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by api 29 days ago
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.
3 comments
atwrk 29 days ago
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/

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Tade0 29 days ago
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.

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LargoLasskhyfv 28 days ago
> 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?

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