If you’ve spent time reading any of Britain’s billionaire newspapers, tuned into Murdoch’s TalkTV, or seen various culture warriors on the BBC, then you’ll doubtless be familiar with many of the common talking points of climate denial that pass for environmental commentary in much of our mainstream media.
One of the most tiresome of these was recently repeated amid a flurry of clean energy misinformation by the journalist Peter Hitchens on the BBC’s Question Time, and is often levelled against the token environmentalist on such discussion panels as the ultimate ‘gotcha’: what about China? China, the argument goes, continues to increase coal power generation at a rapid rate and has huge national emissions, therefore it doesn’t matter what we do in the UK to achieve net zero.
It is indeed true that China has, by a wide margin, the largest annual CO2 emissions in the world, although it’s worth noting that this is a country of 1.4bn people and on a per capita basis its emissions are well below the United States and about level with Germany. It’s also true that when looking exclusively at coal emissions China now exceeds the rest of the world combined, and continues to expand coal power at a recklessly unsustainable rate. That’s a huge problem, and with the prospects for internal democratic pressure curtailed within China, it’s incumbent upon the rest of the world to maintain external pressure for this to stop.
Climate crisis – a collective global problem
However, there are several problems with the efforts of western governments and pundits to pass the buck onto China when it comes to climate action.
Firstly, it’s a simple abdication of our own national responsibility – a responsibility that’s all the greater when viewed cumulatively since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Claiming that the UK’s emissions are proportionately too small to make a difference is both scientific and moral nonsense. Every emitted CO2-equivalent tonne of greenhouse gas matters, and the atmosphere doesn’t care where it comes from.
When people state that they don’t bother voting because their vote doesn’t make a difference one way or another, we rightly view that as silly; if everybody took the same position democracy would cease to operate. Similarly, if all the countries individually representing less than two per cent of emissions (almost every country) washed their hands of any responsibility for climate action, we would cook the planet over the next couple of decades. The climate crisis is a collective global problem that requires collective global action.
Casting China only as world leader in emissions lacks nuance
It should also be noted that China is a major exporter of manufactured goods, and the ‘embodied carbon’ in these exports has been estimated to contribute up to 20 per cent of China’s national emissions. These should be seen as outsourced emissions coming mainly from western nations. While such carbon accounting tricks may not greatly change the overall picture regarding the leading role of China as an emitter, they do allow countries like the UK to make spurious claims about our own progress, when in fact our increased reliance on imported goods offsets much of the decrease in our own territorial emissions.
Moreover, casting China as the coal burning laggard omits important nuance. For instance, China leads the world in clean energy generation, and now holds a third of global renewable energy capacity. This is due to rapid growth in the sector over the last 10-15 years, with Chinese solar capacity increasing by 50 per cent a year between 2012 and 2022.
Focusing on actual electricity generated, rather than capacity, we see that China’s additional yearly output – not total, but additional – from new solar and wind installations is now roughly sufficient to cover the total electricity demand of Australia, Spain or the UK.
A similar picture appears when one looks at the global growth in electric vehicles (EVs). As recently as 2020, having already begun rolling out EVs, China set a target for 20 per cent of new car sales to be electric by 2025. This target had already been beaten by 2022 when electric cars made up 29 per cent of sales in China, almost doubling from the previous year. Of course, with most of China’s electricity still coming from coal, the benefit of EVs is reduced compared to a country with a cleaner electricity mix, but still an improvement on combustion vehicles.
Contradictory positions of climate deniers
It is here that we see most starkly the insincerity of the British climate denial commentariat heaping the blame on to China: one moment they say that China isn’t taking action on climate so there’s no point in us bothering. But then they claim that the UK must delay its planned ban on new combustion vehicles, otherwise our own manufacturers would be unable to compete with the Chinese EVs flooding our markets. These positions are contradictory. Yes, China is the largest emitting nation, but it’s also moving in the right direction more rapidly than most other large economies. In this respect, the G7 nations should be following its example.
Of course, these excuses aren’t supposed to make sense. Climate denying culture warriors don’t care about logical consistency any more than they care about the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed, displaced or impoverished – or the tens of thousands of species that could be wiped out – due to climate change. They simply repeat whatever is most convenient to defend planet-destroying industries and the economic establishment that relies on them. The whataboutery directed at China is a paper tiger – an intellectually dishonest distraction. The UK government is responsible for its own transition to net-zero as rapidly as possible, and we as British citizens have the democratic right to hold none other than our own government to account for failing to do so. We must exercise that right with all the energy and rigour that we can.
