China Proves It: Obama Really Was A Sap

[Geee]

Issues & Insights

Remember when President Barack Obama was running around telling everyone how he’d convinced China to get serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions? A new report shows that Obama was easily duped. 

Over the course of three years, Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping to, he said, agree to “climate targets” (in 2014), “lay out additional actions” (in 2015), and sign the Paris Agreement (2016). 

In typical Obama understatement, he declared that “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

Of course, anyone who looked at what China was promising could see that it was a sucker’s bet. China said only that it would try to “stabilize” CO2 emissions by 2030, while the rest of the industrialized world dumped money and resources into “decarbonizing” their economies.

Worse, even before Obama made his boast it was clear that China’s state-controlled emissions data were unreliable. In late 2015 it came to light that the country had far more coal plants that it had admitted, and as a result had been emitting a billion tons more CO2 that it officially proclaimed.  A report in Skeptical Science last year notes that CO2 emissions for China still “aren’t known with any accuracy.”