China’s not green, Justin
Someone needs to explain to Trudeau the harsh realities of global energy production
So there can be no misunderstanding, let’s recall exactly what Justin Trudeau said when he was asked at a recent “Ladies’ Night” Liberal fundraiser: “Which nation, besides Canada ... do you most admire and why?”
Trudeau answered: “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘we need to go green fastest ... we need to start investing in solar’.”
This theme of China becoming the world’s Jolly Green Giant is nothing new in the environmental movement, among those who profess to call themselves green.
Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, expressed similar sentiments to Trudeau’s in September, 2009 when he wrote:
“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power ... Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that ... from the top down.”
If I had to guess where Trudeau’s view of China comes from, I’d say it's at least partly from his principal advisor, Gerald Butts, former president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Canada.
Prior to that, Butts was principal secretary to then premier Dalton McGuinty, which may explain much of McGuinty’s enthusiasm for wind and solar power, the implementation of which has been a monumental financial and energy disaster in Ontario.
One hopes that whoever convinced Trudeau that China is the Jolly Green Giant of green energy, will also call his attention to a Jan. 8 Reuters report, one of many on the same subject, noting “green” China’s demand for coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is exploding.
Last year alone, China approved the construction of 15 major new coal mines (smaller ones are run by local authorities and are not recorded by the central Chinese government).
This is part of Beijing’s plan to increase China’s coal production -- mainly used to generate electricity -- by 860 million tonnes by 2015, which, as Reuters notes, is “more than the entire annual output of India.”
At the end of 2012, China was already producing about half of the world’s coal -- 3.66 billion tonnes -- compared to a little over one billion tonnes each for Europe and the U.S.
The irony, then, is that China’s “basic dictatorship” is powering its expansion into renewable energy -- which Trudeau so admires -- by using coal to generate electricity, which emits the the most pollution and greenhouse gases of any fossil fuel.
That’s why Chinese cities are so often enveloped in heavy smog, which the people living there can see -- meaning they can’t see more than a few feet in front of them -- even if Trudeau, from his lofty perch in Canada, cannot.
The problem with naive observations like Trudeau’s about China’s alleged greenness, is that we see them repeatedly parroted by environmental radicals.
Their real agenda is to undermine the development of Canada’s oilsands -- an insignificant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions -- along with any pipelines needed to move oil to ports in B.C., the Maritimes, and the Gulf Coast.
Meanwhile, we hear nary a word from them about the explosive resurgence of coal to produce electricity in Germany, another so-called Jolly Green Giant, along with China.
German coal emissions are skyrocketing after its politicians swore off nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and discovered, to their horror, that their mad dash into green energy hasn’t given them the affordable, reliable electricity needed to power a modern industrialized economy. (Sound familiar, Ontario?)
Meanwhile, they also give a free pass to U.S. President Barack Obama, who has the gall to lecture Canada about the Keystone XL pipeline, while boasting to American audiences that his administration “has added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth, and then some” while raising U.S. coal exports to record levels.
Somebody ought to tell Trudeau what’s been going on in the real world when it comes to energy production.
Because if, as he claims, he supports the oilsands and the Keystone XL, he’s been doing a lousy job of it up to now.
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