China has responded to President Obama’s climate change proposal at the United Nations to join the U.S. effort to drastically reduce carbon emissions. The emerging Asian power plans to flat-out extort the U.S. and other Western developed nations for their participation in the deal, or they will take their ball and go home.
According to a document first obtained by Fox News, and now viewable below on PPD, China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases says that the U.S. and other developed countries should have to suffer the economic pain of carbon cutbacks, particularly increases in taxes that would slow the rate of GDP growth further.
The results would certainly allow China — now the world’s second-largest economy — to surpass the U.S. as number one in sooner-than-projected fashion.
The document, which was drawn up for Geneva-based U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in advance of a planned meeting next month, says emission cutbacks by China and other developing countries will be “dependent on the adequate finance and technology support provided by developed country parties” to any new climate accord.
In other words, only if America and, to a smaller degree other developed nations, bear the costs of their economic pain that disproportionately affects the wealthy in Beijing.
The Chinese communist regime will demand next month, or is already demanding is this document, that the stem from “new, additional, adequate, predictable and sustained public funds” — rather than mostly private financing, as the U.S. hopes.
In other words, the U.S. government must further squeeze already-burdened U.S. taxpayers by raising taxes. They also included a list of short- and long-term demands that must be met first.
SHORT-TERM DEMANDS
- A promised $100 billion in annual funding to be appropriated to climate change reforms that the West has already pledged until 2020 is just the “starting point,” and further commitments must be laid out in a “clear road map,” including “specific targets, timelines and identified sources.”
- $100 billion pledge to the same fund should be reached by $10 billion increments, starting from a $40 billion floor this year.
LONG-TERM DEMANDS
- In the long-term, developed countries should be committing “at least 1 percent” of their GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, to put “into a U.N.-administered Green Carbon Fund to pay for the developing country changes.”
- Western countries must clear “obstacles such as IPRs [intellectual property rights]” to “promote, facilitate and finance the transfer” of “technologies and know-how” to developing countries. This must be done before any future climate deal with be agreed to by China.
The theft of intellectual property rights has long been a grievance of U.S. and other Western transnational and national corporations. The Justice Department in May announced the first-ever criminal cyber-espionage case against Chinese military officials, claiming they have been hacking major U.S. companies to steal intellectual property right and company secrets.
U.S. officials accused five Shanghai-based Chinese officials of targeting companies in U.S. nuclear power, metals and solar sectors, including major U.S. firms like Alcoa World Alumina, Westinghouse Electric and U.S. Steel Corp. The other victims cited include Allegheny Technologies, United Steelworkers Union, and SolarWorld.
China’s submission, a nine-page paper tellingly titled, “Submission on the Work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Durban Platform for Enhanced Action,” is one of many to be submitted by various nations ahead of negotiations on a new global climate treaty that will be unveiled at a climate summit meeting in Paris at the end of 2015.
The Paris 2015 treaty is supposed to replace the largely useless Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2020. The U.S. never ratified the treaty in large part due to other greenhouse emitters, including China and India, never having to abide by the agreement.
But according to the Chinese, developing countries have already done their fair share at cutting back greenhouse gases — or, as the document states — “have already communicated and implemented ambitious nationally appropriate mitigation actions.”
“Their contribution to global mitigation efforts is far greater than that by developed countries,” the Chinese say in the document of Western developed countries.
Western countries are “responsible for the current and future concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because of their historical, current and future emissions,” while “developing countries have the right to equitable development opportunities and sustainable development.”
In fact, that was the failed premise behind the outdated if ever needed Kyoto Protocol. China just agreed to reduce the “carbon intensity” of its industrialization, which is a relative measurement absent of actual cutbacks.So, naturally, the Chinese submission argues that any new treaty must “be based and built” on principles of the Kyoto Treaty, with “developed country Parties taking the lead in greenhouse gas emission reduction.”
Except, of course, for the amount of money they are extorting from the West for their participation.
“Commitments by developed country Parties [to the new treaty] on providing finance, technology and capacity-building support to developing country Parties shall be of the same legal bindingness as their mitigation commitments.”
