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and I'm all for all of that, we need every country doing all they can.. screw apathy and whataboutism
but is there any way to motivate China to do more? stop building coal plants?
Buy more solar panels.
Basically the more China makes solar panels the cheaper they become and the more likely they are to use them themselves.
China is already doing a lot more than most of the west? They're by far the leading manufacturer of solar panels and are adopting EV at an extremely rapid rate. Also per capita China has significantly lower emission rates compared to the west.
Why are you so concerned about China?
China emits twice the amount of greenhouse gasses as the next nation in the list:
- China
- US
- India
US emissions have been on a downward trend for the past 20 years. China has seemingly reached a steady state neither growing nor reducing emissions. India continues to increase emissions year over year.
cause they emit a lot of carbon, and we need to reduce carbon emissions
They also have 1.4 billion people living under them. Relatively speaking they don't emit as much as the west. They are also invest the most out of any major country into renewables and EV. IDK what more you can ask of them.
The atmosphere and thermodynamics don't care about per capita emissions. What matters is how much gets dumped into atmosphere.
You do realise the West basically offloaded their industrial pollution to China? Most our green efforts hinge on China's ability to make solar panels and now Americans are so afraid of China's ability to make cheap electric cars that they placed a 100% tariff. You're pointing fingers when per capita Western countries should take more responsibility. I guess it's easy to China bash these days huh?
Only 22% of China's greenhouse gas emissions come from manufacturing for export. Most of it is coal based power generation, transportation, and concrete production for construction.
yes we offloaded our problems to China .. so what can we do to solve that problem
I'm not pouting fingers, this isn't us vs them I want to know if there are good ideas we can do to reduce their carbon emissions while doing everything to reduce our emissions as well
fuck let's go over there and offer to build non coal power plans for free if they don't build coal
half this thread is convinced I'm a climate denier in hiding where if we acknowledge China's emissions are a problem I'm going to jump out of the bushes and claim the west should do nothing
maybe we can't do anything and need to focus on ourselves that's fine, that's an answer too that maybe is the reality
I’ve always found it to be a bad faith argument that the US should not cut emissions until China and India do. That’s just a game of chicken into the worst-case scenario.
As an American, I think there are plenty of changes to be made here, that American policy can change. I also think that if the US Military carbon budget was added to the U.S. statistics that those numbers could be much much higher.
I find that usually the argument about China and India not lowering emissions first is about economic fears. So maybe tackle the argument by reframing how we can use green energy to keep the economy strong. We can retrain our oil extractors and employ them in safer well-paying fields.
The US has been cutting emissions year over year for the last twenty years through a combination of moving some manufacturing offshore, improvements in vehicle emissions, improvements in energy efficiency, and increases in carbon neutral / green energy.
Their emissions total is too high, but it's very similar, if not below many other countries when you consider they are many times larger.
If you had 3 USAs, they would pollute more than 1 USA.
This doesn't excuse china, obviously, they still have work to do reducing them, but they do seem to be heading in the right direction.
They are currently the largest manufacturer of renewables, and built domestically more solar in the last year than the US has total.
Their emissions are predicted to fall this year thanks to that massive drive.
Stop buying so much stuff.
Lets try and get the US to put a carbon border adjustment mechanism in place, like the EU has. Note, this can be extended beyond just the specific goods that generate a lot of GHGs. Meaning that high GHG emitters are slowly but steadily creating an enormous tax on the rest of the world. And yes, at present that includes the US, where I live. I am not convinced that our switch from coal to nat gas has been a huge improvement.
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism_en
Wanting to rescue China’s emission as a westerner is like wanting to reduce emission of Taylor Swift.
It’s just not going to happen and nobody cares or actively looking for excuse to justify it
I mean we could have excessive tax on private air travel to find other things.. that's an easier one I think..
but yeah it's brought up as a hang waving look at this other thing nonsense
The average Canadian (for example) emits near 3x more than the average Chinese person. On top of that, a good chunk of Chinese emissions are manufacturing for western customers. Seems like it's on us to change first.
China's coal consumption has stalled (they still build plants as a jobs program but the vast majority are mothballed or to replace older less efficient plants) and India's grid fell below 50% coal for the first time in 60 years this year.
China's car market is now close to 50% NEV (BEV, FCV and long range plug in hybrids). All the while producing more than half of the world's install capacity in renewables. They are on track to doing their part all the while the USA is been found to under report methane emmisons by more the half actual values.
Frankly the USA is behind china and has been caught lying about emmisons.
yeah the methane emissions thing is scary and definitely something we need to get on top of..
but yeah good to hear coal is slowing
It will as it has joined nuclear as the most expensive option. Thanks to the EV revolution dropping the cost of storage. Renewables are now just cheaper. It is what has driven the renewables boom in India as well (as well as the fact that a distributed grid is easier to build a cross a poorer area that had no power before hand, just like we saw cellphones in large parts of Africa gmthat never had land lines).
The big thing for China is steelmaking.
We need remove emissions from steelmaking. We can reduce emissions by swapping to Methane over coal but it is a far more involved process and China doesn't have large gas reserves like it does coal. Or we can fully remove emissions with green hydrogen which just isn't being produced in anywhere enough quantities to provide for the steel industry.
The other issue is that the Chinese power grid is fragmented and not super well maintained. So they can install a lot of renewable energy but they can't utilise it to its fullest extent without a radically new approach to their power system.
If we wait for China to start reducing emissions before we do ourselves it will delay the transition, causing more damage and delaying new technical innovations which are needed. Every KG of carbon does damage.
we should not wait
War.
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18d
The United States is the nation with the highest consumption. Why go after China and India first?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/resource-consumption-by-country
Chinas population is crashing so by the end of the century if not sooner they will get there.
So give every individual on Earth an allowance of total climate damaging emissions, and make it a matter of personal responsibility.
The argument that other nations aren’t doing anything has always been an appeal to apathy.
The simplest reason to support renewables is not because of what other nations are doing. It’s to reduce demand on imported energy sources. Whilst the US, for example, can fuel itself mostly; the more renewables it uses the longer those resources will last.
We can talk about sustainable economies not in terms of saving the environment but in terms of resilience and ensuring economic independence.