Article by Eric Worrell
China reports economic growth during a period of declining CO2 emissions – but this is not the first time it has promoted this lie.
'This is good news': Scientists suspect China is about to make history
Nick O'Malley
July 13, 2024These reports have been emerging for months, and climate scientists and analysts have been poring over the data. Something unfamiliar is happening. This seems like good news. It may even have profound historical significance.
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, humans have been emitting increasing amounts of global-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise dramatically over the past few decades.
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In 2019, humans emitted 35 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That number dropped a staggering 6% the following year as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted industrial production and shut down the economy. At the time, fall weather left some climate critics despairing. Is this what is needed to reduce emissions? If so, how could such an outcome be achieved in a functioning economy?
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But what interests analysts now is the data from the past few months. The world economy is growing. China's economy is growing. Yet greenhouse gas emissions appear to have peaked.
Sometime last year, or possibly earlier this year, China's emissions seemed to have peaked. If China has peaked, there is good reason to believe that global emissions have peaked as well. That means that somewhere in the past few months, the stubborn link between economic growth and greenhouse gas pollution was broken, ending a 250-year surge in emissions.
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Find out more: https://amp.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/it-s-good-news-scientists-suspect-history-about-to-be-made-in-china-20240709- p5jsbi.html
How do we know these claims may be based on false statistics? Because this isn't the first time it's happened.
Since 2016
China’s post-coal growth
Qi Ye, Nicholas Stern, Wu Tong, Lu Jiaqi and Fergus Green
natural geosciences Volume 9pp. 564–566 (2016) Cite this article
Slowing GDP growth, structural heavy industry transformation, and more aggressive air pollution and clean energy policies have led to a peak in China's coal use. Economic growth appears to have become decoupled from coal consumption growth.
Learn more: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1462901118308803
every few years, China promotes the myth of decoupling to explain the discrepancy between its false economic growth statistics and carbon dioxide emissions.
What has happened since 2016? Once the Chinese economy recovered from its slump and real economic growth caught up with the false growth statistics, China's carbon dioxide emissions surged.
There is plenty of evidence to support that the real explanation for the emissions drop in 2024 is that China is suffering from a severe economic crisis – Their debt-to-GDP ratio is as high as 288%, and their asset price bubbles are bursting.
China's economic downturn will continue
Author: James H. Knott
March 4, 2024, 7:00 am ET
James H. Nolt is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of International Relations at New York University and the author of International Political Economy: Matters of War and Peace. He is the founding dean of an international college in Nanjing, China, and served as a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York for 23 years.
China is in the midst of a profound economic crisis. Growth is falling as unsustainable debt piles up; China's debt-to-GDP ratio reached a record 288% in 2023. The asset no longer generates enough income to pay off the debt. This is especially true in the housing sector, where sales have fallen by a third and new construction starts are down 60% since the pre-pandemic peak. It was one of the world's worst housing crashes in the past three decades.
Many Western experts and politicians see the crisis as a sign of the bankruptcy of China's leadership and economic system. But it is more similar to the cyclical debt crises that have plagued capitalist countries throughout history. An apt comparison is the Japanese crisis of 1989, which ended decades of high growth and rising asset prices driven by inflating debt bubbles. Japan's Nikkei stock index peaked in late 1989 and fell nearly 80% over the next 13 years. Starting in 1991, real estate prices fell for twenty consecutive years. Japan went from being the fastest-growing major economy during 1954-73, often growing at more than 10% per year, to being the slowest, growing at an average annual rate of just 1.75% from 1981 to 2023. facing similar long-term difficulties.
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The bubble has burst. China's creditors have now scaled back new lending and raised interest rates following the government's “three red lines” guidelines. Prices fell further as the most indebted Chinese bulls went bankrupt or panic-sold to repay loans, while their short peers stepped back in and sold assets at bargain prices. This would ultimately set the stage for a price collapse, but would also quickly redistribute wealth from debtors to creditors. During every crash, the bears eat the longs.
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Learn more: https://time.com/6835935/china-debt-housing-bubble/
So the real question is, How could the scientists and public figures cited in the Sydney Morning Herald be so easily fooled by China's renewed lies about its transparent emissions decoupling?
The last time China played such a trick was in 2016, less than ten years ago. You might think that scientists and public figures would bother to do some research before accepting claims of China's economic growth as reliable and echoing such blatant communist lies.
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