2mo ago

Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time

www.carbonbrief.org

Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time - Carbon Brief

Wikipedia about the site (seems credible)

The analysis was produced by a Finnish think tank.

36 comments

Headline could be misleading, but it basically means that (according to one independent analysis) China's emissions have just stopped growing this year. They are still the world's largest contributor by far. This hilariously optimistic chart from the same site shows them relative to the US and almost all of Europe:
Still, not gonna knock what is good news, or at least "better than the alternative" news
- Given that the EU has 3x smaller population than China and the US 4x, the emission numbers aren't out of proportion. Add to that the fact that both the EU and US have outsourced large parts of their manufacturing industry to China and the picture changes dramatically. If China can manufacture, mine and process what they do, with its current population, and if emissions have peaked, that would be remarkably positive. Given their massive investment in wind, solar, nuclear and EVs, it might just actually be the case.
- They are still the world's largest contributor by far.
  I mean yeah because they're doing all the manufacturing the West offloaded on them. When you read about emissions in America or Europe going down remember that a big part of that is simply them shuttering heavy industry.
  
  Thank you, came here to say this.
  
  It's not like someone is forcing them to manufacture it all
- Fuck that graph! Make it per capita, why compare 300 million Americans directly to 1.3 BILLION Chinese?
  Same with EU, EU is also way more people than USA, yet we pollute less.
  We need CO2 Tariffs on USA NOW!!!
  Americans claiming it doesn't help for them to reduce CO2 because of China are disgusting!
  USA abandoning the Paris agreement is disgusting!
  The richest country in the world refusing to do their part is disgusting!
  
  Make it per capita, why compare 300 million Americans directly to 1.3 BILLION Chinese.
  Probably because total amount of CO2 is what matters to avoiding ecological doom. Further, economies and CO2 regulations are largely segmented between US, EU, and China.
  We need CO2 Tariffs on USA NOW!!!
  Yea tbh. I'm in agreement as someone from the US. Anything that potentially reduces CO2 is a good thing.
- They (IIRC) intentionally increased coal energy production because it’s cheap and easy to spin up.
  But at the same time they’re using that power as a stopgap for renewables.
  Kinda what Germany is trying to do
  
  They keep building coal power plants because the total need of electricity in China is rapidly increasing, but they are also building everything else at an even higher rate so less of the total is actually generated by coal. Also many of them are replacing old obsolete plants with cleaner more efficient ones.
  Many of them are also being built specifically because of the increase of renewable sources, to stabilize dips and provide reliability, so the overall usage of those plants has decreased.
- Now that is some high quality projection hahaha
- Yeah this headline is extremely misleading.
I always find it amusing that we, in the west, have sent our mining, recycling and manufacturing to China and then clutch our pearls to gasp at how huge China's CO2 output is.
The problem isn't only China, the problem is us all.
- Not only that, another big hypocritical thing is demanding growing countries that they need to slow down "for the environment". I mean, ok, global warming is everyone's problem, but the hypocrisy there is unmeasurable.
  
  Not really. Eternal growth is a dumb idea until and unless we can go interplanetary.
  Need to find a stable equilibrium for the long haul.
- Or that we keep concentrating only on the total output. China has 4.2 times as many people as the US, yet their total Co2 emissions are only 2.4 times higher.
  It's like complaining that a family of four is eating too much food from the buffet when you have over half of their total amount on your own plate.
- Yeah, China, USA, Russia, India, and the EU top countries have made a global problem for all of us.
- Yup. There's probably an analysis somewhere about how much of China's emissions are ours. I bet it's a large fraction.
  
  It's not that much:
  According to https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 it's less than 10% of China's total emissions, meaning 90% of their emission comes from internal consumption. This is pretty bad considering China's emissions per capita are worse than the UK adjusted for imports and exports.
It's 20% higher than it was 8 years ago.
It's China. When I worked in the air quality monitoring industry, we had to develop mechanisms to detect when someone had stuffed a rag in front of the air sensor... because of events that only occurred in China.
[X] Doubt

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