“They [China] will lose” if the World Retreats from Renewable Energy – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… China is acting as a guarantor … They invested a lot on the green economy. If there’s any kind of involution, they will lose. …”

China finds bigger role as US sidesteps Brazil climate summit

By Valerie Volcovici and Lisandra Paraguassu
November 16, 20253:20 AM GMT+10

BELEM, Brazil, Nov 15 (Reuters) – With the United States absent from the U.N. annual international climate summit for the first time in three decades, China is stepping into the limelight as a leader in the fight against global warming.

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“China gets it,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom during a visit to the conference earlier this week. “America is toast competitively, if we don’t wake up to what the hell they’re doing in this space, on supply chains, how they’re dominating manufacturing, how they’re flooding the zone.”

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“Little by little, China is acting as a guarantor of the climate regime,” said one senior diplomat from an emerging economy. “They invested a lot on the green economy. If there’s any kind of involution, they will lose.“

One Brazilian diplomat said China played a key role in helping reach an agreement over the COP30 agenda before negotiations even began, whereas in previous years its diplomats would not get involved unless there was some key issue for them.

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Biniaz [former US envoy under John Kerry] said she was not yet convinced that China was playing a leadership role beyond the pavilions.

“If they had wanted to, they would have put in a more ambitious emission reduction target,” she said, referring to China’s announcement in September that it would cut emissions at least 7% from their peak by 2035.

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Read more: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/china-finds-bigger-role-us-sidesteps-brazil-climate-summit-2025-11-15/

What is really going on with China? Why don’t their emissions reduction targets match their quiet assumption of climate leadership?

The answer of course is China’s advocacy of climate action has nothing to do with climate change.

There is a real possibility the China’s climate action push is an attempt to prevent national bankruptcy.

China has a lot of debt problems.

Sinographs July 31, 2025

Beijing extends and pretends to deal with its mountain of local government debt

By Jeremy Mark

As the pooh-bahs of the Chinese Communist Party gathered recently to extol their vision for urban modernization, China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping offered an assessment of recent developments that appeared slightly at odds with the upbeat tone of the proceedings. The president said that “(I)n the past, GDP was used to judge heroes,” but “One beautiful thing covered a hundred ugly things. Nowadays, in many matters, one ugliness covers a hundred beautiful things.”

Yet as China’s cities, counties, and provinces confront slower economic growth and fiscal belt-tightening, the leadership didn’t mention the “one ugliness” that is weighing on local governments—trillions of dollars of debt. That is because the Chinese government already has declared victory over local government debt and seems to be moving on. A three-year debt restructuring initiative launched last November refinances ten trillion yuan ($1.39 trillion) of “hidden debt,” or bonds issued by investment companies known as local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). But LGFV bonds are only one part of a much larger problem. Local governments throughout China are also on the hook for trillions of dollars of bank loans, unpaid bills, and other obligations that remain unaddressed.

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Read more: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/sinographs/beijing-extends-and-pretends-to-deal-with-its-mountain-of-local-government-debt/

For decades Chinese local government leaders advanced their careers with a Ponzi scheme. If a local official wants career advancement, they have to meet their growth targets.

Officials quickly discovered they could fake economic growth by pumping their regional economy with borrowed money – building massive infrastructure projects, which looked great on paper, but which did nothing to advance long term prosperity.

Of course, once the local leader made it to the central committee staff, they couldn’t allow this deception to be discovered, so they had to help their successors conceal the growing mountain of debt when their successors pulled the same career advancement trick. As a result, a Ponzi scheme developed, of increasingly senior central committee staff whose careers depended on helping their former subordinates conceal their own career advancing financial malfeasance.

So long as China’s housing bubble lasted, there was enough local government income to conceal the career advancement Ponzi scheme debts. Land releases to developers are a major source of income for local governments in China. But when the housing bubble imploded in 2020, the income required to maintain the career advancement Ponzi Scheme evaporated, and the horrifying debt burden of China’s regional governments was exposed.

It gets worse. While local government officials were playing career advancement Ponzi scheme games, the national government was using debt as a tool of international diplomacy, seeking to ensnare other countries into debt dependency on China, to extend their international influence. But the Chinese national government appears to have miscalculated. They expected to win diplomatic influence by pressuring debtors into concessions, but it never occurred to China that much of the money they loaned would never be repaid.

China Is Bailing Out Its Bad Bets, and Handing the West a Geopolitical Opening

By  Elaine Dezenski
May 18, 2023 2:37 pm EDT

China has created its own subprime infrastructure crisis, and now it is trying to bail itself out. The rescue efforts are focused on loans for China’s much-touted Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, Beijing’s trillion-dollar attempt to build global infrastructure and increase its influence throughout the developing world. These debt problems offer an opportunity for the West to approach developing economies with a better alternative.

Issuing what have frequently amounted to junk bonds, China’s BRI made high-risk, often-unneeded billion-dollar infrastructure loans, with no conditionality, poor risk planning, shrouded in opacity and secrecy. Cash-poor developing countries that lacked the ability to pay and had long track records of corruption were particularly vulnerable. A recent report by researchers at the World Bank and several other institutions shows that China has funded $240 billion in bailouts for many of these subprime loans.

It’s not surprising that so many of the countries that borrowed what looked like cheap Chinese cash for these global megaprojects are now at risk of defaulting on their loans. The seeds of project failure were sown from the outset by a lack of transparency, risk management, and viable controls to check corruption and incompetence.

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Read more: https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-belt-and-road-loans-bailout-infrastructure-africa-asia-7f905df0

After their traditional infrastructure Belt and Road push went sour, China pivoted more towards green infrastructure loans. They invested in massive green energy manufacturing capacity, powered by coal, in anticipation of a global energy system realignment. But as international demand fell short of Chinese expectations, China once again tried to pump the green infrastructure export market by offering easy credit, to keep Chinese factories running, and soak up China’s excess manufacturing capacity.

Working Together to Build a Green Belt and Road

2025-08-12Source：ECONOMIC DAILY

Green is the defining feature of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. General Secretary Xi Jinping has stressed the need to pursue open and green development in Belt and Road cooperation. Over the years, China has worked hand in hand with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partners to advance green, low-carbon, and sustainable development, while steadily deepening cooperation in such areas as green infrastructure, green energy, and green transportation. Nevertheless, the development of the Green BRI still faces many risks and challenges. Constraints in addressing climate change have grown more stringent, and the level of international cooperation on ecological and environmental protection remains to be improved. How can the BRI be advanced in a greener direction? In this edition, we have invited experts to share their insights on these issues.

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Practical cooperation in the energy sector has continued to advance. China is currently engaged in green energy projects with more than 100 countries and regions. In 2024, China’s investment in clean energy reached USD 625 billion — accounting for one-third of the global total — cementing its role as a “stabilizer” of the global clean energy production and supply chain. By deepening cooperation on renewable energy projects in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, China has provided solid resource foundations for host countries to pursue energy transition and green, low-carbon development. Leveraging its scale and integrated industrial advantages, China has promoted the “going global” of equipment manufacturing, engineering, and technical services. China’s clean energy industry has continued to expand in scale, and in 2024 accounted for over 70 percent of the world’s wind power equipment and lithium battery supply, as well as more than 80 percent of photovoltaic modules. A series of projects — including solar PV projects, wind power installations, and transmission lines — has been built in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The promotion of Chinese equipment manufacturing and technical standards has helped alleviate energy poverty in host countries and boosted their economic growth.

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Read more: http://en.brigc.net/Media_Center/Updates/Latest_News/202508/t20250814_137603.html

Thanks to President Trump’s forceful rejection of the fake climate crisis, all the money the Chinese government invested in their green energy manufacturing capacity and green energy loans is at risk. If other nations follow President Trump’s lead, those Chinese Government funded solar, EV and wind turbine factories and installations will become worthless.

China is a big presence at COP30, despite not presenting “ambitious” climate targets of their own, because they are desperate to keep the climate roadshow going. As John Kerry’s former assistant Biniaz said, “if there’s any kind of involution, they [China] will lose“.

How badly China will lose, only China knows.

And maybe even Chinese leaders can’t be sure how much bad debt resilience their nation has left. Nobody knows when China’s ageing population of income savers will try to withdraw trillions of dollars of retirement cash which has been squandered on bad debt.

We know for sure that Chinese communists lie to their bosses – look how badly the Chinese mishandled the Wuhan Covid outbreak. In the USA such incompetence would have been rapidly exposed by mainstream or new media, but China doesn’t have a free press to expose local coverups and corruption. A courageous Chinese doctor tried to raise the alarm, but his warnings were censored, and he was summoned to explain his actions to local authorities.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the CIA was as surprised as the Kremlin, because even though the CIA had full access to Kremlin economic data, all the Kremlin data was lies, the product of long chains of Soviet bureaucrats concealing their failures from the boss. When the Chinese communist system implodes, the timing of that collapse will also come as a big surprise for the same reason, even to people who thought they knew what was happening inside China – including me.