Now, this is interesting. Mark Lynas writes this: Copenhagen climate conference How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.
I had a strong hunch that it was going to turn out that the Chinese had trashed any hope of an agreement in Copenhagen, and Mr. Lynas mostly duplicates my reasoning — well, except for the part where I’m inclined to feel grateful to the Chinese for their obstructionism; he isn’t.
Yes, the Chinese are too busy industrializing to want to put up with crap about carbon limits. That’s obvious, and it’s why I was expecting them to torpedo the proceedings. But I think Mr. Lynas is missing the other elephant in the room — the CRU leak. I think we’re seeing the first geopolitical impact of the East Anglia emails.
Put yourself in the Chinese leadership’s shoes for a moment, and imagine Hu Jintao reading an intelligence precis of the leaked documents. I imagine his reaction would be something much like this: “Foreign devils want us to slow down our GDP growth for a fraud? Fuck that and the dragon it rode in on.”
Savor the irony. Reds pretending to be green have been scuppered by mercantilists pretending to be Reds. OK, that’s oversimplifying grossly; the Chinese have managed to retain most of the worst traits of communism on their capitalist road, and not all the heavies in the AGW crowd are scheming socialists. It’s still true enough to be funny.