China

The world has been looking a bit closer at China in the last couple of months due to the coronavirus which came from there, as did SARS before it. Their culture of wet markets appears to be the cause of both outbreaks which spread across the globe.

As a country it has progressed massively in the last few decades. The population has gone from rural workers on bikes that never left their towns to driving Rolls Royce’s, travelling the world and putting their children through international universities.

The change is the industrialisation of the country. Lets’ be honest the west has put its eggs in one basket and we rely on China and the far east for much of our imported goods from toys to mobiles, cars to homewares and much more as well.

The consequence of this manufacturing giant, which we are all so reliant on now, is that China is also now by far the biggest polluter of the planet! It produces a rather massive 30% of the world’s carbon emissions and that figure keeps growing at an alarming rate year on year.

The UK for example produces 1%...so before the next climate change march or rant about successive UK Governments of the past 20 years or so, think again.

By signing up to agreements in Rio, Paris, Davos to make commitments to reduce emissions and look at green energy and such like has a huge impact on our economy. We stop manufacturing our own goods, we have no export potential and we then rely on imported goods from countries more than happy to produce it and sell it to us….who have not committed to saving the planet or protecting the health of its own citizens let alone the rest of the planets.

The ‘Greta Thunberg’ fans (the entitled generation) are either ignorant or happy to turn a blind eye to their own hypocrisy. How many of these eco-warriors would sacrifice their personal mobiles, cheap fashions, games consoles and such like? Not too many I suspect.

Don’t get me wrong China may be the worse polluter but India, USA, Russia and Japan together produce as much as China….this means just 5 countries on the planet are responsible for more than half the emissions. By NOT committing to climate change policy their economies are booming and the rest of us would struggle without their output.

To me it just seems a very strange mentality. For the sake of being “right on” with our political correctness and looking like we are taking the higher moral ground and being oh so ‘big picture’ for the future generations….we are still wanting everything that is damaging to the environment but we feel bizarrely happier knowing we have not produced it ourselves. We make documentaries showing the damage manufacturing all this stuff has on the local area of production, the health misery the workers, the impact on their local environment and all the harm to the towns and villages……but we don’t refuse the

stuff!