Chinese government officials used the United Nations climate conference, COP27, on Wednesday to promote the idea of climate “compensation” from developed countries to poorer nations, but balked at the idea of China being among those compensating.
China is by far the world’s most prolific carbon emitter and polluter in general, responsible for prodigious amounts of waste tossed into the ocean, ecological destruction in the South China Sea, and tremendous increases in coal production and consumption in the past two years. China is also a global leader in rare-earth mineral mining, a process that devastates mining and processing sites with chemical waste.
While being the second-largest economy in the world and its worst carbon emitter, China has managed throughout the years to carve out exceptions for itself in global environmental projects. It is, for example, a signatory…
