China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday eagerly touted a report from two climate alarmist think tanks, Common Wealth in the United Kingdom and the Climate and Community Project in the United States, that claimed the British and American militaries “owe” $111 billion in “climate reparations” to communities supposedly threatened by their carbon emissions.
The Global Times is the house organ of the Chinese government, the worst polluter and carbon emitter on Earth by a very wide margin, but it naturally left China’s emissions unmentioned as it focused on the “social cost of carbon” calculations run by the two think tanks to slam the “toxic legacy of war” spread by its Western rivals:
“The US military prioritizes its perceived strategic interests over evidence of its ecological impact. Nonetheless, the military presents itself as a solution to the climate crisis even if the opposite is true. Conflicts supported by the US are a source of insecurity, violence, and instability that will exacerbate the effects of the climate crisis while the military itself is a major source of ecological damage,” Khem Rogaly, co-author of the report, told the Global Times in a recent interview.
Patrick Bigger, another author, argued that it is “idiotic to waste dwindling carbon budget on war” through involvement in more conflicts. The two authors called on less military activities and a reduction of US and UK military bases around the world.
The US and UK governments and their militaries are important architects of the modern fossil fuel economy, research has found. The two militaries have generated at least 430 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since the 2015 United Nations Paris climate agreement. In 2017 alone, the Pentagon produced more emissions than Portugal.
The climate change movement always goes easy on China, in part because it knows the Chinese would never tolerate activists interfering with their industrial and military agenda, and such was the case when it came to military “carbon footprints.”
China is working on one of the largest and fastest military buildups in human history and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) does not spend much time worrying about its carbon emissions. China is working on expanding its military bases overseas, including island fortifications in the South China Sea that have proven to be unmitigated environmental disasters.
The Global Times ran through every allegation and conspiracy theory about U.S. military environmental damage it could find, even finding a way to complain about “the military application of A.I. technology” raising concerns about “significant water usage.” China is no slouch when it comes to militarizing A.I., with an agenda to become the world’s leading A.I. power by the end of the decade, but the climate alarmists do not seem terribly concerned about how much water Chinese robots might be drinking.
The “climate reparations” demands touted by the Global Times circled back around to the alleged “historical” responsibility of the United States and Britain to bear a vastly disproportionate share of the burden for reducing emissions, because they launched the Industrial Revolution, whereas China was treated as an innocent developing economy of the “Global South.”
In truth, China is building more carbon-spewing coal plants than the entire rest of the world combined, and its only real competition for pollution is the aspiring leader of the Global South movement, India. India, like China, does not allow climate activists to interfere with its industrial agenda, and the BRICS economic bloc that India and China co-founded has stated it has no intention of making big sacrifices for climate change.
