Five
@Five@slrpnk.net
- Submitted 3 days ago to history@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Comment on Microsoft doesn't understand the Fediverse 5 days ago:
What ghouls
- Comment on H1 2025: China installs more solar than rest of the world combined 1 week ago:
Are you claiming they’re building solar power stations and not plugging them to the grid?
That’s a reasonable assumption based on data from the Chinese Communist Party-controlled National Bureau of Statistics.
That doesn’t make much sense.
It doesn’t make much sense to overbuild housing capacity, only to demolish empty or nearly finished buildings either, but that’s also something that China is famous for.
Some possible explanations for a metropolis sized garden of dark solar panels are:
- Tibet is the dumping ground for panels that don’t meet export quality controls
- Panels are cheap enough that using them as shade for non-desert agriculture makes fiscal sense
- A make-work project to justify the migration of ethnic Chinese laborers to colonized Tibet
- A scheme to artificially inflate GDP
- Comment on H1 2025: China installs more solar than rest of the world combined 1 week ago:
- This is solar ‘capacity’ not actually used solar energy, because
- It’s being installed in Tibet, far away from the industrial zones of China on the coast, which all run on coal power which
- China is the largest consumer of in the world, making up more than 50% of their energy use by kW, while renewables + nuclear make up less than 30%.
China has no intention of switching to renewable energy infrastructure, they are building more coal fired plants and have instituted quotas to ensure that dirtier and more expensive coal is still their primary source of power.
If you want a green world, you can’t wait for a politburo to give it to you.
- Comment on The World’s Largest Solar Plant is Rising in Tibet. It's So Vast It's the Size of Chicago 2 weeks ago:
This has more to do with their goal to cement their control over Tibet than any plan to save the environment.
Of all of the solar capacity China has installed, they actually use only a fraction of it. So it sits dark and good for nothing but being the subject of environmental puff pieces and authoritarian greenwashing. All of their industrialization is at the coast, and it is all powered by coal. Solar is installed in unindustrialized areas, and they haven’t bothered to modify their electricity network to transport the energy to where it would actually reduce carbon emissions.
I think the plan is to use localized inexpensive solar energy to power the industrialization of China’s interior, while continuing to accelerate their use of petrochemicals on the coasts. They’ve built economic protections for their coal industry and are building several more coal fired power plants as we speak. But if the politburo can entice more ethnic Chinese to move to Tibet, then suppressing independence movements will require less government resources. Meanwhile, China’s contribution to the carbon debt will accelerate.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to astronomy@mander.xyz | 2 comments
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to energy@slrpnk.net | 0 comments
- Comment on The Anarchist Cookbook 3 weeks ago:
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to food@slrpnk.net | 3 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on China’s Use of Fossil Fuels Is Falling While Power Demand Is Surging 4 weeks ago:
That doesn’t mean China’s gone completely renewable. It’s still the biggest greenhouse-gas emitter and continues building thermal plants that burn fossil fuels.
Yet even after a sweltering July, thermal generation is down this year in what may be the start of a long-term decline in air pollution.
The U.S. / China tariff war began in January of this year. I wonder how much a reduction in production has played a role in those numbers.
- Comment on This comic hung in my office for years 1 month ago:
The solution to the problem is often logging out, clearing SLRPNK.net cookies, and then logging back in.
- British national, reportedly captured on Russian soil while fighting for Ukraine, remanded into custodymeduza.io ↗Submitted 9 months ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 0 comments
- Comment on Clean energy workers are desperately needed, but many don't know these jobs exist 11 months ago:
Clean energy infrastructure is desperately needed, but capitalists don’t want to pay labor a fair wage.
The stories I hear from tradespeople in clean energy work is that entry level positions are paying less, and the bonuses they were seeing when they started are drying up. Many are looking to move away from clean-energy specific labor and into electrical or construction where unions are better established.
Improperly installed solar panels short out and fail early, carelessly sealed roof mountings leak and damage the dwelling, and most importantly, pressured novice workers make often fatal mistakes while working with electricity or at significant heights. If you have the experience of prison labor as a baseline, the risks and rewards of this kind of labor may be attractive. But most tradespeople know these jobs exist, and choose not to take them.
Instead of support for labor, you see state, provincial, and national incentives to recruit new workers into these fields, as well as articles like this one touting the potential of employment in the clean energy economy. But noticeably absent from the article is any mention of labor organization or workers protections for the people doing this work. If the state was serious about building this infrastructure, they would make these fields union jobs. That’s the only way to get quality renewable energy infrastructure built at scale.
