Why does anyone believe anything the Chinese government claims is true? The fact that anyone would take Beijing’s assertions seriously suggests they are on the take from that communist nation.

China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and has been for years. And yet, when it comes to the Left’s cult of climate alarmism, China effectively gets a pass.

The reason for this presumably has to do with Beijing’s willingness to seemingly play ball with the climate cultists. For example, China signed on to both the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Agreement and the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, pledging to reduce its carbon emissions.

President Donald Trump wisely pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accords shakedown, which, in practice, amounted to little more than a financial redistribution scheme from wealthy nations, principally the U.S., to poorer third-world countries. This is all, of course, tied to the dubious assertion that man-made carbon emissions are driving global climate change. This claim is treated as gospel, though real-world results continuously defy the alarmists’ dire predictions.

Indeed, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently admitted that its use of extreme climate-change model forecasts has essentially been bogus the entire time, as the most extreme and fanciful scenarios don’t comport with the reality on the ground.

While Trump has taken flak from the climate cult for pulling out of the Paris Accords twice now, China has effectively eschewed any legitimate efforts to cut its CO₂ emissions.

Case in point, China gamed the system of self-reporting its carbon emissions over the last five years. Up until recently, China was on track to have increased its overall CO₂ emissions by 14% from 2020 to 2025. In fact, China had essentially acknowledged that it was failing to meet its commitment to curb carbon emissions, with China’s head of ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, explaining last September that “controlling carbon emission intensity is challenging.”

Yet months later, Beijing now dubiously claims that its carbon emissions have increased by only 7%, roughly half of what previous data and its own government talkingheads had acknowledged.

So, how could China have seen its carbon emissions be cut so drastically in such a short time? The answer is that China didn’t cut back on any carbon emissions; it played definitional games. What Beijing previously included under its “carbon intensity” equation — all fossil-fuel-based carbon emissions — was narrowed to include only energy-based fossil-fuel carbon emissions.

In other words, Beijing is cooking the books and has eliminated the carbon emissions of entire industries from its overall carbon emissions record. Those industries are the chemical and plastics industries, both significant emitters of CO₂. By failing to account for the carbon emissions of these industries, China has effectively eliminated an amount of carbon emissions equivalent to the CO₂ emissions of the entire nation of Germany or South Korea.

Not only does this deceive the public on China’s overall carbon footprint, but — even more insidiously — it allows Beijing to expand its carbon emissions well beyond the agreed-upon limits.

China has no intention of economically hamstringing itself as so many European nations have done. Its communist leadership is more than willing to feign concern and advocate for action to stop climate change (a fool’s errand if ever there was one) so long as it gives them an economic leg up on both Europe and the U.S.

China couldn’t care less about stopping carbon emissions, but it will pay lip service so long as it weakens the West. In many ways, China is much smarter than America’s Democrat Party, which advocates for green policies against its own health and well-being.

Donald Trump is wise to ignore the world’s climate alarmists and ensure that America is not falling behind our biggest geopolitical foe.