Delingpole: China Coal Output Highest Since 2015 – Despite 'Green' Pledges

China’s coal mining sector was one of the first industries to resume operations when COVID travel restrictions were gradually relaxed, as Beijing wanted to ensure adequate fuel supplies once the country emerged from the lockdown enforced to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

This will not come as a surprise to those familiar with China’s energy policy: tell the gullible Westerners what they want to hear about reducing carbon emissions – then carry on regardless.

Green activist groups often praise China for its enlightened policy. But as long-time China watcher Patricia Adams explained last month in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, they are merely President Xi’s useful idiots.

As I reported for Breitbart News:

Western green groups have effectively become mouthpieces for President Xi, says Adams, an economist and the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based NGO that has been involved in the Chinese environmental movement since its beginnings in the mid-1980s:

“They praise the scale of Chinese ambition on climate change, while paying lipservice in criticizing China’s massive coal expansion. Meanwhile, the greens turn a blind eye to the obvious; China does not honour its international agreements and has no intention of reducing fossil fuel consumption, quite the opposite. While the world has awakened to China’s abuses, western environmentalists are silent,” says Adams. “China plays them as useful idiots.”

China prioritises — as it always has — economic growth over environmental righteousness. While the West bleats about carbon emissions targets, sustainability and Net Zero, China is expanding its economy rapidly.

Indeed, the Financial Times reports that China’s economy is growing at an even faster rate than it was before the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

China’s gross domestic product expanded 6.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020, a faster rate than before the coronavirus pandemic and easily outpacing the expected performance of other big countries.

Year-on-year GDP growth for the final quarter beat expectations, according to official data released on Monday, with the Chinese economy expanding 2.3 per cent over the course of the full year as industrial production continued to drive the country’s recovery.

The new data underlined a rapid turnround in the world’s second-largest economy, which declined in early 2020 for the first time in more than four decades after authorities imposed an extensive lockdown to stem the pandemic’s initial outbreak.

In the fourth quarter, year-on-year growth was the highest of any quarter since 2018, and China will be the only one of the world’s biggest economies that did not shrink last year.