on January 17, 2022, 6:55 pm
Official government figures show that China’s coal binge also spurred the country to record high coal output over the year as a whole. Chinese coal production climbed to an all-time high of 4.07bn tonnes, up 4.7% on the previous year, in a blow to climate campaigners months after the UN’s Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow.
Sorry, it's not a blow to "climate campaigners", they are used to taking one blow after another; they are a resilient cohort of citizens, in contrast to the planet and its teeming masses. It's actually a blow to the reporter who's yet to realise it's a blow to her and her children, a blow to everyone she knows, and doesn't know, and a blow to her comfortable existence as a smug Guardian energy correspondent.
And further news from China is a warning from Xi Jinping not to put the brakes on the post--Covid economy China has warned the US and Europe against a rapid rise in interest rates that would “slam on the brakes” of the global recovery from the pandemic.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/17/china-warns-west-against-rapid-interest-rate-rise
Great, the most fundamental tenet of monetarism and neoliberalism, the so-called "independence" of central banks and the use of interest rates to control inflation, is now to be abandoned. Proving two things. 1) That monetarism is an economic dogma without reason if the only way you can deal to a serious economic problem is to abandon its own cardinal principles, and 2) the world economy must be teetering on the edge of a precipice - which Xi Jinping fears will be pushed over the edge by pursuing the very theories that the world bases its entire economy on.
If you ever got the impression that our leaders, from China to Scotland, from the USA to New Zealand and Mexico to South Africa don't seem to know what they're doing, I wonder why?
PS Clean Green NZ coal burning is even worse than in China, in percentage terms of course. We've managed a 60% increase in coal burning to produce our power over the last few years, all imported from Indonesia. Another failure of privatisation and Government capture by private industry.
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