
So let’s start hating on the world capital of photovoltaics and nuclear because of a lemmitor’s predictions of energy production over the coming 20 years in China?
So let’s start hating on the world capital of photovoltaics and nuclear because of a lemmitor’s predictions of energy production over the coming 20 years in China?
Not about altruism, just contradicts your prior claim of “energy security”. Maybe they’re switching to renewables because they do care about the environment and because they’re affordable?
That’s why China is working hard on the greatest desert reforestation projects in the world, and why it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves.
First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2
For cumulative that’s debatable. CH4 is the second most important gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is short enough that over spans of 100s of years it can decompose into CO2 which has a much lesser greenhouse potential.
Per capita annual emissions
See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn’t fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.
Compare GDP PPP per capita. China is very much on a lower place than the US or Germany. China is very developed compared to, say, Philippines, but still developing when compared to Japan or UK.
By which other metric would you compare development? I’m open to debate
The important metric for the moral debate is cumulative CO2 per capita, because that’s the whole reason why we’re measuring coal production history, not because we hate coal per se.
I showed you that, even moving to cumulative coal production, China still has 1/3 that of the US per capita, which is the important metric because why the fuck would we compare a country with 1.4bn inhabitants to one with 340mn without taking population size into account.
So yeah, China still has a lot of margin for coal burning until they reach the evil levels of the US/EU, but thankfully they won’t because they’re the strongest country in renewables, producing essentially 100% of all solar panels in the world.
You’re right, you’re referring to the original source, which is supposedly already in PPP dollars, so I deleted my previous comment. Thanks for the correction. Regardless, that data is 2011, so it’s kinda useless to me because that’s before the energy transition of China.
What’s the point of comparing coal if not for CO2? Most other forms of pollution from coal are local, not global, the international debate here is on climate change, a western-world inhabitant has no right to say what China should be doing with the local pollution. The discussion on coal is started because of its horrendous climate change potential, which comes exclusively from its cumulative CO2 emissions.
But if you want to compare coal numbers, I ran the calculations using this source for US production and this source for China production. Downloading the CSVs from both sources, I get that the US has produced 85643270043 short tons of coal, which at 21GJ of energy per short ton amount to 496731 TWh, whereas China has extracted 617787 TWh, i.e. a bit below 25% more than the USA. Since China has 1411 mn inhabitants and the US has 340 mn inhabitants, i.e. China has 415% the population of the USA, China has along its existence as a country extracted about 1/3 as much coal per inhabitant than the USA.
So yeah, China would have to literally consume twice as much coal as it’s already consumed to reach US values of per-capita historical cumulative coal consumption.
Now what will you come up with? Suddenly coal numbers don’t matter anymore?
If you “aren’t sure” about that, then why the hell are you trying to discuss it making guesses instead of informing yourself?
China, a country with 4-5 times the US population, has half the cumulative historic emissions. And yet you have the fucking nerve to blame china for coal. The US and the EU get to pollute the fucking Earth for 2 centuries, and China does a renewable revolution in its 40 years since industrializing and you cry about how they still have plans for coal.
Just, seriously, stop arguing from ignorance. If you do not know about cumulative emissions, don’t make “Oh I’m not so sure about that because look at the trends for the past 60 years”, as if the US and EU hadn’t been emitting fossil CO2 since the fucking late 18th century.
China is 17% of the world and almost 40% of the emissions.
Deceiving metrics. What percentage of world PPP GDP is China? China doesn’t pollute due to its population, it pollutes because it’s the industrial hub of the world. How comfortable of you to sit in your office and import Chinese products disregarding the effect of that in the pollution metrics of your country and China.
China is only %27 renewables while the EU is 47%
And how long did China take to develop? What are the cumulative CO2 emissions of China vs those of the US or Europe? Furthermore: where are the solar panels that Europe uses manufactured? Europe may have a blossoming wind industry, but photovoltaics are almost entirely Chinese.
What a chauvinistic and anti-Chinese point of view. BTW, you got completely proven wrong on China building more coal than renewables, you’re just spitting disinformation.
It’s a better measure because western countries outsource manufacturing and associated pollutions to other countries and then pretend to be green.
How much coal has China cumulatively used in its history compared to the US or Europe? Spoiler alert: much less. Almost as if countries in the process of developing used coal for a reason…
Gotta love how you jump to the whataboutism when it comes to good China news. “Yeah sure, they may be saving the environment by going solar, but what about… Uh… Environmental regulation?”
Like, mate, manufacturing 90% of the world’s photovoltaics is the best thing you can environmentally do.
It’s not about regulation. China has almost the complete photovoltaic production of the world. Essentially all panels installed in the rest of the world are also Chinese. It’s about a smart government knowing which technologies to pursue, instead of things like the Spanish “sun tax” of the 2010s that killed whatever solar industry there might have been in the sunniest country in Europe.
So, no wars, got it. Just overtaking the US through soft power and economic prowess, lmao.
Show me the youth unemployment figures
According to SCMP, “The urban jobless rate among those aged 16 to 24 – excluding students – fell to 15.8 per cent last month, down from 16.5 per cent in March, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday”. What’s your point? It literally says “released by the National Bureau of Statistics”, what’s the government hiding??
You missed the part where China hurried through a tiktok like curtain to silo users.
Can you source this claim, please?
You must have also missed the social credit scoring
This is a nothingburger made up by western bad-faith actors. There is no such thing as a social credit score in China. Unlike in the US, where you can go into your bank account to check your “good citizen meter” and see how likely you are to get a mortgage.
The HK protests
Nothing compared to ICE kidnapping people from their literal homes masked, putting them into unmarked vans, and deporting them without due process or putting them in prison.
This is textbook tolerance paradox stuff, either accept propaganda or you ae against free speech
So, China forbidding western media is oppressive and dictatorial because western press good, but the West forbidding Russian media is cool and based because Russian media bad? You’re only showing your bias here if you think western media has any semblance of objectivity, especially when it comes to international politics.
Are you telling me the EU has less press freedoms than Russia or China?
Not than Russia, Russia is further advanced towards fascism than the EU, so it’s worse. But China is getting better and the EU is getting worse.
Its clear you are passionate and refusing to take on board an alternative view.
It’s clear that you only care about deaths if they take place on the first world. You want to avoid “direct confrontation” because you care more about Europeans and Americans than you do about Vietnamese, Korean or Iraqi. You take pride in how much the “military expenditure in the cold war prevented direct conflict” without caring about how much more conflict it stoked outside the west.
Ukraine is atrocity that is only tied to the cold war by way of Russia
False. The invasion of Ukraine is a policy pursued by the Russian goverment as a way to preserve the sphere of influence that the west is eroding each day through NATO and economic/soft power. You can condemn it, it’s cruel and abhorrent, but it’s not exclusively Russia to blame, and in 10 years from now this will be clear to everyone.
stop issuing economic statistics
Then what’s this?. I literally don’t know what you’re talking about.
The trend is toward openness in China?
Yes. China is progressively opening up, allowing things such as IShowSpeed to do livestreams of the country wherever he wants and granting him honorary visas, and spreading the contact of Chinese people with westerners through for example XiaoHongShu (RedNote) or TikTok, which is why the US wants to ban access to these apps. I’m not a US citizen either, I’m European, and the EU itself closed access to Russian media some months after the war started. You may or may not think that this is justified, but it’s quite literally the definition of “closing up”, and China is engaging in exactly the opposite.
Those proxy wars are the example of it not getting hot
I beg you tell the same to a Ukrainian or to a Vietnamese.
The cold war never became hot
Tell that to the millions of people the west murdered through bombing of Korea, Vietnam or Laos, the millions more murdered though US support of military dictators such as Suharto or Pinochet, or the millions who died through the de-stabilization of their countries such as Mosaddeq’s Iran, Guatemala or the outright invasion of Iraq. Ask those people what they think of the west’s military expenses over the past century.
Democracies have more freedoms allowing for more accurate polling. There is also less fear of consequences for being open
Literally two days ago Mamdani won the mayoral elections against all polls, polls in the west are heavily manipulated. And literally last week a man was denied entry in the country due to having a picture of bald Vance. I happen to be Spanish, and in our super-democratic state we have literal political prisoners who had to free the country such as Carles Puigdemont due to political persecution and risking their lives in jail. The west is NOT more democratic than China at this point, and the trend is towards openness in China and towards fascism in the west.
It’s not just trying to build solar capacity, it’s building all solar capacity in the planet. Solar photovoltaics is essentially exclusively manufactured in China, as are e.g. EV batteries. China is definitely the leading country when it comes to solar and batteries, while maybe the peak of wind technology is in Europe. They’re also innovating on nuclear and they approved to build the largest hydroelectric generation plant in the planet, producing twice as much as the current largest (three gorges dam, also in China?.