Dissent Among the Heathen

While the greenest government ever has crippled the country's solar industry in accordance with the prevailing religious doctrine, the Heathen Chinee have indulged in a blasphemous and self-centred attempt to improve energy efficiency, reduce pollution and, dreadful to relate, deal with the world as it actually is. China's coal consumption, which grew massively for the first thirteen years of the century, now appears to have peaked and begun to fall, prompting the UN's climate overseer to start sounding off in favour of Stalinist interventionism in the free market, purely for the sake of improvements in health and in people’s lives. The policy of the Heathen Chinee, as anyone decently in the mainstream of the non-extreme centre would know, is fatally undermined by its roots in rational self-interest, its dependence on mere science and expert opinion, and its hidebound resistance to such civilised and necessary measures as felling trees, dredging rivers and gassing badgers.