Why China, India and Russia want to be bought off for the Paris Climate PR Spectacle

COP21 won’t get a meaningful agreement, but they will get “breakthrough success”

Don’t think China, India and Russia can save us. They won’t give up fossil fuels in a meaningful way, but they all have a price and buying them off is a lot cheaper than you might think. That’s because the goal is not for them to reduce CO2, but only for them to give the appearance of doing so.

It’s not about CO2, but about PR

Paris is a theatre– a grand show, and China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Jianmin said as much. He “laughed when the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ was mentioned. “It is a kind of performance,” he said, “It makes no difference.”

The 1.5C “high ambition” target is a perfect PR win. The Green Machine will be able to claim a major success getting X number of countries to sign up for a breakthrough pledge to do something “more ambitious”, something that “far exceeded our hopes” but that is really decades away and likely to happen even if nobody did anything at all. It’s the do nothing, unaccountable promise that politicians love to make.

All three nations have publicly poured cold water on the Paris solutions, but view that as just posturing for a better position to negotiate from.

Figure how the equation looks for China:

how do I hobble my competitors, steal their factories, and sell them more of my goods? how do I collect more of their pointless guilt payments (carbon credits etc)? and how can I look like a hero in the West at the same time?

Answer to all three: smile at the press conference, and pander to the global extremists in words only. Do token efforts and turn the guilt screws on the West as appropriate.

Things for India don’t look that different to China. For Russia the equation is more complicated as it involves oil exports and ISIL. But all of them will sign a deal that hurts the West but doesn’t impinge on their own growth. And in China and Russia, there is no push-back from their citizens for “selling out”. We can’t rely on undemocratic countries to save us.

Why we know it’s a grand theatre

The Green Machine actions betray their words. When the Climate extremists get a choice they often choose the less effective and higher CO2 option – so there is something they want more than CO2 reductions, something that trumps mere “carbon pollution”. Ponder that Climate change is The Greatest Threat on Earth but the Green Machine won’t consider nuclear energy, super critical hot coal, fracking for gas, or Direct Action type plans that cut CO2 cheaply. As I said last week, Tony Abbott was dangerous because he gave the Green Machine what it “said” it wanted — cheap cuts to CO2. Really what they want is personal power, glory and money. They also like invitations to hot dinner parties and two week long junkets every year. Who wouldn’t? And getting that out of COP21 at Paris is a very different goal to reducing global atmospheric carbon dioxide or actually changing the temperature, which are both incidental, an accidental kind of collateral damage to achieve the primary goal. The top Green permitted solutions to the climate problems are always the ones that increase dependency on big-government — like inefficient renewable energy, government funded research, carbon taxes and fake markets that are government run.

Reducing actual emissions is unaffordable — but the reality of that won’t save us from a “true global deal” and a “major success” at COP21. The West can’t afford to pay to convert the developing world to renewables zero-emission heaven. The West can barely achieve real emission cuts for themselves. But what matters is getting India, China and Russia to look like they are doing something. That’s a PR victory for the Green Machine, and it would be used to keep dragging funding from western taxpayers.

PS: We’ll be getting back to original research and the notch and solar model soon after the Paris Show concludes.

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