this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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askchapo
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I agree with all of your points except the first... and kind of the last.
We are past 1.5C.
We don't need to 'peak', to stop raising CO2 emmissions, we need them to drop, precipitously, very, very quickly.
It is indisputably true that developed nations are responsible for most of the historical CO2 emmissions when taken altogether...
But they have largely actually lowered their CO2 emmissions in the last decades, and as your own first linked article states, China is responsible for about half the CO2 emmissions since 2000, and that China's total historical CO2 emmissions now exceed the EU's total historical CO2 emmissions.
I completely agree that China is leading in solar and EV production, that these are very good things, and that the US shifting to natural gas is basically a bullshit PR stunt to claim natural gas somehow doesn't count as a fossil fuel.
... But I don't think its good to just massively fanboy/girl ('uncritical support'?) over China, as basically all the other posts in this thread up untill I posted mine have done, without acknowledging the giant elephant in the room that is China's just utterly massive use of coal and new coal plant starts in the last two decades.
China is not some kind of magical green utopia.
They may be building the components of a post carbon future, but they're doing so with astounding amounts of burnt coal.
True, but I think it's still a valid target for assigning responsibility. The math would be the same regardless of the threshold you pick; US is overbudget, China is underbudget.
They gotta peak before they start dropping, that's kinda the definition.
That's because they're making all of our shit now. The EU is importing some 1.2 billion tons of CO2e a year now (a third of their consumption-related emissions), something that tends to get left out of these graphs.
No they don't, where are you getting your numbers from?
Even if they were, you're eliding the per capita component of consumption. China's cumulative per capita emissions don't even make the top 20.. What are the Chinese people supposed to do, live on air?
I think it's fair to stay skeptical, but if you compare China's progress with the US's, you'll see why the users are on here are gushing. They're the only ones giving the world anything to hope for at this point.
Better than what the US/EU are doing, which is building nothing with astounding amounts of burnt coal, gas, and oil. You can't just magic PV and wind turbines out of nothing, you have to use your current energy mix, and China's doing that to make more progress than the rest of the world combined.
As I said, literally right before you cropped my quote:
https://archive.is/KY2Ey
Its the sentence under the graph, in my last post which is also from the article you linked.
Fair 'nuff, missed that in the article. That said, though, a country of 1.4 billion eclipsing a region of 448 million (based on current population) isn't exactly earth-shattering, especially if you consider that including the UK would put the EU back on top and that the table Carbon Brief provides includes per capita emissions.
Wanna address anything else I said or just the one thing I messed up?
They won't address anything, these anti-China concern trolls are always the same. Makes me wonder, if they think that climate change is such a major issue that China should collapse into 18th century levels of energy use to deal with it, why they aren't demanding the same of their own government, which, regardless of which nation it is, is doing far, far less than China is to combat climate change. This is just the usual westerner sour grapes that China is trying to fix the problem the west has caused and it makes them feel bad because China is the "bad guy country."
I genuinely believe that there are good faith arguments and critiques to make of China's green energy policies.
I also genuinely believe that none of these important conversations are going to happen in English, and especially not on a lame social media site. Nor should they.
For sure, there are certainly ways China could be doing better, but they're also literally doing more than any other country right now, so westerners complaining about them is the height of hypocrisy.
It's nuts how much China has achieved with less than a quarter of the US's cumulative per capita emissions and around half the US's total emissions. I can't see how anyone can look st those numbers and see anything other than a story of massive and tragic waste but I guess that's the power of propaganda.
Yep. "China bad" is the default in the west, so they can't handle anything that contradicts that narrative. And if they were to actually look earnestly at the numbers, they would be forced to admit in their simple liberal binary "good guys/bad guys" system that the west are actually the bad guys there.
That's largely due to the UK no longer being counted, and the UK's total emissions were a huge chunk.