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by locallost 52 days ago
Others have touched on the other points, but I would like to point out also that China using 2x the energy with 4x the population speaks more in favour of China than the US. The US also uses fossil fuels to generate more than half of its electricity, and has done so for a long time. Germany for example transitioned from coal to renewables, whereas the US went from coal to natural gas. China is following a similar pattern as Germany.

Overall there is no 100% clean source, there is something dirty in the chain everywhere. The main question for me is, is one thing an improvement over the other, is the improvement massive or modest? I think the improvement is massive and am hopeful for the future. This doesn't mean you can never improve, but I think this is already happening. For instance I saw an estimate from the Rocky Mountain Institute that they expect no further mining of lithium for batteries because it will be recycled. I obviously don't know if this is true, but even if lithium mining is environmentally unfriendly, if it's an improvement over what we have now, and if we can down the road get rid of that too, it's a positive development.

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Germany didn't transition away from coal. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/all/yearly
It's less than half of what it was even 15 years ago. And it didn't replace that with natural gas like the US but with wind and solar.