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.
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:
US for comparison:
But the absolute amount of coal being used is literally incomparable to any other country, and at least as of 2023, still rising:
US for comparison:
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.
But have you considered this informative graph?
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.
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.
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.
They gotta peak before they start dropping, that’s kinda the definition.
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.
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?
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.
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.
As I said, literally right before you cropped my quote:
https://archive.is/KY2Ey
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.
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.”
I genuinely believe that there are good faith arguments and critiques to make of China’s green energy policies.
I also genuinely believe that none of these important conversations are going to happen in English, and especially not on a lame social media site. Nor should they.
For sure, there are certainly ways China could be doing better, but they’re also literally doing more than any other country right now, so westerners complaining about them is the height of hypocrisy.
It’s nuts how much China has achieved with less than a quarter of the US’s cumulative per capita emissions and around half the US’s total emissions. I can’t see how anyone can look st those numbers and see anything other than a story of massive and tragic waste but I guess that’s the power of propaganda.
Yep. “China bad” is the default in the west, so they can’t handle anything that contradicts that narrative. And if they were to actually look earnestly at the numbers, they would be forced to admit in their simple liberal binary “good guys/bad guys” system that the west are actually the bad guys there.
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.