How Could The Times Not Realize That It Is A Laughingstock?

At the New York Times yesterday, they devote the entire space for unsigned editorials to one piece.  You could guess the headline without my having to tell you.  It’s “Trump Imperils the Planet.”   From the sub-headline:  “[T]he administration is taking the country, and the world, backward.”   Yes, it’s not only that nobody is doing as we say on reducing emissions to “save the planet,” but IT’S ALL DONALD TRUMP’S FAULT!!!!!!.

[The recent UN climate conference in Poland] was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet — a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, . . .  

But hadn’t Pravda assured us that the rest of the world would never be tricked into following Trump’s lead, but rather was going to put this retrograde idiot in his place?  Perhaps you can recall a smug Pravda on March 29, 2017, shortly after Trump took office,  awarding the coveted mantle of “climate leadership” to the genius totalitarians in China.  From that piece:

“They’ve set the direction they intend to go in the next five years,” Barbara Finamore, a senior lawyer and Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York, said of China. “It’s clear they intend to double down on bringing down their reliance on coal and increasing their use of renewable energy.”

“China wants to take over the role of the U.S. as a climate leader, and they’ve baked it into their five-year plans,” she added, referring to the economic development blueprints drawn up by the Chinese government. . . .  Since Mr. Trump’s election in November, senior Chinese officials and leaders have been taking the high ground on the issue by urging all countries, including the United States, to abide by their climate commitments.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!  Actually what China was doing was playing the NRDC and the New York Times for the dupes they are.  (The Manhattan Contrarian take on this situation — on June 8, 2017 — was “Believe Me, You Don’t Have To Worry About China Seizing ‘Climate Leadership.’”)  After mouthing the right platitudes to dupe these credulous fools, China went right ahead and resumed or kept building as much new coal-fired electricity generation capacity as the U.S. has in total, to go with its existing coal-fired capacity, which is about 3 times what the U.S. has.  The BBC had the story on September 26, 2018:

Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.  The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China.  The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet.   

It must be that svengali Trump who made them do it!  In fact, he’s so devious and clever that he got them to start all these plants even before he became President.  And then, here are some of the other things that the svengali Trump has mesmerized the world into doing (from the same December 28 Pravda editorial):

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, . . . declar[ed] he had no intention of abandoning coal, which provides nearly four-fifths of Poland’s electricity. . . .  Further depressing the proceedings were recent defections and political troubles in countries that, along with the United States, had been expected to lead the way to a low-carbon energy future. Germany, which long ago walked away from carbon-free nuclear power, is having a hard time cutting back on coal because of political opposition. In Australia, a prime minister was kicked out of office because he wanted to reduce the use of coal, which Australia produces in abundance.   

And they don’t even mention the gilets jaunes in France.

Here’s what else they don’t mention:  Not a single country in the world has even begun to build the infrastructure that could potentially reduce carbon emissions by 50% or more.  Nobody is doing it and nobody is going to do it.  The only realistic way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions more than 50% in an industrial economy would be with nuclear power, which not a single country is pursuing.  A frequently-mentioned but not realistic alternative would be trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries.  No country is pursuing that either.  As I said back in August, the whole idea of reducing carbon emissions as a supposed “solution” to “climate change” is over.  Not going to happen.

Here’s one other thing that Pravda leaves out of their moralizing editorial:  they run a sideline travel venture where they fly people around the world on private jets for a fee of some $135,000 per person.  Hey, you get to rub elbows with climate campaigners like Nick Kristof.  From the Washington Post, July 2017:

It’s the trip of a lifetime — around the world in 26 days, with stops in nine countries. Just 50 people will travel on this guided tour next year via a private Boeing 757 to places like Marrakesh, Easter Island and Reykjavik, Iceland.  The price: $135,000 per person. . . .  Those who make the journey will be accompanied on various legs by journalists from the New York Times.  

When are they going to figure out that everybody else is laughing at them?