More Sucker Bait From China

China now says it's considering negotiating a legally-binding climate pact at the UN talks in Durban, South Africa this coming weekend. I guess they have to wait for the weekend because the rest of the week will be taken up with condemning Israel for its racist human rights abuses.

If China is at all serious about this, it is clear that it's at least partially a ploy to get America to commit to a treaty which will destroy what's left of its economy with global-warming/climate change legislation.

China is now the world's top producer of carbon emissions. It's a large nation with a huge population, but the main reason it is producing so many greenhouse gases is that its industry is booming. In order to take the heat off its reputation for creating massive public works project that destroy the environment and use something resembling slave labor, China has decided to join the junk science parade and help the world save the ice caps and the polar bears.

China likely hopes that by joining the global warming hysteria (publicly, at least), it can shame the Obama administration into producing even more regulations thereby further damaging the American economy. They also hope that the ecoweenies and lefties in the Democratic Party will push the United States into an international global warming treaty on the theory that "China has done it, so shouldn't the United States do it first?"

So here's the Chinese plan: They will consider negotiating a global warming pact, which will include cap and trade provisions, to be finalized some time in 2020. And even that's not a sure thing. Says Su Wei, China's climate negotiator: "We do not rule out the possibility of a legally binding agreement. It is possible for us, but it depends on the negotiations." "Su Wei" in English is "Mr. Obvious." In essence, China wants another nine or ten years to go hell-bent for leather with its industrial expansion and monumental construction projects in order to pull far ahead of the United States on all manufacturing fronts.

And the American suckers are already taking the bait. Says Alden Meyer of the disreputable but powerful Union of Concerned Scientists: "China is signaling that they are trying to be flexible and constructively negotiate over the next week." The Obama/Clinton State Department has been trying to push a Kyoto-style treaty since its first day in office, and some low-level bureaucrats have expressed their joy at the Chinese offer. Officially, however, the State Department is silent. Their "no comment" statement was that they refused to discuss the matter while the negotiations are still under way. Do they mean they'll discuss it after the weekend, or in 2020? Enquiring minds want to know.

Jake Schmidt, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council said: "If Chinese officials agree to negotiate a binding treaty, it will put pressure on the Obama administration which has argued that the details of such a pact still need to be fleshed out." In other words, as an ecoweenie he thinks it's a good thing when Chinese rhetoric about possible negotiations for a treaty that might happen years in the future can force the American government into real action now restricting its already seriously-damaged industrial and economic base.

It is also quite likely that any treaty that includes China (and the United States?) will be interpreted, enforced and implemented by the United Nations. That's like putting a child-molester in charge of a kiddie daycare center. The claimed point of the proposed treaty is that wealthy nations will reduce their carbon emissions and pay poorer nations to do the same thing. Sounds good. Most unworkable schemes with no real solid foundation in fact sound good.

The United States has allowed its out-of-control bureaucratic agencies to slow development to a snail's pace already. With Obama's executive order allowing the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a "poison," coal and oil energy sources are grinding to a halt. Now look at the base year proposed by China. As the United States drifts off into non-productivity without any need for foreign treaties, China will have until 2020 to build its pollution industries. Then, nine or ten years from now, a treaty will be signed that says each industrial nations must reduce its carbon emissions by, say, 25% in five years.

By that time, China will be producing more carbon emissions than the next big three combined. The United States, on the other hand, will already have crippled its industries with regulations and cap-and-trade schemes. China will be heroic and cut its emissions by 25% immediately, leaving them as still the largest polluter on earth. And America will try to figure out how to cut 25% of nothing.