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.
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 21 hours 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?
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 19 hours ago
Do you think I am here to hate on China or something? Your inital claim was:
And when you looked at the numbers and you were clearly wrong, you moved the goal poast again:
Or 50% more to be at the level of the EU, using the Our World in Data numbers from 1900(thanks btw). Given current production, China would overtake the EU around 2040 in that metric.
AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 19 hours ago
The important metric for the moral debate is cumulative CO2 per capita, because that’s the whole reason why we’re measuring coal production history, not because we hate coal per se.
I showed you that, even moving to cumulative coal production, China still has 1/3 that of the US per capita, which is the important metric because why the fuck would we compare a country with 1.4bn inhabitants to one with 340mn without taking population size into account.
So yeah, China still has a lot of margin for coal burning until they reach the evil levels of the US/EU, but thankfully they won’t because they’re the strongest country in renewables, producing essentially 100% of all solar panels in the world.
MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 18 hours ago
First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2.
It is also a metric China will not want to use. Per capita annual emissions are already higher in China then in many Western countries. More so UN population forecast shows Chinas population falling much more quickly then that of the West.