Just 6 months before the Wuhan “outbreak” , large anti-pollution protests rose up in Wuhan, China around July 7, 2019 “on a scale rarely seen “, as citizens demonstrated against the construction of waste-to-energy incinerator plants in a lower-income neighborhood near a landfil. Chinese citizens seem worried that “dangerous levels of pollution” will intoxicate their city. The protests “steadily grew over the week” when “a censorship and public security operation kicked in to try to keep a lid on the unrest”. [1, 2, 3, 4] Though protests have occurred before in 2014.
This Wuhan protest, follows huge street protests in Hong Kong which began on June 28, 2019, but China’s censors “worked hard to prevent information about these protests from spreading broadly, although word of them has been seeping into the mainland.” [5]
The 2015 COP21 Paris Climate Change Agreement allowed China and India to double their pollution by 2030, while at the same time western countries agreed to work towards Net Zero! The Paris Agreement came into effect in 2020!
“This asymmetry makes no sense, of course. Allowing China, which [already] emits about twice as much as America, to increase emissions over this period, while restricting Canada and the U.S., would result in even more industries moving to China. Total global CO2 emissions would then likely rise even faster.” [6]