Don't expect any big climate concessions from China at COP26

National Post, 29 October 2021

The Glasgow summit makes clear the new reality that China has learned it can conduct itself with impunity.

Global climate policy depends upon agreement amongst China, the United States, Europe and India.

While the global leaders scurry to Scotland to avert catastrophe, China’s president is expected to skip the Glasgow summit.

At the moment, China is suffering periodic blackouts as officials shut down production to meet climate goals. It is not a propitious time for Xi Jinping to be announcing new emissions targets. Indeed, China’s recently released climate plan is heavy on new processes, and rather light on actual emission reductions. Meanwhile, energy demand means building more coal plants, so China is moving in the opposite direction, no matter what it might announce or agree to in Glasgow.

The single greatest contribution Canada could make to reducing global carbon emissions is to dramatically ramp up natural gas production and transport so that cleaner-burning gas could replace China’s dependence on coal. But that option appears dead for Canadian domestic political reasons.

More fundamentally, the Glasgow summit makes clear the new reality that China has little need to make international agreements. China will simply do whatever it wishes to do.

Climate policy for more than two decades has been driven by the Davos elite, a consensus of the rich and powerful in both business and politics. Less than five years ago, Xi’s keynote address at Davos was considered a milestone moment, China’s full integration into respectable company, whether at Davos or the UN climate bureaucracy.

Now, as the Davos clan, complemented by Greta Thunberg, descends upon Glasgow for COP26, Xi has decided that he no longer needs their approval. He can do as he pleases, and need no longer pretend to look for international approbation.

Consider the data that Xi and the Communist Party of China have available from recent events.

Two years ago, as the novel coronavirus was circulating in Wuhan and being covered up by the communist authorities, China’s biggest foreign relations problem was the internment of more than one million Muslim Uyghurs in forced labour and re-education camps. Today, the world has made its peace with both the camps and the causes of the pandemic, with the added benefit that China has totally destroyed the credibility of the World Health Organization. Any further pestering from that quarter can be safely ignored.

Xi has launched aggressive actions in relation to Taiwan. American President Joe Biden blusters a bit, but given that he remains proud of his shambolic humiliation in Afghanistan, there is nothing to fear from that quarter.

Indeed, the exchange of Canadian hostages for Meng Wanzhou means that the Biden administration has given its approval to hostage diplomacy. Beijing went out of its way to rub American and Canadian noses in their capitulation, making it clear that it was a straight up trade.

Not that Canada matters much to China’s foreign policy, but I am sure it pleased Xi to know that while the Two Michaels were languishing in prison, Canada’s ambassador in Beijing was lobbying Canadian businessmen — not to use their influence, modest as it might be, to seek their freedom, but rather to keep up their inward investment in China.

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