burning ever-increasing amounts of coal to do it.
When Jayaraj asked, "Why is China doing this despite climate pledges?" it's safe to assume he was being merely rhetorical. China makes the pledge to sucker the West, and then goes about the merry business of protecting its national interests, as Jayaraj reported elsewhere in his piece, by pursuing "the most affordable, abundant and dependable energy source," and that's coal. If Xi can get the West to harm our national interests with the Left's Greener-Than-Thou agenda, so much the better.
While Xi was making a shǎguā out of Biden in San Francisco, Foreign Policy ran this piece: "China Pledged to ‘Strictly Control’ Coal. The Opposite Happened." FP reminded readers of Xi's 2021 pledge to "strictly control coal-fired power generation projects," but "in the two years before Xi’s pledge, the government approved 127 plants, collectively capable of producing 54 gigawatts of coal power. In the two years after, that number rose to 182 plants, with 131 gigawatts of coal power. "
China's coal-burning capacity doubled in just four years, according to FP. All the while, Xi smiled for the cameras while various Western leaders shook hands with him over agreements they'd stick to but Beijing wouldn't.
Forget shǎguā. Somebody, please explain to Biden the Chinese word for schmuck.
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