The Patriot Post® · China's Coal Throws Out More CO2 Than First Believed

China has always seemed less-than-enthusiastic about the UN’s push to combat climate change by cutting traditional methods of generating energy. While Barack Obama and his cadres were preaching the global warming gospel and working the phone and pen ahead of the UN summit on Climate Change in December, China simply promised that it would stop increasing its greenhouse gas production before 2030. Now, weeks ahead of the UN meeting that was supposed to wrap up an international treaty to supposedly fight climate change, it turns out China burns more coal than it previously disclosed. The numbers China originally provided were 17% less than what the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas actually produced. To put this in perspective, The New York Times said that China burned an additional 600 million tons of coal in 2012, or 70% of what the U.S. uses in one year. Say, didn’t the Obama want to cut our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 32% below what we produced in 2005? This is basically the U.S. giving China free carbon credits.

It also, as The Daily Caller points out, throws a wrench into the UN’s calculations heading into this UN summit. This illustrates the problem the big-statist climate change advocates face. If global warming is, in the words of John Kerry, the “most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” then Obama’s efforts lack resolve. As Investor’s Business Daily opined, “The idea that no one would cheat on any carbon reduction pledge is even more unrealistic. If China can hide carbon emissions equal to all of Germany’s for more than a decade, why should anyone trust it, or any other country for that matter, to be honest about its future emissions?”