While the Chinese government does many good things, they often work in underhand ways that would be considered unacceptable in the West.
Recently one of the Chinese Communist Party run media organisations put out an article questioning Greta thunberg’s vegetarianism, on the basis that they thought she looked overweight, and calling her an environmental princess.
You would think it would be too pathetic for a country to try to fat-shame an environmental campaigner. China is determined to continue to live as they are now. The problem is that there emissions are so high, even if the rest of the world went to zero emissions China would still push us into acceptable levels of global warming.
It is a fact that 17.9% of the world’s population live in China. All countries around the world both with emerging economies and those more mature must cut their carbon emissions. This sort of behaviour may play well within China, however it does not reduce the need for China to cut its emissions, and it makes the rest of the world look at them as rather pathetic.
Derogatory names for clean economies are often use by all sorts of leaders. Boris Johnson told Joe Biden the president of the USA that there was nothing wrong with bunny hugging – it would appear that Boris Johnson was rather clumsily making the point that moving in a green direction is good for the world’s economy and is not merely good for the natural world. Forget bunny hugging, it is illogical to poison the world if in the long run it is cheaper to do it cleanly anyway.
A change of direction is clearly needed. The costs china will suffer due to runaway global warming will also be huge, they will not be suffered only by other people.