To be clear: Are you saying China is in the process of developing?
How much coal has China cumulatively used in its history compared to the US or Europe? Spoiler alert: much less. Almost as if countries in the process of developing used coal for a reason…
zapzap@lemmings.world 1 day ago
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Compare GDP PPP per capita. China is very much on a lower place than the US or Germany. China is very developed compared to, say, Philippines, but still developing when compared to Japan or UK.
zapzap@lemmings.world 5 hours ago
I’d rather not debate that particular topic. I’m not up on all the nuances. But I will say that while coal was maybe the right choice for generating abundant energy once upon a time, we know a lot more now about why it’s a bad choice for other reasons, and, besides, we have more options now than we used to. So it’s good to see the world’s second largest economy at least trying to build solar capacity.
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 3 hours ago
It’s not just trying to build solar capacity, it’s building all solar capacity in the planet. Solar photovoltaics is essentially exclusively manufactured in China, as are e.g. EV batteries. China is definitely the leading country when it comes to solar and batteries, while maybe the peak of wind technology is in Europe. They’re also innovating on nuclear and they approved to build the largest hydroelectric generation plant in the planet, producing twice as much as the current largest (three gorges dam, also in China?.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Not so sure about that. China overtook the EU in 1987 in coal consumption, but today it is at 25,000TWh or so. In 1965 the current EU countries were at 4,500TWh. It certainly is not much less, if China has not overtaken the EU by cumulative coal consumption.
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ourworldindata.org/…/coal-consumption-by-country-…
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
If you “aren’t sure” about that, then why the hell are you trying to discuss it making guesses instead of informing yourself?
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China, a country with 4-5 times the US population, has half the cumulative historic emissions. And yet you have the fucking nerve to blame china for coal. The US and the EU get to pollute the fucking Earth for 2 centuries, and China does a renewable revolution in its 40 years since industrializing and you cry about how they still have plans for coal.
Just, seriously, stop arguing from ignorance. If you do not know about cumulative emissions, don’t make “Oh I’m not so sure about that because look at the trends for the past 60 years”, as if the US and EU hadn’t been emitting fossil CO2 since the fucking late 18th century.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Maybe that is because I have the elementary school education necessary to understand that burning coal and gas also causes emissions. So when I am looking at cummulative coal consumption, I have the very basic common sense to not look at CO2.
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
What’s the point of comparing coal if not for CO2? Most other forms of pollution from coal are local, not global, the international debate here is on climate change, a western-world inhabitant has no right to say what China should be doing with the local pollution.
But if you want to compare coal numbers, I ran the calculations using this source for US production and this source for China production. Downloading the CSVs from both sources, I get that the US has produced 85643270043 short tons of coal, which at 21GJ of energy per short ton amount to 496731 TWh, whereas China has extracted 617787 TWh, i.e. a bit below 25% more than the USA. Since China has 1411 mn inhabitants and the US has 340 mn inhabitants, i.e. China has 415% the population of the USA, China has along its existence as a country extracted about 1/3 as much coal per inhabitant than the USA.
So yeah, China would have to literally consume twice as much coal as it’s already consumed to reach US values of per-capita historical cumulative coal consumption.
Now what will you come up with? Suddenly coal numbers don’t matter anymore?