China’s electrification efforts are substantial and to be applauded and encouraged.
The problem is when you tell one sided stories, the important details get lost.
This is the most recent figure on China’s total energy mix from the IEA. They have a stupid long way to go on emissions.
It sounds nice to say they installed more solar in a month that australia has ever in it’s history. Let’s look at the trends…
Coal is up. Way up. Why did this article lose the narrative so badly? Because it’s a fluff piece, not an informed, intelligent discussion on emissions.
Is there data for 2024 yet?
Not that I saw. See another post below with the iea website.
not until we actually stop using fossil fuels. we are still using more fossil fuels than ever. And when/if renewables actually start eating into the fossil fuel market, then fossil fuels will get cheaper. So either we are going to burn through most of our fossil fuels regardless, or we will eventually need to take some kind of punitive actions against using them.
anyway, you’d think republicans would be on board with renewables for exactly the same reasons as china. it makes economic and national security sense if that’s all you care about.
my dad once said that if he was in Bush’s position, he would have used 9/11 to justify decoupling from Saudi oil and push for more solar and wind development
I still think about that. So many missed off-ramps to this…
If the US has tried that, SA would have tanked the dollar.
Perhaps. At the same time, we also had a better reputation then. A lot of countries were quick to jump on board when we decided who was gonna get invaded. Maybe they would have been just as eager to pull together and go green? Not that we’ll ever really know, of course.
anyway, you’d think republicans would be on board with renewables for exactly the same reasons as china. it makes economic and national security sense if that’s all you care about.
Not for them, and not for the horizon they care about. They’re (and the US as a whole) heavily invested in fossil fuels, so economically for them it makes the most sense to squeeze as much profit from those investments as possible.
Fund Ukraine to bomb Russian refineries. Huge win for the environment
Oh come on! Cheetolini knows best that fossil fuels are the future. All this woke green energy talk.
~I’m case I have to spell it out, I’m being sarcastic.~
Man, they’re twisting the data hard to try to make China look good here. They’re falling back on per capita, and cumulative to try to hide that they’re the largest emitter of carbon by far, much of it is from burning coal, which they are still doing much more than any other country.
This is greenwashing, nothing more.
Maybe… but… remember ten years ago when there were all those articles about how “China is building train stations to no-where!” and today those same train stations are now in the center of new bustling cities? Isn’t this what we’d expect to see, right at the start of a pivot to green energy?
bustling…cities?
not what I’ve seen. I’ve seen entire 30 floor buildings empty.
just because there is a “city” doesn’t mean it’s populated.
If you observe snapshots in time you’d understand what the facts are at that point in time. If you observe the trends at a point in time, you’d understand what things are likely to look at a future point in time. To me the interesting and informative bit is the trend and its short and long term projections. E.g. that it points to peak oil consumption within a couple of years and that it points to reduction of the leverage of OPEC and the US over China along any downstream effects.
Except the anchor that is America will keep fossil fuels going forever.
Jeff Daniels was right in Looper. “Go to china!”
