Beijing Professor Now Calling on Western World to Slash Emissions, Ignoring China's Output

When you think you've seen it all in the hypocrisy arena, something new comes along. Now, it is a professor in China, apparently Xuejing MA at the East China Normal University, who is calling on the West to cut back on our carbon emissions. This is either Richter-scale hypocrisy or utter cluelessness, given that China is building coal-fired power plants like crazy.

Watts Up With That's Eric Worrell has more. First, take a look at these excerpts from Xuejing MA's China Daily screed:

Global warming is one of the biggest challenges faced by humanity today. As emissions continue to rise, global temperatures keep breaking records and the world’s poorest nations bear the brunt of a crisis they did little to create.
However, public discourse on climate responsibility remains mired in individualism. Citizens are told to recycle, go vegan and shrink their “carbon footprints” while systemic sources of emissions — from industrial production to state-backed fossil fuel subsidies — remain largely untouched. It is time the global conversation shifts from personal virtue to structural accountability, from lifestyle tweaks to large-scale political and economic reform.

First, global warming is far from the biggest challenge faced by humanity. The planet has been on a slow warming trend, with some dips and spikes, since the end of the last major glaciation. We're in an interglacial period right now, but for the last few million years, mile-thick glaciers have been advancing and receding in the northern hemisphere, on the geological time scale, like window blinds, and humans haven't been around for the vast majority of that time. There's just no reason for "large-scale political and economic reform."

And, I would point out, Communism is a far, far greater threat. Millions died in the 20th century alone thanks to Communist and socialist regimes.

Here's the onion:

Carbon emissions are linked to economic activity. Data show that 63 percent of emissions come from poor or developing countries, countries where the people are not rich, but are trying to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. In order to become middle or upper-class, lower income countries are forced to emit. Urging a developing country to cut back is an attempt to constrain its development, especially when today’s rich countries emitted freely on their way to prosperity.

Did you get that? It's OK for China to continue spewing carbon emissions because it needs to. It's some kind of temporal DEI being promoted here, wherein China gets a free pass because it is industrializing later in history than the United States and Europe. So the Western world must pull in its horns, switch to expensive, unreliable, low-density energy sources, while China keeps shoveling coal into boilers.

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The proper answer here is to tell China, when it comes to whining about Western emissions, to go pound sand. I'm told the Middle Kingdom has a surfeit of sand to pound, and that's a low-emissions activity as well.

As Eric Worrell points out:

Developing countries like China get a free pass because they “are forced to emit”. But rich country politicians “must understand that addressing climate change can be a decisive factor in their political success or failure”.
The absurdity of this thinking is if CO2 was a problem, it wouldn’t matter whether the CO2 was emitted by rich countries or poor countries. It’s like Professor Hu Yong is demanding a free pass for developing countries to wreck the planet, while developed countries cut back to give them space. If the world truly had exhausted its carbon budget, everyone would have to cut back on emissions, developed or not.

I guess that's why the rapid expansion of coal-fired power plants in China, where they are building new plants like madmen. In the last year alone:

Coal commissioning also rose sharply. Around 21 GW of coal-fired capacity was brought online in January-June, the highest first-half total since 2016, the report said. Full-year additions are expected to surpass 80 GW, making 2025 the biggest year for coal power completions in a decade as projects from the permitting boom of 2022-2023 reach the execution stage, the report said.
Construction momentum also remained elevated, with 44 GW of new capacity starting or resuming work in H1. Provinces with large coal resources, such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi, led additions, reinforcing coal's role as a dependable source of dispatchable power.

All this is nothing new for China. There are no better people on the planet for whining about the mote in someone else's eye while ignoring the beam in their own. But this exercise in "power for me and not for thee" is one of the more egregious examples, even for China.

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