[Tade0]

China does: all of the above, where it makes sense.

Renewables and batteries to keep your AC, workplace EV charger, stove, pool heater and (since recently) green ammonia producer going, nuclear to prevent e.g. aluminium smelters from seizing up.

Also the cheapest way to make renewables work 24/7 is to build HVDC lines - they cost as much as a highway per unit length and even undersea cables would deploy for less and faster than equivalent nuclear.

The total length of HVDC lines just in China is currently more than 40k km, so they've literally deployed enough of them to wrap around the globe.

[api]

China is also still building coal and has passed Europe and will (if they don’t change course) soon pass the US and Canada and the other big ones on a per capita emitter basis. They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Not saying they’re not also building renewables and nuclear, but it seems like the policy is more “build anything and everything to satisfy demand” than a focused effort.

BTW: if you look at US emissions, the data center bubble hasn’t had much if any effect. They are still trending down. There’s reasons to dislike that industry but I’m sick of the mindless echo chamber doom on that issue. They’re not that significant in the grand scheme of things.

[atwrk]

Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita.

An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3].

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

[Tade0]

According to this graph and assuming both US emissions fall and Chinese grow exponentially at the rate they were over the decade 2014-2024, the figures will cross around 2037.

Personally I doubt that, as US emissions have been going up due to data centers:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-leads-global-co2-...

And while China, like you said, doesn't seem to have a focused goal, it so happens that renewables are the path of least resistance for just having more energy as fast and cheap as possible.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

> They already passed everyone as top emitter in an absolute sense.

They also passed everyone as top emitter of produced goods, which almost everyone else has outsourced to there. So what?

Buy less? Buy American? European? More expensive? Reshore?