Combating climate change does not require the United States and the rest of the world to remain silent about human rights abuses, repressive policies, and the military ambitions of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China. The issues that “antagonize” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are ones U.S. policymakers should not ignore. China’s human rights abuses, military ambitions, and industrial policy cannot be separated from climate change. Chinese policymakers know their country is critical to any comprehensive international effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and they are trying to use that leverage to advance Chinese interests in other areas. The reality is that China is now emitting more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. China has previously under-reported its emissions, making it difficult to track its progress on climate targets. Any policies that fail to account for the global nature of emissions will be meaningless. In a real sense, “climate change” is increasingly an issue of “China change.” We do not wish to see a new Cold War between China and the United States. However, if China continues to attempt to greenwash its human rights record with empty promises of climate action, the United States should make it clear that we are equally committed to protecting human rights and the planet’s health. If China does insist on a Cold War, we should remember the values that won the last Cold War - a belief in personal freedom, private property, consumer choice, and free enterprise. We must make it unmistakable clear to China that we will not sacrifice our commitment to human rights as we work to combat climate change.

The Chinese Communist Party, like all authoritarian regimes, cannot be trusted to provide accurate and transparent information to the world concerning anything, let alone its environmental indicators. China hides its human rights atrocities. It is now widely believed that the CCP hid critical information about a virus that just happened to create economic chaos in the West and ended up benefitting the economy of the world’s biggest polluter. In July, Beijing rebuffed another WHO investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Obfuscation is the national pastime as it was for the Soviets before them. The facts and the science are plain. The US has continued to make greater progress toward reducing our carbon emissions than Europe while protecting our competitiveness, without Kyoto and the Paris Accords. Brussels’ new radical climate action plan, also announced in July, is more nonsensical policy summersaults. Carbon trading in China and here will lead to higher prices for virtually everything. It will place the U.S. at a further competitive disadvantage with our greatest strategic competitor, who is prepared to dump money into subsidies and fudge their climate numbers at will. Mr. Biden and his acolytes on the Left are dedicated to putting the business of climate change on steroids at the expense of American workers and consumers. They welcome the pressure from China. It supports their aims. Americans, however, should be wary of any effort by states or the federal government to fundamentally change our regulations for the sake of competing with the apparition of a communist China that actually cares about climate.

The same folks who helped bring you COVID-19 are now claiming they’re going to be carbon neutral by 2060. Anyone can hear the speech by President Biden warning the nation that American leadership on climate policy is key to winning our competition with China. The Red Dragon’s fire-breathing economy is powered by coal. Nobody should expect that to change. China’s sudden interest in climate policy is a trap Mr. Biden, and his climate profiteers are more than willing to fall into. China accounts for a whopping 28 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. More than 100 coal-fired power plants under construction will add approximately 247 gigawatts of coal power to its grid over the next few years. That’s nearly six times Germany’s entire coal-fired capacity. According to a Climate Action Tracker analysis, all that power amounts to as much as 14.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Their stated goal of the eco-scheme of carbon neutrality is nonsense. China’s recently announced carbon-trading marketplace, created literally out of thin air, is intentionally focused on its own companies, which the communist government increasingly regulates. Starting with the world’s dirtiest power sector and later expected to expand into metals, chemicals, and aviation, the Chinese government will claim emissions reductions that will lack credibility like so much else out of the communist regime. Even many environmental groups like Greenpeace are skeptical. They should be. The notion of carbon trading is based on dubious estimates and fungible reporting. It’s primed for manipulation by companies and governments wanting to project a perception of environmental sustainability but may, in practice, be doing little to reduce emissions.

The Biden Administration goal of net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 faces some troubling supply-chain issues, like child labor in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, slave labor in China. One case in point is polysilicon. Polysilicon is one of the basic building blocks for solar panels. And solar panels are the basic building blocks for the part of the net-zero economy, you know, the economy that has no gas cooktops, gas water heaters, Bunsen burners, or gasoline-powered cars. In addition to no gourmet cooking, the net-zero economy gets rid of the gas-fired and coal-fired powerplants that make most of our electricity needed to power the replacement electric cooktops, water heaters, and electric vehicles (who knows what replaces Bunsen burners). There is a bit of awkwardness regarding the supply of polysilicon. Special Climate Envoy John Kerry noted that it is a problem that US imports “solar panels that we believe in some cases are being produced by forced labor.” Eighty percent of the world’s supply of polysilicon (needed for solar panels) comes from China. About half of that 80% comes from the northwestern province of Xinjiang, where a million of the local people Uyghurs have been forced into detention camps. Credible reports indicate that there are also programs to sterilize the Uyghurs. The Chinese say the camps and the forced labor are merely job training. The systematic rape, forced detention, and sterilization issues that are part and parcel of this “job training” need not hinder the United States’ march to net-zero greenhouse gases. Thanks to the efforts of the environmental/climate warriors, we already have an approach that will allow us to ignore the impact of green slavery totally.

Judging by the actions and words of America’s enemies, President Biden gets no respect. Russia and our other major adversaries are showing their contempt for Mr. Biden. Russia, Iran and North Korea have all concluded that Mr. Biden is weak and that they can get bigger compromises from him than they give in return. Ebrahim Raisi is apparently being groomed to succeed Iran’s elderly “supreme leader” Ayatollah Khamenei which makes it no surprise that he will be Iran’s next president. He rejected the Biden administration’s attempts to include limits on Iran’s missile program in any revival of the 2015 nuclear weapons deal. Mr. Biden had offered to negotiate with the North Koreans anytime, anywhere, and without preconditions. That was a big mistake. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, always seeking attention, rejected any negotiations with the U.S., even without preconditions. There should be no negotiations with the Kim regime without preconditions such as international inspections of its nuclear weapons and missile programs and a cessation of missile tests. Messrs. Putin, Raisi and Kim clearly believe that Mr. Biden can be pushed into compromises that will both strengthen them and weaken US national security. That weakness has been displayed often enough for them to not doubt it. And China is still building its army, navy, air and missile forces amid a strong surge of nationalism. At the same time, Mr. Biden‘s defense spending plans diminish significant investments such as naval shipbuilding. We don’t care if the world doesn’t love us but our enemies must respect us. Right now, they don’t.

We face many problems with respect to the Chinese. Slavery, genocide, torture, religious persecution, etc., are not confined to a single province or a single company in China. They are, instead, features of the regime. We need clarity on that point and on the language we use to make that point. The White House talked about “forced labor” and the like. That’s a start, but it is insufficient and, more importantly, inaccurate. This administration also needs to decide what it thinks about China. With one hand it points out Chinese forced labor. With the other, it hands China decisive advantages by committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions more or less immediately, while the Chinese Communists commit to reducing emissions at some date in the distant future. The administration wants us to buy electric vehicles, despite the fact that 80% of the minerals used to make the needed batteries are controlled by or processed by China. American companies face the same sort of problem. Many view China as a significant market, and are, consequently, willing to overlook the human rights abuses and depredations. That approach is not - as the young people like to say - sustainable. The Chinese communists are, in fact, committed to human enslavement in all its forms. Companies and governments are not going to be able to remain complicit by their silence indefinitely. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. noted under other circumstances: “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” Indeed. With respect to the communist regime in China, we are well past that time. An unwillingness to plainly describe and act on what is happening in China is betrayal, whether done by governments, companies or individuals.

Simply put, halting meat consumption in the United States completely would not make a slight difference in the climate. Nor should you feel that eating that ultra-processed veggie burger is actually making a difference for the environment. (Nor are the chemicals used to make it a healthy addition to your body.) The main complaint environmentalists have on eating meat is animals emit methane gas. Methane gas is 80 times more potent than carbon as a greenhouse gas. On the surface, that is concerning. But that figure doesn’t tell the whole story. Methane stays in the atmosphere for up to 12 years. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for up to 200 years. Of all the greenhouse gases emitted in the United States, 10 percent is methane, and 80 percent is carbon dioxide. Animals are also not the only source of methane. Food waste is a major emitter of methane. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of all food produced is wasted in the U.S. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that between 6 and 8 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to food waste. Ensuring that everything on the plate is eaten would be a more effective emissions-reduction strategy than wringing your hands over what’s on the menu. Environmentalists often say time is running out to stop humanity from inflicting irreversible damage on the planet. If they truly believed this, targeting meat is a head-scratching strategy. Electricity generation is responsible for a quarter of all emissions, but most environmentalists oppose expanding carbon-neutral nuclear energy.

The United Nations Environment Program has called meat “the world’s most urgent problem.” Activists propose meat taxes or other policies that discourage eating bacon burgers. To environmentalists, behind every big, juicy steak or sausage lies irreversible damage to the planet. Now corporations selling synthetic meat analogues are trying to get in on the game, marketing their food as supposedly better for fighting climate change. And there’s a lot of money at stake on the notion. Sustainability-related claims about food are on the rise. But there’s some good news for those who love real meats and the environment: An individual’s diet has almost no impact on the climate. According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture as a whole is only responsible for 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. All livestock is responsible for just five percent of U.S. emissions. The United States is responsible for 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, making American livestock’s hoofprint less than 1 percent of global emissions. That by itself is small potatoes. But what about if we all went vegan tomorrow, as PETA demands? A study from Arizona State University found that everyone going vegan would reduce total U.S. emissions by 2.6 percent. (After all, beans and cabbage still require resources to produce and transport.) Global emissions would be reduced by a small fraction of a percent. Extrapolating further, if anyone American went vegan, U.S. emissions would go down by 0.0000008%. In scientific terms, that’s a nothing burger.

The U.S. is under siege from China and Russia in the 21st century digital Cold War, and the private sector finds itself directly in its crosshairs. Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR) penetrated the SolarWinds operating system, spread malware into its Orion security software. Cyber hacking groups such as DarkSide and REvil operate with apparent impunity on Russian territory. In July, the Biden administration explicitly called out China’s Ministry of State Security for a cyber attack on Microsoft Exchange’s email server, through which China-based hackers penetrated thousands of networks worldwide. We should not expect the Chinese and Russian attacks to abate anytime soon. There are no internationally recognized norms for conduct in cyberspace, and thus far the U.S. has been unable effectively to find and stop the rampant criminal hacking online. All of which means that, now more than ever, the U.S. private sector is on the hook to fend for itself. Enterprises must recognize that no single solution is sufficient, and that diversified threat detection is the most effective means to protect the data and reputation on which commercial success and our national security rely. Deployment of authentic deceptive data creates an alternative reality, one which slows down the hacker and exposes them to detection. When an attacker guesses wrong and enters the wrong door, the defender is alerted and can collect data on the attacker’s tactics. Just making this strategy known deters the bad guys from attacking in the first place. The federal government might yet make cyberspace safe for business, but, for now, it’s up to the private sector to take the fight to the cyber adversaries who seek to do us harm.

North Korea has multiple nuclear sites, including the sprawling Yongbyon complex, where plutonium production and uranium enrichment occur; the Sohae satellite facility used to test ballistic missiles; and the Punge-ri nuclear site. Mr. Kim has always sought to give up as little as possible in return for as much sanctions relief as he can obtain. If North Korea never agrees to full denuclearization, then the U.S. needs to consider an arms control regime, which allows for inspections, reduces stockpiles, and limits testing to prevent additional technological advances. After U.S. special envoy Sung Kim’s recent conversation with his Chinese counterpart, Beijing, which has flagrantly enabled North Korea to evade U.N. sanctions, publicly assured Mr. Kim of its ongoing support and reaffirmed the countries’ 60- year bilateral defense treaty. Having purposely rebuffed U.S. proposals for negotiations without preconditions, Mr. Kim is following the same playbook as he did in the lead-up to the Singapore summit, when he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov before sitting down to talks with President Trump. Mr. Kim may soon conclude that the gravity of North Korea’s economic and health crises compel him to force the U.S. to deal with him now, perhaps by conducting an ICBM or nuclear test designed to engineer a “crisis” which only Mr. Kim could de-escalate - on his own terms. But for now, notwithstanding whatever health issues may have afflicted him, Mr. Kim is effectively practicing Pyongyang’s version of “strategic patience,” willing to relinquish some strategic independence to China in return for a stronger negotiating position against Washington.