Leave it to the lefties at Reuters to act like they’re actually shaming President Donald Trump while behaving like media minions for the communist Chinese government.
“China leads nations with new climate plans, defying US climate denial,” read the September 25 headline screed belched out by Reuters reporters Valerie Volcovici and Yukun Zhan. They began:
China led several countries in announcing new climate plans on Wednesday and offered a veiled rebuke of the U.S. president's anti-climate rhetoric a day earlier at the U.N. General Assembly.
What does "anti-climate" even mean? Trump opposes the weather?
Now stay with us here — could it be possible commie China is lying again about its "plans"? Say it ain’t so! But Volcovici and Zhan just appeared to be pushing readers to just take Xi’s word for it as he took a veiled swipe at Trump:
China's reduction target marked the first time the world's biggest emitter pledged a cut in emissions, rather than just limiting their growth, though the reduction was less than many observers had expected. Xi urged stronger climate action from the world's developed countries. He referred, though not by name, to the United States for moving away from the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Reuters readers wouldn’t know until the fourth paragraph that China is “the world’s largest emitter,” and nowhere did Volcovici and Zhan disclose how China notoriously ramped up its fossil fuel production against its previously held commitments to go green.
Carbon Brief reported in February that China’s construction of coal-powered plants reached a 10-year high in 2024. Citing new research at the time, Carbon Brief summarized that “[t]he accelerated buildout, fueled by investment from the coal-mining sector, ‘raises critical concerns’ about China’s ability to transition away from fossil fuel, the report warns.” In fact, it was Reuters itself that reported in February on China’s coal production reaching a ten-year high, “hampering the country's transition away from fossil fuels.”
Even the eco-extremist Sierra Club admitted in a September 23 item that China “continues to dominate in coal production.” The Stockholm Environment Institute recently co-authored a major report finding that “The Chinese government continues to invest heavily in oil and gas exploration, spending nearly CNY 93.75 billion (USD 13.3 billion) in 2023, the highest amount in over a decade (Ministry of Natural Resources, 2024).” VC Elements also reported in April that China “generated nearly 60% of its electricity from coal,” just behind India and vastly ahead of the United States, which is powered primarily by “natural gas” and only gets 15.6 percent of its energy resources from coal.
Oops. All of this is easily researchable of course, and would ideally cause any journalist with a functioning brain — apparently not Volcovici and Chan — to scrutinize China's green commitments, given that its government has a chronic aversion to the truth. In fact, according to ReCharge, China’s new climate plans aren’t even all its being cracked up to be in the first place:
But the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) think tank said in a statement that setting a target for solar and wind capacity of over 3.6TW by 2035 would mean a ‘sharp slowdown of recent trends …’ On the target to cut emissions by 7-10% from peak levels, CREA said this also ‘falls far short’ of what would be required to align with the Paris Agreement of at least 30% from 2024 levels.”
In other words, it seems more likely that China is just tossing the eco-fanatical apparatchiks in the U.N. a green bone just to shut everybody up and keep them looking the other way.
Did the Reuters reporters mention any of this? Nope. Perhaps Xi promised each of them a delicious fortune cookie if they both acted like good little propagandists and regurgitated their press-release language about leading the world.