I will just post this here from a previous time this was brought up: While China is building a LOT of renewable energy and it should be applauded for it, it is not the only thing that are building. China accounted for 95% of the world’s new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from https://globalenergymonitor.org/
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
53 points (92.1% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5186 readers
750 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
While that is true, I believe that those are all replacement power plants. As in there was already an old much dirtier coal power plant in operation that needed replacement. If that is also the case, emissions may have finally peaked and we can begin the long hard road of cleanup and total phaseout.
Would have been great 20 years ago.
I'll believe we have emissions in decline when I see the numbers. AFAIK 2023 had record emissions and I doubt it'll stop there.
Yeah, it sounds great, I want this to be true...
This is just unbelievable. I don't believe it. Numbers are too easy to play with, you can make projections or look at rate of growth rate and say that's a tipping point. I want to see CO2 emissions diving on a bar graph, because physics doesn't use creative statistics
Not to mention an emissions decline means we're still making things worse, but not quite so quickly.
Obviously the path to making things better would have to pass through here, but just as people thinking electric cars are a solution rather than more of the problem, the delusion that this is winning is also part of the problem.
Kind of seems like a puff piece for China?
It really is not. China has built a lot of green tech in the last few years, but economic growth has meant energy consumption grew faster then renewables. However Chinas economy has problems, which China tries to solve by going green. So you get renewables and things like EVs actually replacing fossil fuels.
At the same time China is not a saint and per capita emissions are above those of most European countries right now.
Don't these emissions include the CO2 from the production of the imported goods those European countries consume?
Even if you adjust for that countries like France, Spain and Sweden have lower emissions. However the EU as a whole is 10% above China. Then again the data is from 2021 so they probably are about equal nowadays.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?region=Europe