Here is the truth about China and their phony agreement to support Paris accord. They're going to build more coal plants then ever in the next ten years. It will make it impossible to meet Paris climate goals.
Wrong,
it is a vital component of the Paris agreement! These
Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) have been set differently for each country, based on its intended nationally determined contribution which is fair and ambitious,
in light of its national circumstances, and how it contributes towards achieving the objective of the Convention as set out in its Article 2. The goals of the Paris agreement are the sum of those of all countries (except 2) together. So the temporary increase and subsequent decline of coal power for some countries is an integral part of the Paris agreements, not to make it impossible to achieve, on the contrary.
What you are suggesting is that Countries like the USA have been allowed to pollute the world's environment as their economy developed, but developing countries should not be allowed to do the same just because they started growing later.
This is why Trump pulled out of Paris. Because we would have honored it and restricted ourselves spending a lot of money while others like China would just go about doing business as usual.
It's almost the opposite, the USA would like to restrict developing countries from developing themselves, which by the way would create a larger market for selling American products, and keep the position of the no.1 polluter of the world over time (one e.g. needs to look at the
cumulative 'contributions' of CO2 emissions,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Co2_cumulative_emissions_1970-2013.svg).
That's a backward way of making America great, by trying to keep others small (which will therefore fail). And China has already started the conversion away from Coal powered energy generation (but cannot do that any faster due to their growing economy's need for energy) and will overtake the USA in serving international markets with cleaner energy products and know-how. They also build coal plants to replace older, more polluting plants. Not ideal, but part of the INDCs. The Chinese government has also halted many building plans of new coal powered plants, to speed up the conversion to cleaner energy.
It's like the USA is driving in reverse, and complains that the others are overtaking them. I've been told that the top producers of consumer products like Apple, cannot find adequately educated employees in the USA and is therefore forced to recruit in other countries. Things like travel-bans only make matters more difficult, and the USA also tries to increase their export of coal to other countries.
Cheers,
Bart
