The New York Times — The World According to It

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The gentleman who told me that he had total trust in (DER SPIEGEL, Süddeutsche Zeitung and) The New York Times, will be informed by the latter that the USA (having, thanks to fracking, duly decreased CO2 emissions as opposed to Germany), nay, the Trump administration, imperil the planet, "taking the country, and the world backward."

Perhaps you can recall a smug Pravda on March 29, 2017, shortly after Trump took office, awarding the coveted mantle of “climate leadership” to the genius totalitarians in China. From that piece: 

“They’ve set the direction they intend to go in the next five years,” Barbara Finamore, a senior lawyer and Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York, said of China. “It’s clear they intend to double down on bringing down their reliance on coal and increasing their use of renewable energy.” 

“China wants to take over the role of the U.S. as a climate leader, and they’ve baked it into their five-year plans,” she added, referring to the economic development blueprints drawn up by the Chinese government. . . . Since Mr. Trump’s election in November, senior Chinese officials and leaders have been taking the high ground on the issue by urging all countries, including the United States, to abide by their climate commitments. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Actually what China was doing was playing the NRDC and the New York Times for the dupes they are. (The Manhattan Contrarian take on this situation — on June 8, 2017 — was “Believe Me, You Don’t Have To Worry About China Seizing ‘Climate Leadership.’”) After mouthing the right platitudes to dupe these credulous fools, China went right ahead and resumed or kept building as much new coal-fired electricity generation capacity as the U.S. has in total, to go with its existing coal-fired capacity, which is about 3 times what the U.S. has. The BBC had the story on September 26, 2018: 

Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery. The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China. The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet. 

It must be that svengali Trump who made them do it! In fact, he’s so devious and clever that he got them to start all these plants even before he became President. And then, here are some of the other things that the svengali Trump has mesmerized the world into doing (from the same December 28 Pravda editorial): 

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, . . . declar[ed] he had no intention of abandoning coal, which provides nearly four-fifths of Poland’s electricity. . . . Further depressing the proceedings were recent defections and political troubles in countries that, along with the United States, had been expected to lead the way to a low-carbon energy future. Germany, which long ago walked away from carbon-free nuclear power, is having a hard time cutting back on coal because of political opposition. In Australia, a prime minister was kicked out of office because he wanted to reduce the use of coal, which Australia produces in abundance. 

And they don’t even mention the gilets jaunes in France. 

Here’s what else they don’t mention: Not a single country in the world has even begun to build the infrastructure that could potentially reduce carbon emissions by 50% or more. Nobody is doing it and nobody is going to do it. The only realistic way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions more than 50% in an industrial economy would be with nuclear power, which not a single country is pursuing. A frequently-mentioned but not realistic alternative would be trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. No country is pursuing that either. As I said back in August, the whole idea of reducing carbon emissions as a supposed “solution” to “climate change” is over. Not going to happen.

The source.