By Paul Bledsoe, PPI’s Strategic Advisor
The stunning protests by average Chinese citizens against Xi Jinping’s disastrous Covid lockdowns may open the door not just to less restrictive Covid approaches, but to global outrage over an even more cataclysmic threat—China’s out of control greenhouse gas emissions that are destabilizing the global climate.
The latest protests in China are reminiscent not just of Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, but also of the public outcry from 2013-2017 against China’s crippling air pollution. Those protests proved politically powerful enough to force at least some improvements in Beijing’s air quality, prompting new investments in clean energy and slight changes to China’s intensely polluting industrial economy.
Yet these mostly cosmetic actions have done little to slow planet-endangering greenhouse gas growth presided over by Xi. China’s yearly emissions are now more than 31% of the global total. That’s more than all emissions from the U.S. and every other developed country on earth combined. And unlike the U.S., EU and our allies who are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to deeply cut our greenhouse gases, China’s emissions are still rising.
