It’s Not Easy Being Green

What’s so cute about the comfortable lie that the left’s received wisdom has about the US being the biggest polluter on earth is that to have this “wisdom” requires a great deal of ignorance about the rest of the world.

The Beijing Olympics will expose the environmentalist fraud that the U.S. is the world's biggest polluter. Compared with China, we get the gold medal for energy efficiency. Can Al Gore speak Chinese?

Don't expect any protests from groups such as Greenpeace in Tiananmen Square as the Olympics open. China doesn't allow open protests, and environmentalists are quietly ignoring China's new status as the world's biggest polluter. But at these Olympics, oxygen tanks will be an essential piece of athletic equipment.

The amusing thing is that while the Chinese are in fact the worst users of energy one can imagine in the post-soviet age, their draconian techniques employed in controlling it during the Olympics are no different than the way they’ve handled people in any other matter in life, and that the green-red-trots seem rather attached to being draconian, so long as they find a rationalization by which to tell you that you should submit to their superior knowledge if you know what’s good for you.

The Berkeley researchers say China's emissions are growing at an annual rate of 11%. In 2006-07, China added 186,000 megawatts of coal-fired electrical generation capacity, equivalent to two United Kingdoms. The U.S. Energy Department says China's emissions rose 138% from 1990 to 2005.

As the Heritage Foundation's Ed Feulner points out, China's emissions rose 8% last year after jumping 11% in each of the two previous years. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency notes that China alone accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007.

In other words, these great heroes of “the Worker” have managed to turn out more atmospheric pollutants than their actual economic growth, inverting the American success story, which all the while is the thing that the world’s precious political watermelons like to imagine is some sort of “crime against humanity”: polluting less by being more productive and andvancing industrial capacity.

Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicate that China's carbon-dioxide emissions per unit of output are five times those of the U.S. Our emissions rose by 1.5% last year after declining 1.3% the year before. Our GDP is rising faster than our emissions, meaning we are becoming more energy efficient every day.

As the big, bad USA's carbon dioxide emissions fell in 2006, our economy boomed 3.3%, says the Energy Information Administration. We used energy more efficiently and reduced emissions without Kyoto. Energy use per unit of GDP fell 4.2 % in 2006, and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell by 4.5%.

Compared with the Kyoto signatories, the U.S., not Al Gore, should be getting a Nobel Prize. The United Nations reports that greenhouse gas emissions from the Kyoto signatories, despite all their efforts, increased 2.6% from 1990 to 2005. Austria, New Zealand and Canada increased their emissions over 1990 levels by 14%, 23% and 54%..

But that doesn’t fit the script, because that isn’t what the left’s script is really for.