I'm not one to champion China, but thank god that they seem to be pretty co2 conscious. It's easy to envision China having leadership that didn't give a fuck about climate change (or didn't want to hear it was real) and just went full on coal energy independence.
One of the best aspects of Chinese energy policy is there isn't much evidence they care about CO2 at all. They aren't world's largest coal consumer (by a 5x margin I believe [0]) because they care about CO2.
They care about cheap energy and energy security. They've been relatively transparent that they are pursuing all available options as far as those options will go. It has been a wildly successful strategy for them in securing prosperity and I wish the west had that sort of ambition.
Pollution is a huge problem for them also. It got really bad in places like Beijing, people here in the western USA complain about forest fires, but 150 ppm AQI would be a clean air day in Beijing’s winter. It is survival for them, since people simply can’t live like that.
Carbon is a much more abstract problem even in the USA, since you don’t feel climate change right away like you smell black dirt gas air. But that only really matters for high carbon low pollution energy sources like natural gas, and China doesn’t have so much of that anyways to use it in lieu of renewables.
I recently visited Beijing for a few weeks and was worried about AQI (I have a kid with situational asthma) . Most of the time AQI was around 50, and sometimes it got to 100. Not bad at all for us.
Just a point of reference: back in 2009 we transited through Beijing to fly to HK and even just spending a few hours in the airport resulted in my daughter having to use an emergency nebulizer.
This time hardly anyone had a problem. Beijing used to be dry and dusty (from what my wife tells me from visiting 30y ago) now they've pulled in a lot of water through some newer canals and the humidity is really high (mosquitos are starting to become a problem).
Another improvement is: nearly zero 2-stroke motors. All scooters and mopeds are fully electric. Also 50% of the cars are electric (green license plates). All city buses and taxis are electric. Road noise is greatly reduce given the sheer volume of traffic (though they love to honk - like India).
Beijing is pretty humid in the summer, I’m not sure where you get dry from (although my first summer in Beijing wasn’t until 2002, not quite thirty years ago). Dust storm season is spring and pollution season is winter (especially when they get inversions). Fall is the best season to tour in Beijing if you want clean air and no dust, the air won’t start getting bad until November, although moving all the farmers away from coal heating has improved things a lot (they still have bad inversions, but like LA and Salt Lake City). Two strokes have been banned for awhile, electric bikes were already taking over in 2002, you already could no longer find the tuktuks that I remember from my first trip in 1999.
To be fair, China's moving at a MUCH faster rate to clean their air than it took the US when they were at this stage of industrialization. And they've set their air quality targets much higher than the US, which hasn't updated its air quality standards in decades.
There is a lot more technology today than back then, so it isn’t really a fair comparison. Still, it’s good that China took the problem seriously, there was some time in 2010 when they were clearly in denial (the Us embassy in Beijing crazy bad air incident that got Twitter blocked).
I was in China around that time and I don't remember the incident leading to Twitter being blocked. In fact, I think Twitter was blocked earlier than pollution incident. I do remember everyone getting pissed off that the US Embassy reading was so different than the local one: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/sensing-our-planet/craz...
It was not completely blocked in November 2010, but was completely blocked shortly there after as far as I remember (I was in Beijing from 2007 to 2016).
China wasn’t measuring 2.5 ppm at all back then, and was rather touting improvements in 10 ppm because a tree planting effort in the gobi temporarily solved northern china’s dust storm problem. They were basically pretending that 2.5 ppm pollution didn't exist.
The US didn't have solar and wind as real alternate energy options in the 1970s or '80s. They had nuclear, but all the environmentalists hated it then.
Also the US' per capita consumption is still over 2x higher than China's.
This also doesn't account for the fact that countries that produce more of the worlds goods through mining and/or agriculture are obviously gonna be inflated. Banana republics (which the US continues to uphold and profit from) are using a lot of energy "per capita" but all the wealth from that is stolen so it's senseless to assign that consumption to the nation exporting rather than the nation importing
> Banana republics (which the US continues to uphold and profit from) are using a lot of energy "per capita" but all the wealth from that is stolen so it's senseless to assign that consumption to the nation exporting rather than the nation importing
Ten "facts" or so in that one statement. Would be great if you can cite any one with a modern reference.
Which banana republic with high per capita is US upholding and profiting from? Who is stealing their wealth?
Why is that country a banana republic?
Keep in mind that electricity demand in the US is decreasing.
If you reduce your manufacturing, of course it'll reflect positively on emissions. China demonstrates that it's possible to make CO2 emissions decrease even while energy demand keep growing (even if it doesn't grow as much as before)
It's only 2x if you consider the annual emissions, but the CO2 stays in the atmosphere. If you consider cumulative CO2 emissions, the US was around 3 times as high as China (with data up to 2015)
"Cumulative emissions" is the sunk cost fallacy masquerading as an excuse to defer blame onto dead people instead of doing something to address the active problem.
> Between 2014 and 2020, Dr Ma served as Chief Economist and then Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China. Over the subsequent years, Dr Ma played a key role in the development of sustainable finance in China and around the world. He led the drafting of China’s green finance and green bond guidelines; he led work on green finance at the G20; he pushed for the greening of China’s Belt and Road initiative; he set up initiatives with the global accounting and standards bodies; and he helped enlist the world’s major financial centres in the drive to green the capital markets.
China imports nearly all its oil and most of its oil comes from the middle East. This means solar/wind/coal is preferable because it can be created locally. Oil can easily be stopped with a Naval blockade by either of USA/India/Philippines etc.
> Note that this statement obviously runs into contrary to the OP. I.e., renewable and CO2-less energy is invested more and growing more than coal.
There isn't a link. I think the whole anti-CO2 thing is one of the stupidest ideologies since Communism. I'd still happily invest in solar energy; it looks like it might be very profitable. The fact that the Chinese behaving in a clever way doesn't imply that they are doing so for stupid reasons. They are probably behaving rationally for rational reasons.
That's a throw to a single notion of possible change that was current at the time the cartoon was drawn up.
The reason for the retreat of the ice sheets remains elusive, however.
Whereas there was a change in the relative strength of the sun roughly 20,000 years ago thanks to variations in the planet's orbit, it was smaller than changes that preceded it and failed to trigger a melt.
From a Scientific American article of 2012 that discusses another paper with an alternative notion of cause:
I agree with you in some sense. That is one of the better illustrations but it isn't very compelling.
In fact, one telling point is that it demonstrates that in 20,000 BCE industrialisation and rapid global warming of 4 degrees would have ushered the world into the unthinkable horrors of ... somewhat better than the present day because they'd have consumed more energy than we have. Change is clearly not automatically a bad thing.
The point is the slope of the graph, not the position. Yes, climate changed in the past, just never so quickly, and by quick, we mean really really quick (in comparison to previous warming and cooling cycles). We really are in unknown territory here, and yes, things might actually be OK, or maybe not so bad as we move from a planet that can sustain 8 billion humans to 2 billion humans, or maybe we all get replaced by transhuman AI in a few generations anyways that have no problem adapting. We know there will be consequences, we just argue about how severe those consequences are, and if lifestyle changes can really turn things around (climate change optimists), or are we powerless to do anything at all (climate change pessimists).
Read the “limits of the graph” section about 1/4 of the way down on the right. The graph is smoothed significantly because we simply don’t have the data resolution that people want to believe. In reality the average temps undoubtedly oscillate with changing seasonal and solar system effects across decades. Forest fires, asteroids, volcanic ash.
> ... as we move from a planet that can sustain 8 billion humans to 2 billion humans ...
Core of the issue though, isn't it? The planet can't support 8 billion humans right now. This living standards of around 7.8, 7.9 billion of them are unacceptably low IMO. So if it can't support 8 billion now and it can't support 8 billion in the future, I'd like some fairly concrete explanations of why we shouldn't be promoting cheap energy and industrialisation in the here and now. It appears that industrialisation drives down population and may even lead to transhumanism, so per capita improvements to prosperity seem to be the most viable solution to our sustainability problems. I'd also bet working on cheap energy will probably drive up the carrying capacity too, that is what happened all the other times securing energy got cheaper.
And as we can see in the Chinese example that we're talking about today, if we had just gone full-greed and kept building coal plants we'd probably have stumbled on a low-carbon equilibrium by accident anyway because that is more or less what seems to be happening in China. Coal and oil aren't that competitive these days. There is a pretty high chance fossil fuels would have been pushed into 2nd class status already if the deplorable fools in the 80s and 90s hadn't succeeded kneecapped western nuclear programs.
The nice thing about sustainable energy is that, at a certain point of economy, no one has a good reason to not prefer it over fossil fuels. So whether you think climate change is a problem or not, well, it wouldn’t matter if it were cheaper anyways. Or if people die off to a more sustainable carry load, who cares if the remaining humans are all slaves to evaporation farms and are riding around on sand worms addicted to some spice drug.
The problem is only if we get the opportunity to make hard choices for better outcomes. Do we have the self control to do that as a species, or are we doomed to act like petulant five year olds who can only think about short term benefits? Can humanity pass the marshmallow test?
They care about smog (or really the protests/health externalities), which is caring about CO2 by proxy, hence peaking coal by 2025 (end of 14th 5 year plan), and phasing/reducing coal starting 2026 (15th 5 year plan).
> The safe, healthy and sustainable development of nuclear energy is conducive to improving energy supply capacity, adjusting my country's energy structure and reducing dependence on coal, natural gas and crude oil.
This is just the first link I found, there's tons more of course, since becoming a "Ecological civilization" is one of their Communist Party tenets:
> over-reliance on coal and extensive mining for a period of time led to an imbalance in the industrial structure, serious ecological damage, and a cliff-like economic decline, which brought pain to the people of Shanxi.
> pointing out that low-carbon energy development is related to the future of mankind; China attaches great importance to low-carbon energy development and actively promotes energy consumption, supply, technology, and system revolution; China is willing to work with the international community to strengthen energy cooperation in all aspects, maintain energy security, respond to climate change, protect the ecological environment, promote sustainable development, and better benefit the people of all countries in the world.
In the west there have been environmental commitments since the at least 1990s. The governments just seem to mostly ignore those commitments. So it's pretty easy for westerners to not believe commitments made by other governments.
Fortunately, unlikely democracy and the rule of law, the CCP appears to actually care about cheap energy and rolling back obvious pollution in major cities.
They don't though. If they cared about CO2 then the amount of CO2 they emit would be decreasing over time, because that would be their priority over e.g. rapid growth or cost considerations. If they wanted to they could be shutting down coal plants and replacing them with solar or nuclear instead of building new coal burners in addition to solar, but they're not.
It's hard to put a precise date on it but some think it happened in 2023, some 2024, the official goal is peaking by 2030 (note they've hit other renewables goals by about 7 years) but generally it's agreed that it's flattened and about to decline, if it hasn't already, due to rapid renewable rollout.
They're not meant to be per capita. If energy policy is based on CO2 emissions then the absolute numbers matter, not per capita numbers. The laws of physics don't care how many people benefited from an action, they happen based on total volumes and weights.
That's a ridiculous statement. You have to normalize by population, because if you don't, you end up comparing countries with thousands of people to countries with hundreds of millions of people. Of course a billion people are going to emit more CO2 than a thousand people.
You might as well compare an individual person to the entire US, and then declare that that individual person is going a great job at combating the greenhouse effect. John Smith is doing 300 million times better than the US!
You're obviously not talking about energy policy or laws of physics. You're making moralistic judgements and anthropomorphizing a nation-state
If you wanna make comparisons (I don't, you do), per capita obviously matters. There's no reason why you should be holding members of one nation state to a stricter standard than members of another.
It's not the members of the nation state, it's the government. If one government is emitting more CO2 than any other, that government is the one that most needs to change policy because a policy change there is the place it would make the most difference.
Suppose there were only two countries in the world. One had 99.99% of the world's population and the other emitted twice as much CO2 per capita. Which one is most in need of changing if you want to make an impact on the problem?
Does it matter that much of “China’s” emissions are caused by manufacturing stuff for “environmentally conscious” US and Europe? Or is it “different” and I “don’t understand”?
It's possible to manufacture stuff without emitting CO2, so what matters is who is in charge of the choice of how it gets manufactured, because that's who has to change it.
Whatever you’re making is going to require materials, the manufacturing of which emits CO2, and transportation of your product will also require CO2, as will the rest of the sales chain to the consumer.
But more to the point, because we’re quibbling over an irrelevant issue: I contend that it is unfair to attribute all of China’s emissions to China, and if we’re being honest much of it is attributable to the West which deindustrialized itself and instead makes almost everything there.
> Whatever you’re making is going to require materials, the manufacturing of which emits CO2
This is circular logic. "Manufacturing emits CO2 because manufacturing emits CO2."
> transportation of your product will also require CO2
It doesn't. It's possible to use electric trains and trucks and electricity doesn't have to be generated from burning fossil fuels.
> I contend that it is unfair to attribute all of China’s emissions to China, and if we’re being honest much of it is attributable to the West which deindustrialized itself and instead makes almost everything there.
Attribution is boring. Do China want to do the manufacturing in a way that doesn't emit CO2, or do they want to let someone else do the manufacturing so the someone else can do it in a way that doesn't emit CO2? Those are the options.
"Coal power additions were about 40 GW in 2023, while the first half of 2024 saw only 8 GW of new coal capacity, according to Rystad Energy’s estimates."
the additions is significantly lower in 2024, and the trend is showing a decreasing, dramatically.
also, any country does not seek political influence is non-sense. then what is your point?
