“The fact of the matter is that there’s a reason why you have the largest gathering of world leaders probably in world history here in Paris. Everyone else is taking climate change seriously.” Barack Obama.

Like a lot of the president’s statements on climate change this isn’t actually true. In fact there are lots and lots of people in the world who know it’s a hoax. And among them, unfortunately, happen to be the ruling elite of the most significant carbon emitting nation of them all: China.

We know this because of a devastating report, released today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, written by one of the West’s leading experts on the Chinese environmental economy, Patricia Adams.

Adams, an economist, executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, who has been working with the Chinese environmental movement since the mid-Eighties, is under absolutely no illusions about China’s real position on “climate change.”

China sees it as a brilliant opportunity to fleece the gullible gwailo for as much money as it can, to burnish its international image by making all the right green noises, and to blackmail the West into providing it with free technology.

But it has no intention whatsoever of sacrificing economic growth by reducing its carbon dioxide emissions.

China knows this. The West either knows this or strongly suspects this. So any agreement reached next week which pretends otherwise will either be a fudge, a lie, or an outright capitulation by Western negotiators – because China knows what it wants and it isn’t budging, no sirree.

Here’s how Adams puts it: