Been reading through my usual posts and this thought popped up in my head. Did a bit of searching and now I'm curious what y'all's analysis is on this. And how potentially the CCP will respond to climate related consequences in the coming decades since they are becoming an increasingly massive superpower and their actions will have global impacts for the rest of the world.
China is leading the world and it isn't close. just like poverty and real wages, the global stats look much much much worse if you control for China lol. they're the only country taking it remotely seriously
They're certainly leading the world in terms of coal burned for power generation.
China burned 4.66 billion tons of coal in 2023... more than half of the world's total coal usage.
https://thecoaltrader.com/chinas-coal-consumption-surges-in-2023/
And they built 95% of the world's new coal plants in 2023, despite promising to cut back on new coal plants in 2021.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-coal-power-construction-in-2023-report-says/
They are building a whole lot of renewable capacity, and this is lowering the proportional amount of energy made via coal:
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US for comparison:
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But the absolute amount of coal being used is literally incomparable to any other country, and at least as of 2023, still rising:
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US for comparison:
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China is the world's factory and simultaneously responsible for alleviating poverty for 1.5 billion people and unlike the US it doesn’t have the capital and resource stock to covert and expand 100% of it's economy to renewables while also growing it's economy, not when it's facing US aggression and European uncooperativeness in green tech research/transfers
Damn straight they’re building coal plants, people need electricity and despite advances in solar, wind, and Hydro there's still a hard tech cap on scalability, a problem that western nations have tried to worsen thru sanctions, international research bans and copyright protectionism
Unlike western nations China isn't polluting to make a quick buck, the state’s attitude towards climate change is one of the most progressive in the world, it pollutes because it has to, it's embedded in the global capitalist economy and pretending it can turn itself into solarpunk utopia overnight is unreasonable
when so much of the production that results from China's emissions are sent overseas it's silly to place the blame at their feet alone, the people that buy and own funkopops are not divorced from the emissions involved in their production, even if they happen in another country
Oh, then I guess it would be silly to blame historical emmission totals on the US and EU then, because they used to be making most of the exported manufactured goods in the past, right?
Should we be blaming the, at the time, developing countries that imported all those goods and capital, for past CO2?
Also....the end consumer is divorced from the pollution.
Not literally, but in the sense that this is an externality, it is functionally exporting pollution, made easier by extreme physical distance.
Also temporally divorced from global warming and the disasters it will bring, the inevitable, moderately time delayed result of long term consumerism.
I blame everybody.
Spidermans pointing at each other.
where do you think euro-manufactured goods were going in the 19th-20th centuries? China? the country whose soldiers were still using swords in the 1910s?
"i blame everybody" read: i am wholly ignorant of imperialism
I didn't know the historical emissions from the US and EU were going to the third world. All those factories in London pumping out pollution to make goods to send to the Congo and Kazakhstan.
They polluted themselves largely for themselves, now they're exporting the pollution elsewhere... also for themselves.
While coal's contribution to China's energy mix shouldn't be ignored, it's worth noting that their emissions are on track to peak sooner than expected. They're also producing the bulk of the world's solar capacity, by an absurd margin.
Meanwhile, the US has become the world's largest natural gas producer and exporter. (see also how much US exports have increased over time). The climate impacts of exported LNG are probably worse than coal.
If you consider historical emissions per capita, and the "budget" required to keep the planet under 1.5 degrees C, the US and Europe are largely over their historical budgets, while China, Africa, and South Asia are under due to the fact that they industrialized much later. In a fair scenario, the US & friends should be sharply cutting their emissions to give room for historically underdeveloped areas to modernize, but that isn't happening.
Edit: Also, where the heck is OWID's data coming from? EIA shows coal dropping by 0.23 quads between 2022 and 2023, a decline of only 2%. Meanwhile, gas is up 1.5 quads or 4.2%. 1 quad is 293 twH. Numbers are sus.
I agree with all of your points except the first... and kind of the last.
We are past 1.5C.
We don't need to 'peak', to stop raising CO2 emmissions, we need them to drop, precipitously, very, very quickly.
It is indisputably true that developed nations are responsible for most of the historical CO2 emmissions when taken altogether...
But they have largely actually lowered their CO2 emmissions in the last decades, and as your own first linked article states, China is responsible for about half the CO2 emmissions since 2000, and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.
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I completely agree that China is leading in solar and EV production, that these are very good things, and that the US shifting to natural gas is basically a bullshit PR stunt to claim natural gas somehow doesn't count as a fossil fuel.
... But I don't think its good to just massively fanboy/girl ('uncritical support'?) over China, as basically all the other posts in this thread up untill I posted mine have done, without acknowledging the giant elephant in the room that is China's just utterly massive use of coal and new coal plant starts in the last two decades.
China is not some kind of magical green utopia.
They may be building the components of a post carbon future, but they're doing so with astounding amounts of burnt coal.
We are past 1.5C.
True, but I think it's still a valid target for assigning responsibility. The math would be the same regardless of the threshold you pick; US is overbudget, China is underbudget.
We don't need to 'peak', to stop raising CO2 emmissions, we need them to drop, precipitously, very, very quickly.
They gotta peak before they start dropping, that's kinda the definition.
But they have largely actually lowered their CO2 emmissions in the last decades, and as your own first linked article states, China is responsible for about half the CO2 emmissions since 2000...
That's because they're making all of our shit now. The EU is importing some 1.2 billion tons of CO2e a year now (a third of their consumption-related emissions), something that tends to get left out of these graphs.
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and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.
No they don't, where are you getting your numbers from?
Even if they were, you're eliding the per capita component of consumption. China's cumulative per capita emissions don't even make the top 20.. What are the Chinese people supposed to do, live on air?
But I don't think its good to just massively fanboy/girl ('uncritical support'?) over China, as basically all the other posts in this thread up untill I posted mine have done
I think it's fair to stay skeptical, but if you compare China's progress with the US's, you'll see why the users are on here are gushing. They're the only ones giving the world anything to hope for at this point.
They may be building the components of a post carbon future, but they're doing so with astounding amounts of burnt coal.
Better than what the US/EU are doing, which is building nothing with astounding amounts of burnt coal, gas, and oil. You can't just magic PV and wind turbines out of nothing, you have to use your current energy mix, and China's doing that to make more progress than the rest of the world combined.
and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.
No they don't, where are you getting your numbers from?
As I said, literally right before you cropped my quote:
and as your own first linked article states,
https://archive.is/KY2Ey
As of last year, China had emitted more than the European Union since industrialization started, according to Carbon Brief, a climate-focused publication, although it remains far behind the total output of the United States over the same period.
Its the sentence under the graph, in my last post which is also from the article you linked.
Fair 'nuff, missed that in the article. That said, though, a country of 1.4 billion eclipsing a region of 448 million (based on current population) isn't exactly earth-shattering, especially if you consider that including the UK would put the EU back on top and that the table Carbon Brief provides includes per capita emissions.
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Wanna address anything else I said or just the one thing I messed up?
They won't address anything, these anti-China concern trolls are always the same. Makes me wonder, if they think that climate change is such a major issue that China should collapse into 18th century levels of energy use to deal with it, why they aren't demanding the same of their own government, which, regardless of which nation it is, is doing far, far less than China is to combat climate change. This is just the usual westerner sour grapes that China is trying to fix the problem the west has caused and it makes them feel bad because China is the "bad guy country."
and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.
That's largely due to the UK no longer being counted, and the UK's total emissions were a huge chunk.
I'm not saying the stats are necessarily wrong, but why do the numbers say the US is suddenly using like 300TWH less energy while China is using 2PWH more? Is that true? I think total consumption of energy generation types per capita is also likely a more revealing graph.
IIRC, the new coal plants are for backup power when renewables aren't enough.
I’m not sure about the specific goals but I just got back from a China trip and can report that EVs are now outselling petrol cars and there is very good and cheap EV charging infrastructure in most cities. And they are making a shift to renewables with absolutely massive solar farms.
I've been in Wuhan for like 6 months ish and the amount of EVs on the road are drastically higher than 5 years ago, and I think petrol taxis are being phased out.
Like when I was living in Australia, you'd see a Tesla every now and then. The number of EVs as a percentage of road vehicles is exponentially higher in China and it's not even close. In some areas you're approaching 50% of all personal vehicles being EVs
Yeah I didn’t see a single petrol taxi. In Guangzhou it felt like maybe 80-90% of newer passenger cars I saw were EVs, in Changsha maybe 50-60%. Still massively better than the west on that front.
Not every change has been positive but certainly was very impressed by the EV/renewables revolution.
Most universities have very affordable language programs. Like, $1000-$3000 USD a year for 20 hours of weekly classes depending on what amenities you want
I've befriended an Anglo here who did 3 weeks of DuoLingo before landing a job teaching English. It's not that hard, they'll put you through some Mandarin (or Cantonese) remedial classes as you go.
I have been considering it but as a transgender american, theres a bit of heistation for me to actually go through with this. For my part I'm all caught up legally on this so stealth could be done but still. Its rough enough being a foreigner and a transgender all in one :/
China has given itself the task of solving green tech once and for all which means it has to solve the tri-fold problem of scalability, efficiency, and material sustainability, tho despite successes this is becoming increasing difficult due to US aggression and the Euros shutting China out of green tech research
As a result it's been forced to make an impossible choice; short-term expansion of coal to sustain economic growth which pays for green tech research which leads to long-term total conversion of the economy to green tech which solves geopolitical and climate concerns for China, it's a gamble that requires no margin of error
But juggling western aggression, poverty elimination and hard-problem climate research investment increases the chances of errors
It's worth noting that China would be incentivized to decarbonize even if climate change wasn't happening, because it's a lot harder for the US military to control the sun than the world's oil supply.
I'm not super familiar with what their actual policies are wrt to climate change; apparently they've committed to going carbon neutral by 2060, which is late but also much more believable than the US's plan to hit net 0 by 2050 (inasmuch as we have an actual plan on this front).
I read an editorial that was posted on here around the time the IRA was being passed where a government official was comparing China's approach and progress on climate change to the US's lackluster results on keeping its promises, but I haven't been able to find it again. Maybe one of the resident clairvoyants can divine what I'm thinking about and dig up the link.
because it's a lot harder for the US military to control the sun than the world's oil supply.
US military furiously taking notes from the Matrix
it's a lot harder for the US military to control the sun than the world's oil supply.
but there's still all the different materials required to make solar panels and batteries.
Almost all of which come from China or Russia. The US is nearly completely reliant on both for its own green energy demand.
China is the world's 3rd largest producer of lithium. I'm pretty sure the entire supply chain can be found within China.
They are our only hope for decarbonising the world's energy generation enough to mitigate disaster.
https://xcancel.com/KyleTrainEmoji/status/1604510937557635072#m good thread on this, theyre leading the world
I've seen it mentioned in many places that China is heavily affected by climate change caused problems like sea level rise (?). Just something to know.
