https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-climate-folly/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Making energy more costly, turning a blind eye to China’s brutality.
The White House, in effect, hosted the highest-powered Zoom call ever Thursday with a virtual summit on climate.
Everyone who is somebody participated, from Vladimir Putin (otherwise plotting a potential invasion of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping (taking time out from grinding Hong Kong to dust) to Pope Francis and Bill Gates.
The story line was big, ambitious goals for reduced emissions and a renewal of U.S. “credibility” after President Donald Trump supposedly trashed it by pulling out of the Paris climate accord.
Biden announced a commitment to cut U.S. emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030. This was greeted by huzzahs from elite opinion-makers, but the commitment, and the entire effort, is misbegotten.
A key theory driving it is that if the U.S. cuts its emissions, everyone else around the world will as well, preserving Earth as we know it.
But even well-intentioned countries are liable to miss, or to manipulate, their climate targets, whatever they say. And not all countries are well-intentioned.
Consider China, which the Biden administration has been desperate to get on board. Amazingly enough, climate envoy John Kerry was the first Biden official to visit China, signaling that climate change is more important to the administration than China’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, its aggression in the South China Sea, its suppression of the Uyghurs, its predatory trade practices or its theft of intellectual property.
Kerry got verbiage from the Chinese about tackling climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”