John Shirley
From the Washington Post of 7/19/2023:
Chinese officials have focused on softening the impact of extreme weather, rather than cutting emissions, even if it means burning more fossil fuels.
After last summer’s — also record-breaking — heat wave dried up reservoirs and caused power shortages from idled hydropower stations, the government has turned to coal to ensure the same doesn’t happen this year. Local authorities approved more coal power plants in 2022 than in any year since 2015.
The People’s Republic of China is populated by intelligent, forward-looking people. They are resourceful, and thanks to their style of government they are capable of instituting vast national changes by fiat. The PRC has indicated an awareness of the causes of climate change–anthropocentric pollutants creating a stifling greenhouse effect. Surely, knowing the long-term consequences, they could use their advantage of top-down control to change industrial and energy production policies more than they have. So why is the PRC the world’s biggest producer of coal-sourced energy? Why is it still producing huge amounts of carbon pollutants? Is it to appease the new class of powerful PRC billionaires–or is there another reason?
The seas are dying, as we know them. They are overheating, acidifying, and suffering from PPPP: pervasive plastic-particle pollution. Fish stocks are about half what they once were. Many millions rely on fish for their primary protein. Yet, as per The New York Times: “Over the last two decades, China has built the world’s largest deep-water fishing fleet, by far, with nearly 3,000 ships. Having severely depleted stocks in its own coastal waters, China now fishes in any ocean in the world, and on a scale that dwarfs some countries’ entire fleets near their own waters. The impact is increasingly being felt from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific, from the coasts of Africa to those off South America — a manifestation on the high seas of China’s global economic might.”
Why? Can’t they see they’re overfishing to the point they’re going to lose that source of protein entirely? They must know this is unsustainable.
Suppose that the PRC’s scientists have arrived at the consensus view that climate change cannot be stopped or significantly mitigated. Suppose they–and perhaps other countries, like Russia and India–are quietly assuming that the worst will happen, and the way to survive the dystopian continuum of climate change at its worse is to accept it and accrue as much power and as many resources as possible, to build some form of infrastructure that will help them to survive it and live on in a world reeling from climate-change induced famine, drought, and the forced migration of billions of people. This might explain their policy of risky expansionism, as per The Hill: “China’s expansionist drive, from the East and South China seas to the Himalayas and the southern Pacific, is making the Indo-Pacific region more volatile and unstable.” The more territory, the more resources, to exploit during the worldwide famines that may come because of the worst effects of Climate Change. And it is not impossible that the harvest of some of this systematic global overfishing by the PRC is being routed to frozen storage, in preparation for a coming global famine…
It could be that the PRC has decided that climate change at its worst cannot be stopped. A growing feeling amongst climatologists suggests it’s already too late–humanity has failed to significantly reduce its carbon output. The shift to sustainability is coming far too slowly. So if the PRC agrees with that appraisal, what does it do? It could be working toward using the resources it has to give it an edge so it can take the resources it wants, and redirect them to its own people. If this is what’s going on, it’s profoundly cynical–but the PRC might consider it to be simply the only practical way to proceed.
The other governments of the world might want to do orbital observation survey of China to see if it is engaging in large-scale excavations–such excavations might represent the building of underground cities, with hydroponic or vertical farms, to create a society protected from climate change extremes–both in terms of extreme weather conditions, and international chaos.
