The Patriot Post® · Joe Biden's Climate Emissions

“The United States could go to zero [carbon emissions] tomorrow … [but] we’d still have a problem. The world would still have a problem. If China went to zero tomorrow with the United States, we’d still have a problem.” So says climate czar John Kerry. That’s a good thing to keep in mind in the midst of all the emissions promises at President Joe Biden’s Zoom call “virtual climate summit.”

Biden’s summit was timed to coincide with Earth Day yesterday, not to mention getting ahead of the phenomenon of rising temperatures known as “summer.” Democrats also prefaced the summit with their re-submission of the Green New Deal, while Biden himself opened the proceedings with a vague promise to cut U.S. emissions somehow or other. Using a benchmark of 2005, the year with the highest U.S. emissions on record, Biden pledges to cut emissions 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

China’s Xi Jinping also promises to fight climate change. Obviously, the same man running genocidal slave-labor camps, stealing American intellectual property, and cheating on trade isn’t a man to be trusted on “saving” the planet. On the contrary, as the editors of National Review aptly explain, “Xi genuinely wants to be seen as a leader on climate — not out of any gauzy green sentimentality but because it suits his own interests. At the top of his to-do list is supplanting the United States as a world leader by exploiting discord in Washington and between the United States and its allies.”

ChiCom Joe and his own Red Party are glad to help.

In fact, while much of the rest of the world, led by the U.S., has been cutting emissions over the last 15 years (primarily here by fracking for natural gas), China has offset all that reduction and more by building coal plants as part of its economic and military development.

Biden’s plan would involve a huge wealth transfer from our nation to nations not subject to anything like the standards we have. Compare the efforts of the U.S. (population 330 million) with the coal-heavy appetites of India (1.3 billion) and China (1.4 billion) and you begin to get the idea.

At the 2015 Paris climate summit, China promised to begin reducing its emissions … by 2030. That just happens to be the same date Biden chose for cutting U.S. emissions in half.

Want some perspective on Biden’s goal? “Amid last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns,” writes the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal, “greenhouse gas emissions fell to about 21% below 2005 levels. In other words, even with the economy shut down and a large share of the population stuck at home, the U.S. was less than halfway to Mr. Biden’s goal.”

Columnist David Harsanyi argues, “Such an effort, if we were serious about it, would entail massive destruction of wealth, a surrender of our international trade advantages, the creation of a hugely intrusive state-run bureaucracy at home, the inhibition of free markets that have helped make the world a cleaner place and a precipitous drop in the living standards of most citizens — especially the poor.”

Nevertheless, Biden insists, “The signs are unmistakable, the science undeniable.” Well, some science, anyway. And, he argues, “The cost of inaction keeps mounting.” We seriously doubt it exceeds the cost of the executive edicts and economy-restructuring legislation he and his radical party would foist on the nation. That’s the real agenda.

But as usual, nothing is ever enough for the leftist fringe driving today’s Democrat Party. That’s why climate alarmists are dumping wheelbarrows full of cow manure at the White House to protest Biden’s “bulls—t” climate plan. Nothing says “we care” like leaving a literal pile of crap for someone else to clean up. Democrat policy in a nutshell.