By Paul Bledsoe
for The Hill
The big news out of COP 27, the UN climate negotiations, according to most media was a global agreement to create a fund to provide developing nations more aid to explicitly address rising climate change impacts. Yet, this action, while justified, is at best a thin, temporary band aid. Because without deep cuts in greenhouse gases from huge polluters like China, the cost of climate impacts will soon skyrocket into the trillions, overwhelming the ability of rich and poor countries alike to address it.
So, what was done in Egypt to actually limit emissions and control global temperature increases, which after all is the central goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement? Precious little. Instead, a perverse sort of political correctness on the global left overtook the needed focus on solving the climate crisis, much of which is now inarguably caused by autocratic nations like China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who were barely mentioned during these talks.
China’s annual emissions alone are nearly one-third of the global total, more than all the developed countries combined, and still rising. Global greenhouse emissions cannot decline — and climate protection cannot be achieved — until and unless China begins to cut its emissions. Yet, China was never under any intense pressure from developing nations to act at these negotiations. China’s President Xi Jinping, fresh from gaining a third consecutive five-year term as the leader of the Communist Party Conference, didn’t even bother to show up. Never mind, that China consumes nearly 60 percent of the world’s coal each year!
