| Sourced From Energytribune.com |
It didn’t take long. On July 5, just nine days after the House passed the cap and trade bill (also known as Waxman-Markey) Chinese officials made it clear they are opposed to any carbon taxation scheme. Yao Jian, the spokesman for China’s Commerce Ministry, said the bill violates basic principles of the World Trade Organization and said that the ruse of environmental protection was being used to protect trade and that it could induce a trade war.
“China considers that the carbon emission tax not only violates the basic principle of WTO, it also violates the principles of the Kyoto Protocol about different responsibility between developing and developed countries.” Yao said.
In March, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that the US was planning to impose a tariff on imported products to avoid unfair competition imposed on the American manufacture industry. There is a clause in the cap and trade bill – officially known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) – that allows the imposition of a “special tax” which stipulates that imported foreign products that do not meet the US emission standard can be heavily penalized. The Chinese are worried that this provision may be copied by European and other countries, and lead to more trade protectionism.
Studies done by the universities in Beijing and Shanghai have concluded that carbon emission taxes in the US and other countries will gravely affect China’s economy, affecting especially the paper, steel, cement, fertilizer and glass industries. Their point is clear: developed countries have moved dirty industries to developing countries, and now the carbon dioxide emissions from those industries are being considered “pollution.” The Chinese believe that the developed countries should also pay for part of Chinese emissions since they benefit from China’s industries. Furthermore, they see a carbon tax as a new style of developed world economic hegemony over developing countries.
Yao warned that carbon emission legislations will only harass the international trading order. And he said that a carbon tax will not help the world get through the economic crisis, nor will it help the effort on climate change negotiations. “China” he concluded, “is strongly against the carbon emission tax.”
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I am very grateful to the Chinese for having torpedoed the carbon tax proposals. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not responsible for global warming, or should I rather say “climate change” after the now-debunked IPCC found that global cooling was occurring and tried to hide this fact. Polar ice melting is due to soot deposits, not CO2 increase. Present changes in climate are driven by natural factors such as solar output over which we do not have any control. Without Chinese participation, carbon tax is meaninglees for the World and will thereby avoid a wholely unnecessary carbon tax being levied. I applaud very positively the Chinese position – hurra to China. Rather than wasting money on CO2 sequestration, we would be much better off building nuclear fission reactors, and using the underground formerly oil-filled anticlines for storing nuclear waste. There is enough Thorium in Telemark Norway when blended with uranium to power electrically the World at present energy consumotion levels for 1000 years. The only climate crisis we have is adaptation to naturally-driven climate change, i.e. we need to help countries adversely affected by climate change with generous aid. Even if I am hypthetically wrong regarding anthorpogenic climate change (I am strongly of an opinion that anthopogenic climate change is an insignificant effect if one measures temperatures properly and imprartially), my proposal regarding Throium and the use of formerly oil-filled geological anticlines for storage of nuclear waste would also reduce CO2 emissions in any case. Environmentalists should also bear in mind that Earth’s geological formations are naturally radioactive to a significant degree (e.g. witness the use of gamma probes when boring through geological strata for real-time strata composition analysis).
There is so much muddled and unstructured thinking going on in this World that it makes me dispair at times. The discredited IPCC “hockey stick” global warming graph (Mann/Al Gore) ignoring the Medieval Warm period is just one example of bad science tainted by political and financial interests.