| > I’m shitting on people who are praising China for being the #1 emitter Largest country in the world is the largest emitter. Quelle surprise. Does Vatican City get a prize for being the smallest emitter? > long after the west realized how bad climate change was and was trying to correct them. The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning today? China burns coal because they have coal. If they had natural gas their emissions would be lower too. They know coal is bad and as you've admitted yourself, their coal use is down in 2025. It's projected to decrease even further by 2035. They're deploying solar and wind and nuclear at a never-seen-before pace. Their factories produce plentiful cheap panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world". The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down. They are not the same. > it’s very clear China optimized for its own citizens Every country is supposed to do that. The current US administration is acting against its citizens' interests with its crusade against solar and wind energy. > in the face of the west trying to grapple with climate change How is the west doing that? All I see are more SUVs and people protesting solar generation facilities in the country and calling renewable energy and bike lanes "woke" or some nonsense. > [China] is only now showing some signs of pivot with solar being cheap enough. Who made solar so cheap, I wonder? Was it an accident or part of multiple 5-year plans that anyone can read? And "some signs" is possibly the biggest understatement I've seen all year. They install more solar than the rest of the world combined. Please, please re-examine your biases. Stop repeating the same conservative media lies. Start looking at the data objectively. |
Nope, because they are irrelevant in the scheme of sources of CO2. Tons emitted is all that matters.
>The West led by the US whose adminstration currently denies the existence of climate change? Whose emissions drop was due to the fracking boom and natural gas becoming cheaper than coal? Let's not break our arms patting ourselves on the back. If fracking hadn't been invented how much coal would the US be burning?
The west, as in Europe (and the US before Trump) who began all of the initiatives to track CO2, the impacts of global warming, clean energy alternatives, etc. All of the solar tech that China is deploying today is paid for by the hundreds of failed startups pushing the technology forward in the 2000-2012 era.
>China burns coal because they have coal.
That’s not an excuse. Australia gets a middle finger as well for because they have a shitload of coal and also take the attitude of “we might as well burn it since we have it”. That’s literally the opposite of being proactive.
If you only build renewable to deal with a shortage of fossil fuels, then you’re not addressing global warming. You’re just doing the very normal economic incentive thing.
>Their factories produce panels and batteries and EVs that the rest of the world can use to decarbonize - so at least there's a point to "the highest emissions in the world".
Depends on how dirty the energy is for those. If more emissions come from manufacture and transport than are saved by the panel+storage, it would have been better for the recipient to burn fossil fuels.
>The US is approving data centers with on-site gas turbines, and paying off windmill operators to shut down.
Yes, it’s disgusting and everyone in the Bay Area that used to pretend about global warming who is now working for companies expanding for AI can get fucked.
>They are not the same.
They are not, but holy shit China is also terrible. The difference is that China has a track record of destruction over the last 25 years while climatologists screamed from the rooftops. It’s going to take 15 years even at their ambitious pace to unwind the expansion of emissions in the last 15. That’s the problem with climate change, it doesn’t matter if you increase solar production until you actually get rid of the coal burning.