The climate is, as it has always done, changing. For the past three decades it has been trending warmer… thus “global warming.” Anybody able to go outside in the middle of summer and notice their skin about to melt off has picked up on the fact. Where the fighting has come in has been the two-sided debate of “why is this happening,” and “what should we do about it.”

For the first part, human activity has certainly played some role, greater or lesser. The real problem is the second part. The general consensus among many on the political Left is that the obvious thing to do is to trash the American economy… make oil and coal so expensive that people don’t travel, that industry falls apart, that the standard of living declines and expectations of improvement in the future transforms into a general malaise about a dismal “new normal.” Well… mission accomplished. Huzzah, I guess.

But while the US has gotten a handle on the increase in greenhouse gasses (largely through the Pelosi-Frank economic collapse causing a decrease in travel and manufacturing), China has been largely ignored. Their economy, while not a strong as it might have been (especially since their customers aren’t as rich as they might have been), is still strong enough that they continue to crank out new producers of greenhouse gases at a truly astonishing rate, cars, factories, coal-burning power plants. Gentlemen, behold:

China passed the US in terms of CO2 emissions back in 2009. Many people try to give them a pass by pointing out that on a per capita basis China is still behind the US; but that is a metric that just doesn’t matter. If global warming is driven by added anthropogenic CO2, then it’s driven by absolute total amounts, not per-capita relatives. And China not only passed the US, it *shot* past the US. It’s growing so fast that you get related news reports like this:

Beijing air pollution soars to hazard level

WHO guidelines say average concentrations of the tiniest pollution particles – called PM2.5 – should be no more than 25 microgrammes per cubic metre.

Air is unhealthy above 100 microgrammes. At 300, all children and elderly people should remain indoors. … the US embassy recorded 800.

And exciting satellite photos like this from October 20, 2012:

And yet… who gets picked on? Let’s see:

Now no one can deny that the world is getting warmer

The US is the world’s greatest economy and a massive emitter of greenhouse gases. Until its political masters act, the planet has no chance of halting global warming or curtailing rising sea levels or dealing with the increasing acidification of our oceans or coping with the melting of Earth’s icecaps.

By The Numbers: Breaking Down America’s Hottest Year On Record

the United States has an opportunity to take a leadership role in this area. His administration has made some progress in curbing greenhouse gas emissions, most notably with new vehicle emissions standards and proposed regulations for new power plants. But the country has to go further in meeting its commitment to reduce overall emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and much greater reductions in the decades ahead. The best place to start is with meaningful new emissions standards for existing power plants.

Global warming rests on the US. China isn’t even mentioned.

The thing is: the US could have *massively* reduced CO2 emissions while *massively* increasing energy supplies, productivity and standard of living… had it not been for more or less the same people bitching the loudest that the US needs to reduce CO2 emissions. While it’s not a 1:1 mapping, the same people today screaming about the US and CO2 were the ones who have stood in the way of building new nuclear power plants for the last forty years. Beyond that, had NASA had the funding to build solar power satellites starting in the early 1980’s, we could have several of them by now… not only providing entirely safe gigawatts, but also providing a functional space exploration, exploitation and colonization infrastructure. Instead, NASA was turned into a do-nothing organization, and programs designed to trap whole generations into cycles of poverty were gifted trillions of dollars. Gah.

If those who most loudly warn of anthropogenic global warming truly believed what they were broadcasting, then China would be Economic Target Number 1. *Vast* pressure would be applied to the Chinese government and Chinese companies to get them to get their CO2 under control… a wise approach would be to get the US, France, China, Japan and Russia together to brainstorm (and put into mass production) new, better, safer, more efficient nuclear powerplants. But instead what do we see? Al Gore sells his little TV studio for a *personal* profit of around $100 million dollars… to Qatari oil sheiks.  Way to live the dream, pal.

SCIENCE FICTION SUGGESTION: Take one part “Beijing on a bad day” and one part “Fringe,” and you have a story about the air pollution, either just on its own or with a little mad-scientist assistance, polymerizing and converting several cubic kilometers of the air in and around Beijing into a brown, nasty aerogel. The whole city gets locked into place in a matter of seconds, and stays that way until it rains good and hard and melts off the aerogel. Yay, sudden panic in the surrounding regions!