China’s Energy Dream

No weapon is more potent at crippling Western economies than the net-zero agenda.

China uses the climate agenda both as a way to strengthen its economy by continuing and growing its use of fossil fuels and as a weapon for weakening other countries by reducing theirs. It now monopolizes the global wind and solar industries, although its own renewable energy infrastructure, like renewable energy infrastructures everywhere, is unreliable (requiring thermal generation backup mostly from fossil fuels), costly, and subject to high rates of curtailment. But its domestic renewables sites serve as effective demonstration projects for tours by Western environmentalists, who then lobby their governments to buy these expensive and unreliable forms of energy. When they do, they give China two wins for the West’s two losses. On the same model of profiting from the sale to the West of crippling technologies, China hopes to dominate the electric vehicle market—and its domination of mining and refining cobalt and other minerals needed for batteries makes that result inevitable if the rest of the world takes the bait.

By pursuing unilateral climate policies—committing to reduce their own carbon dioxide emissions while China goes merrily along increasing its own—Western countries are hobbling their economies through rising energy costs, power blackouts, and other supply shortages as surely as wartime saboteurs might, only the damage is self-inflicted and systemwide.

Patricia Adams unveils all this and more in her outstanding briefing paper China’s Energy Dream, just published by our friends at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. With GWPF’s permission, we’re delighted to make China’s Energy Dream available to you in a high-quality printed edition that you can read at your leisure and conveniently share with friends.