Although it appeared a little after the traditional pantomime season, the latest articlei in the Guardian to fuel my ire, did make me think of pantomime, for reasons which, dear reader, will become apparent if you read on.
I’m talking about this: “West accused of ‘climate hypocrisy’ as emissions dwarf those of poor countries – Average Briton produces more carbon in two days than Congolese person does in entire year, study finds”. It appeared on the Guardian’s website on 28th January 2022, and in turn was prompted by “A New Year’s Resolution on the US’s Climate Hypocrisy”, which appeared on the websiteii of the Center for Global Development on 7th January 2022. Or you can read the UK version, with virtually the same title (A New Year’s Resolution on the UK’s Climate Hypocrisyiii).
These two paragraphs from the Guardian article sum up what it’s all about:
The study, which highlights the “vast energy inequality” between rich and poor countries countries [sic], found that each Briton produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person, with people in the US producing 585 times as much. By the end of January, the carbon emitted by someone living in the UK will surpass the annual emissions of citizens of 30 low- and middle-income countries, it found.
Euan Ritchie, a policy analyst at CGD Europe, said his work was prompted by the “climate hypocrisy” of western countries, including the UK and the US, that have pledged to stop aid funding to fossil fuel projects in developing states.
And no doubt it is fair – very fair indeed – to point out that the per capita GHG emissions of US and UK citizens are massively higher than those of poor developing countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. However, why single out the USA and UK? Why not mention EU countries, for instance? As the EDGAR websiteiv makes clear, UK per capita emissions have declined more rapidly than those of the EU, and from a higher level in 1990. They were, by 2019 (the last date available on the database) lower than those of the EU.
But most tellingly, why not talk about China’s emissions? On a per capita basis, over the same time scale, far from reducing, they have quadrupled. Not just quadrupled, but overtaken quite substantially those of the EU, and now exceeding the per capita emissions of UK citizens by almost 50%. Iceland, curiously for a country with great geothermal resources, has per capita CO2 emissions at twice those of the UK, and they have increased by close to 25% since 1990. In fact, there are plenty of unlikely candidates in the list of high per capita emitters. The following countries (as of 2019) all have per capita emissions at least twice as high as those of the UK:
Australia; Barbados; Bahrain; Brunei; Canada; China; Curacao; Estonia; Gibraltar; Iceland; Kazakhstan; Luxembourg; Mongolia; New Caledonia; Oman; Palau; Qatar; Russia; Saudia Arabia; Seychelles; South Korea; Taiwan; Trinidad & Tobago; Turkmenistan; United Arab Emirates; and USA.
There is a very long list indeed (too long to mention here in detail) of countries with per capita emissions below the above level but ahead of the UK’s. By the way, who would have thought it? The winners, by a country mile, in the above list, are New Caledonia and Palau.
And let’s talk about cumulative emissionsv while we’re at it. Again, we find China in second place (with 12.7%), behind only the USA (admittedly way out in front, with 25%). Russia is on 6% and Japan is on 4%. Even South Africa is on 1.3%. According to Carbon Briefvi the UK lies in just 8th place, behind the USA, China, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany and India, with Japan and Canada not far behind.
So why pick on the UK? In 8th place in terms of cumulative emissions, and well down the pecking order in both total national emissions and per capita emissions. China and Russia (as examples) are well ahead of the UK on any measure, and India is ahead in terms of cumulative and annual emissions. Why does the article (and that on which it is based) ignore them?
Especially given this statement:
“Solving the climate crisis in the medium term is the responsibility of high emitting countries, not only because they caused the problem but logically, it’s where high emissions are concentrated,” said Mutiso, who is Kenyan.
That would be China, then (and increasingly India).
I loved this quote from the Guardian article, by the way, a good point on which to end:
“It’s well known renewable energy is intermittent and needs to be backed up by other sources. Telling African countries they just need solar is completely hypocritical and colonial.”
But it’s OK, apparently, to insist that the UK has to rely on intermittent renewable energy despite the fact that solar power at this latitude is a joke in winter, at the time when energy is most needed. The irony appears to pass the Guardian by completely.
Conclusion
The thing about pantomimes is that the audience can see the villains all too clearly while those prancing about on the stage either can’t (or perhaps more accurately) pretend not to see them. There are times when the debate about climate change looks increasingly like a pantomime.
Endnotes
i https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/28/west-accused-of-climate-hypocrisy-as-emissions-dwarf-those-of-poor-countries
ii https://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-years-resolution-us-climate-hypocrisy
iii https://www.cgdev.org/blog/new-years-resolution-uk-climate-hypocrisy
iv https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2020#emissions_table
v https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
vi https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-which-countries-are-historically-responsible-for-climate-change
Climate Scepticism 
Yes, but no Britons want to go to live in the Congo, while quite a few Congolese would like to come and live here, no doubt. The author lives in a country with better healthcare than the Congo. It has better education, better transport, more facilities, better (kof) government. In short, one of the mentioned countries is a basket case, the other is still (just about) civilised. That’s not just my colonial attitude talking.
Wiki:
The other Congo is not much better, in case the author was referring to that country – corruption, election fraud, slavery, inequality, a Mugabe-lite president…
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Jit,
Yes it is high time we all lived like the Congolese and dropped the hypocricy that inevitably accompanies high standards of living and energy security.
Meanwhile, the pious but self-enervated West now finds itself in the cross-hairs of the hypocritical Russians and Chinese. No doubt they will make their move once we have achieved the necessary levels of self-satisfaction.
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I try hard, both out of politeness and as a matter of policy, to avoid being rude about people. However, viewing the behaviour of those who are determined to run the UK down, force us to rely on unreliable, unpredictable and expensive forms of energy and in the process make us reliable on bad actors around the world for our reliable energy supplies to fill the gap, all the while making no complaint about those whose “climate sins” are so much worse than ours, I can’t help being critical of them.
Why do they do it? Are greenhouse gases a problem only if emitted by affluent westerners? Are Russian, Chinese and Indian emissions on a larger scale somehow less dangerous in their eyes?
I have never been an advocate of the theory that climate warriors have anti-western sentiment as their primary motivation, but sometimes I find myself wondering.
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Mark:
“I have never been an advocate of the theory that climate warriors have anti-western sentiment as their primary motivation, but sometimes I find myself wondering.”
I’m not sure about anti-western sentiment, but the movement had its origins in the NIMBYISM of various people wanting to keep the hoi-polloi of the boomer generation out of ‘their’ allegedly pristine wildernesses.
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The reason tiny island states like Barbados and New Caledonia (which isn’t yet a state, being part of France) are such heavy emitters is surely because they’re not big enough to justify building expensive gas power stations, coal investment is no longer underwritten by the World Bank, and so they rely largely on diesel. People will put up with high energy prices on a tropical island where heating costs are negligible, but of course it makes lots of basic electricity-based services like hospitals and supermarket freezers rather expensive, and industrial development impossible.
The poor Guardian is caught in its ever more tangled web of motivations, trying to appeal to a US audience while still obsessed with post-colonial self-flagellation, AND avoiding mentioning that EV batteries rely on cobalt extracted by Congolese children. They’re preparing their readership for coming blackouts, when they will be able to scold us with: “think of the poor Africans, who haven’t got any electricity at all.”
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“China’s emissions of two potent greenhouse gases rise 78% in decade
Figure represents 64-66% of global output of tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, MIT study finds”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/15/chinas-emissions-of-two-potent-greenhouse-gases-rise-78-in-decade
Emissions of two of the most potent greenhouse gases have substantially increased in China over the last decade, a study has found.
Perfluorocarbons are used in the manufacturing processes for flat-panel TVs and semiconductors, or as by-products from aluminium smelting. They are far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, and can persist in the Earth’s atmosphere for thousands of years, unlike CO2 which can persist for up to 200 years.
A research team led by Minde An at Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined the emissions of two specific perfluorocarbons, tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, both with atmospheric lifetimes of 50,000 and 10,000 years respectively.
By analysing atmospheric observations in nine cities across China from 2011 to 2021, they found that both gases exhibited an increase of 78% in emissions in China and, by 2020, represented 64-66% of global emissions for tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane. However, while levels of fluorocarbon emissions are increasing at an alarming rate, CO2 still accounts for about 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions.
The increase in emissions from China was sufficient to account for the global emission increases over that same period, suggesting that China is the dominant driver in tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane release into the atmosphere globally.
The emissions were found to mainly originate from the less populated industrial zones in the western regions of China, and are thought to be due to the role of perfluorocarbons in the aluminium industry.
China is the world’s largest producer and exporter of aluminium, with the country’s production reaching a record-high output of 41.5m tonnes last year.
With the rapid expansion of China’s aluminium and semiconductor industries, these ongoing high levels of fluorocarbon emissions could pose a particular threat to China’s carbon neutrality goal and global climate mitigation...
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“Green energy sector drove more than 90% of China’s investment growth last year, analysis finds
Industry bigger than all but seven world economies, and accounts for more than third of China’s economic growth”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/05/china-green-energy-sector-investment-growth
Perhaps it’s badly reported, perhaps I’m no economist, but if 90% of investment growth generated more than a third of economic growth, then it sounds as though the other 10% of investment drove nearly two thirds of growth – in which case it was the non-“green” investment that delivered the goods. Meanwhile:
…China’s coal industry is also a powerful political force and it will be contesting the speed of transition. Last year, developers submitted proposals to build a total 161 GW of new coal-fired power plants and more are in the pipeline. The future direction of the country’s energy sector should become clearer next month, when the government unveils its next five-year plan.
Climate campaigners said it was time for China to make up its mind. “This is a historic turning point: solar power is set to overtake coal in China for the first time in 2026. This is maybe the clearest demonstration yet that clean energy has won – on cost, scale, and air quality,” said Andreas Sieber, the head of political strategy at 350.org.
“However, China is responding to coal’s economic defeat by building more of it. With around 290 GW of new coal capacity already permitted or under construction, and another record year for approvals, the country is … proving coal is obsolete while rushing to entrench it. This mostly serves a coal industry racing against time. The consequence is predictable: stranded assets, higher system costs, and a transition made harder.”
Whatever other faults they have, the leaders of the CCP aren’t stupid. They certainly aren’t proving that coal is obselete – quite the opposite – and they clearly don’t regard the many new coal-fired power plants as stranded assets. Western campaigners are whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up.
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What an absurd editorial in the Guardian (it’s based, of course, on more propagandic “research” from Carbon Brief):
“The Guardian view on Donald Trump and the climate crisis: the US is in reverse while China ploughs ahead”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/15/the-guardian-view-on-donald-trump-and-the-climate-crisis-the-us-is-in-reverse-while-china-ploughs-ahead
Even the editorial contains this:
…the numbers suggest that the decline in China’s carbon intensity – emissions per unit of GDP – was below the target set in the last five-year plan, making it hard to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement. The shift in emissions may not prove enduring. There is fear that China’s focus may change; the next five-year plan, due in March, will be key. Some subsidies for renewable power have already been withdrawn. The installation of huge quantities of renewable energy infrastructure has been accompanied by a surge in constructing coal-fired power plants, though the hope is that these are intended primarily as a fallback. [My emphasis].
There are other grave concerns, including evidence of the use of forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in solar-panel production in Xinjiang. China’s chokehold on critical minerals hampers the ability of others to develop their own technology. And while its cheap [sic] renewables technology has resulted in the cheapest electricity in history, it has also hit manufacturers in other countries….[The link used to to make the claim is to a Carbon Brief report about an IEA report].
China’s cheap electricity is down to its massive reliance on coal, not renewables. It is this, among other things, that gives it a competitive advantage against developed countries, which are now exporting manufacturing, jobs, and emissions to China.
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Seems the Guardian conveniently ignores the obvious, sad really.
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“As Trump retreats from climate goals, China is becoming a green superpower”
BBC link.
Some balance, but no mention of the new coal plants, whose lifetime extends beyond the alleged Net Zero target.
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Jit,
I was just reading it. As for coal, this is worth repeating, from the same BBC article:
…China is running two races at the same time.
It is trying to keep the lights on for the world’s second-largest economy, and its 1.4 billion people, while building renewables capacity that can replace coal.
That is one of the reasons the country is still relying on fossil fuels and building coal plants.
China is using more power every year and coal was still responsible for generating 58% of that in 2024 – although the rapid growth of wind and solar power means they were contributing 18%.…
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BBC article headline:
“As Trump retreats from climate goals, China is becoming a green superpower”
From the BBC article:
China is using more power every year and coal was still responsible for generating 58% of that in 2024 – although the rapid growth of wind and solar power means they were contributing 18%
From the latest Ember report:
In 2024, wind and solar together overtook coal in a historic first for the United States
In 2024, wind and solar together generated more electricity in the US than coal for the first time, with coal’s share in the mix falling to an all-time low of under 15%
...The demand rise was predominantly met with higher solar, wind and gas generation, which also made up for a fall in coal generation (-22 TWh).
2024 saw the largest-ever increase in solar generation in the US (+64 TWh).
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/major-countries-and-regions/#united-states
But the US is in retreat and China is becoming a green superpower. Words no longer mean what they used to mean.
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See Paul Homewood here: https://www.climateskeptic.org/p/why-is-the-bbc-holding-up-china-as.
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Thanks for the link Robin, which states the obvious but conveniently neglected “context”.
“What the BBC fail to mention is the fact that everything in China happens on a giant scale, because the country itself is so big. China produces 35 times as much electricity as the UK and more than the US and EU combined. So of course they produce more solar and wind power than we do.”
You have to wonder if they only give the “context” when it suits their narrative, Heaven forbid!!!
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Jo Nova on the new coal plants in China: a real hockey stick.
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