On July 19, reports surfaced that Chinese President Xi Jinping would be backing his country — the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions — out of any former commitments to reducing emissions. Experts say the move is merely the latest in a string of failures by the Biden administration to successfully engage China, showcasing not only American weakness on the global stage but also an untrustworthy communist regime.
The announcement from Xi comes at a particularly embarrassing time for the Biden administration, as U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was in the middle of holding talks with his Chinese counterpart. Kerry later admitted that he was unable to “break new ground” on a climate agreement.
Experts say that the decision of Xi to back away from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, in which he then pledged to peak his country’s emissions by 2030, means that Biden administration-led efforts to dramatically curtail U.S. emissions at steep economic cost will yield no net reduction in global emissions and a negligible reduction in global temperature. As The Heritage Foundation’s Diana Furchtgott-Roth has written:
“In April, the EPA released a proposed tailpipe rule that would require 60 percent of new vehicle sales to be battery-powered electric by 2030, and two-thirds by 2032. And in May, the EPA proposed a power-plant rule that would require most power plants to sequester, or bury, 90 percent of their carbon emissions, or go out of business by 2040.
“These rules would result in tens of billions of dollars in annual costs to the U.S. economy — and with no reduction to global emissions, if China replaces U.S. emissions with its own emissions.
“Even if the United States were to get rid of all fossil fuels, this would only make a difference of two-tenths of one degree Celsius in the year 2100, according to Heritage Foundation chief statistician Kevin Dayaratna.”
Xi’s announcement appears to be a further indication of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) indifference toward the Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s June visit to China did not result in any significant diplomatic breakthroughs, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s July visit only resulted in headlines about her awkward bows instead of any notable changes in the two country’s economic relationship.
“Since coming into office, President Biden has been courting Chinese leaders to get their cooperation on climate change,” Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “Thus far, U.S. officials have failed to secure any real agreement or even to improve working relations with their Chinese counterparts. This is a colossal failure for the Biden administration, and it confirms what conservatives already knew — that the CCP is not interested in working with the United States on any issue, whether our concerns are valid or not.”
The climate reversal appears to be the latest example of the communist regime’s elusiveness. Earlier this week, it came to light that the CCP’s official reported numbers of deaths in China due to COVID were vastly distorted, with the actual number likely 1.4 million deaths higher than what the CCP reported. This follows the well-documented efforts of the regime to hamper the investigation into the origins of the pandemic, which appears to have resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan despite intense denials from the CCP, who in 2021 claimed the virus was leaked from a U.S. Army lab.
The CCP has also claimed that its network of forced labor camps in the Xinjiang province are merely “vocational skills education and training” centers, despite widespread evidence that at least 1.3 million ethnic Uyghurs are forcibly detained in the camps and subjected to torture, forced abortions and sterilizations, rape, medical experiments, and more.
The CCP has also denied that it engages in forcible organ harvesting, despite extensive evidence that the regime carries out the practice on Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians who are imprisoned due to their religious beliefs.
“We need to have a clear-eyed view regarding what the CCP’s agenda is,” Del Turco concluded. “Its goal is to amass more power at just about any expense, and they simply don’t care about the progressive causes that the Biden administration has been desperate to get them on board with.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
