There was a time when I used to read the New York Times daily. It was supposed to have “all the news that fit to print” and I guess I could not be a student, or later a young professional “intellectual,” that would live without the Times analysis.

But as of late I began to cringe, not knowing what nonsense flim-flam will come next in the paper and although I have yet to use the conservatives’ boogeyman MSP (mainstream press) I am starting to see their objections. I guess mainstream means adopting the most conventional, least intelligent and least out of the box thinking. This includes adopting the hypes du jour and in my area of interest, energy and geopolitics, there are plenty.

So, I was of course drawn by the impressively titled story by Elisabeth Rosenthal on November 21: “Importing Coal, China Burns it as others Stop.” The story is simple. China has emerged as one of the world’s largest importers of coal and this should not be surprising since they burn about 50 percent of all coal currently consumed in the world.

But that was not the crux of the story. The shock value was the origin and shipping of the coal, namely environmentally aware (astute, conscious, devotees) Australia, Canada and the United States, worse yet and horror of horrors, the states of Colorado, California and Oregon. So while these locales have restricted, cancelled and tried to ban coal outright, they are exporting the same coal to the Chinese.

The piece did not hide the main point of the story and it did not make any bones in presenting a lamenting tone narrative; nothing of the detached and clinical writing just to inform here. It went like this. There is an inconsistency and perhaps a hypocrisy that we are in the process of stopping using the dirty stuff only to sell it to the Chinese. If the reason for cutting coal use is for a greener tomorrow and, especially, reducing CO2 emissions, how is Chinese combustion instead of US or Australian combustion, going to alleviate global climate change? It is just only one atmosphere.

It was not surprising that the first person to be quoted in the Times story was somebody from the Sierra Club. Now there you have a balancing act. In my view, the Sierra Club and many other environmentalist groups have fooled the public in their mainstream pretensions.

They are as radical social engineers as can be. There is no real energy project that the Sierra Club will like and will be proud of all it helped to cancel.

What the article, like so many more before it, did not do is to seriously examine, and amazing even to me, the collapsing nonsense of 1) man-made global climate change and, if that is too serious a task, 2) what to do about it. China will not play along.

Does anybody really believe that there will be economically extractable fossil fuels anywhere in the world that would not be produced and consumed just because the United States, Australia and Canada impose carbon constraints? A morally charged (which religion is hard to fathom) Sierra-Club-induced economic hara-kiri can cause irreparable harm to these countries. China and the rest of the galloping developing world will move on, buying all the energy sources they need, including from us, and laughing all the way to the bank and our treasuries.

Of course nothing of this obvious thinking was in the Times piece.