← Back to context

Comment by jqpabc123

2 months ago

Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!

China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.

So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"

  • You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.

    The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.

    Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.

  • Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.

    https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

    Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.

  • They're making insane progress and they are decarbonizing in terms of their energy mix. Can you and others please stop with never letting china receive any praise for anything? it's so annoying when people seem incapable of pointing to ANYTHING in china and being like "nice". Is there anything positive you'll credit china with in this space or just nitpick?

  • cool now compare the population difference.

    In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.

    • Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).

      2 replies →

The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.

However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.

  • Yes, BYD will be fine.

    And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.

    Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.

    • The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).

      3 replies →

    • US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.

      When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.

      They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.

      Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.

      16 replies →

    • > Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers.

      The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.

      Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.

      (As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )