Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:
By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.
Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.
Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.
Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).
Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions.
We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this.
We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.
America could set the standard and then use its soft power (or sanctions if it came to that) to make India and china follow suit. The problem is that America is now hellbent on burning the world, and its soft power is all but gone.
China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1]
It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation, because China specifically substitutes coal for gas because they have none of that (and no reliable source). This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability. So for China you have 55% coal and 3% gas while the US uses 16% coal and 40% gas for electrical power.
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
I'd guess that this is in large part due to the sheer amount of datacenters they plan to bring online in the coming years and the fact that they can't scale up green energy quickly enough to meet the expected demand.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
China is already slowing down the addition new fossil fuel power plants. Yes, they still build new ones, yes they generate a lot of emissions. But they are also adding more than the rest of the world combined of renewable (solar, wind) electricity generation each year. Realistically, if China stopped 100% of emissions tomorrow, they'd be in much better position to replace it with clean alternatives than most other countries.
That's a bit defeatist, and kind of a whataboutism. Sure, it is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history playing out as a slow motion trainwreck, but you don't solve the tragedy of the commons by continuing to make it tragic "because everyone else is doing it". You focus on your own impact and you also focus on diplomacy with your neighbors. You don't just stop, you put in twice the work.
It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
Stopping 100% of emissions from the US would not be enough, but it would absolutely matter. We're still the #2 CO2 emitter. China is only about 3x more, not anything like "orders of magnitude." India is quite a bit less than the US.
> India and China burn orders of magnitude more
The US accounts for significantly higher emissions than India[1], despite having only a quarter the population.
> and they aren't going to slow down
There's a pretty good case to be made that China is slowing down[2], albeit not as fast as any of us need to be.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...
> India and China burn orders of magnitude more
They don't, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
> and they aren't going to slow down.
China already did, according to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/china-co2-emis...
yeah all these charts you need to read the footnotes, this wikipedia is co2 from fossil fuels not land changes which probably is some random fraction
Fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas account for approximately 90% of all human-produced carbon dioxide.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/fossil-fuels-are-th...
Some fraction that will not be enough to produce "orders of magnitude more"
Disagree with this perspective entirely.
Not only is it factually wrong (US emissions are much higher than Indian ones despite India being like 4x as many people), it also ignores second order effects of sane environmental policy completely:
By demonstrating that emission reduction is feasible, smaller wealthy western nations can have giant effects on billions of people living in poorer states. Not only does this demonstrate that wealth and environmental concerns are compatible, it also allows "follower-nations" to emulate such efforts cost effectively by picking proven technologies and avoiding technological dead-ends.
Just consider wind/solar in China: I would argue that the whole industry and growth rates only got to the current point so quickly is thanks to research, development and investment done in western nations in the decades prior.
Countries like Germany (<100M) had a huge effect on energy development in China (>1b people). If they had just kept using fossils until now, Chinese electricity might well be >90% coal power as well.
Geoengineering is a naive pipedream in my view because all proposals are either the height of recklessness and/or completely financial lunacy: CO2 capture for small individual emitters like cars is never gonna be even close to cost competitive with just reducing those emissions in the first place (but I'm always curious about any novel approaches).
Our behaviour is also responsible for China's and India emissions. We've exported lot of our production to those countries and are importing it back. If we were to measure emissions not by the country of the producer but the country of the consumer, our numbers (USA and Europe) would look dramatically different.
As consummer we are responsible for the whole world emissions in the end. Changing those habbits, can impact things far beyond borders. But that's a political choice which goes against a constant growth based economy and it seems that not many people in our countries are ready to accept this. We want to buy and travel as much as we always did but bear no reponsibilities for the impact it has.
Actually it would matter. Less CO2 would be released. It just wouldn't stop all the CO2 being released - but we don't need nor want to stop it all for it to matter.
China outpaced the US for renewable energy rollout years ago, and isn't stopping now, because it's seen as energy security. It's not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...
Right on schedule folks, it's a climate topic and we will now have the traditional recitation of the lies.
America could set the standard and then use its soft power (or sanctions if it came to that) to make India and china follow suit. The problem is that America is now hellbent on burning the world, and its soft power is all but gone.
China has actually been leading the charge in terms of green energy lately, at least in terms of making solar power equipment more accessible by way of driving down cost.
I have no idea however if they're just exporting this to other countries or if they're also pushing renewable energy domestically.
From what little I've read on this topic in recent years though they seem to realize that all of that smog is coming from somewhere and are taking meaningful action to remedy it, which is in stark contrast to what we're doing in the states these days with stifling clean energy and promoting coal.
China has continued to rapidly increase their use of coal for power generation. Just a few days ago there was an article about them hitting an 18-year high of new coal power installations [1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
It is deceptive to compare coal % of power generation, because China specifically substitutes coal for gas because they have none of that (and no reliable source). This also means those coal plants run at lower/decreasing utilization because a big part of their role is to provide dispatchability. So for China you have 55% coal and 3% gas while the US uses 16% coal and 40% gas for electrical power.
If you compare numbers, you will also find that lower per-capita consumption more than compensates for currently still higher CO2 intensity of chinese electricity (3000kWh/person * 0.5kgCo2/kWh for China vs 5500kWh/person * 0.35kgCo2/kWh, i.e. 1.5 vs 1.9 tons of Co2/year/person from electricity for China vs the US).
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New coal power installations != increased use of coal for power generation. You have to stop this lie by omission.
Their new coal plants either replace older ones. Or they are left idle. Close to 90% of all their generation growth comes from solar and wind.
They use coal because they have coal. Just like the US uses natural gas and then pats itself on the back for "reducing emissions" by switching from coal to gas. But their current trajectory will see them going to burning very little coal. It's a national security issue for them.
2 replies →
I'd guess that this is in large part due to the sheer amount of datacenters they plan to bring online in the coming years and the fact that they can't scale up green energy quickly enough to meet the expected demand.
In an ideal world I think they'd prefer to be powered by 100% clean energy but not at the cost of losing the AI race.
China's coal consumption has been pretty much flat for the past decade. That's certainly not ideal, but it's not a rapid increase.
2 replies →
China is already slowing down the addition new fossil fuel power plants. Yes, they still build new ones, yes they generate a lot of emissions. But they are also adding more than the rest of the world combined of renewable (solar, wind) electricity generation each year. Realistically, if China stopped 100% of emissions tomorrow, they'd be in much better position to replace it with clean alternatives than most other countries.
USA burns orders of magnitude more per capita. And if you take historical emission (and you should!) then the disproportion is absolutely absurd.
That's a bit defeatist, and kind of a whataboutism. Sure, it is the greatest tragedy of the commons in history playing out as a slow motion trainwreck, but you don't solve the tragedy of the commons by continuing to make it tragic "because everyone else is doing it". You focus on your own impact and you also focus on diplomacy with your neighbors. You don't just stop, you put in twice the work.
It's also somewhat easy to shift that viewpoint a little, too, right now: China's emissions numbers have started a rapid deceleration downward. They are doing more about their emissions faster than the US. Does the US want to lose to China that badly that we shouldn't even try to align US policy to more of the emissions reductions that China is already succeeding at today? (Much less their robust plans for future emissions reductions?)
Why so blatantly lean into Jevans paradox?
In this case, there is no ceiling on global emissions. If one country reduces to zero there would absolutely be less emissions than if they hadn't. There's no incentive for China and India to pick up the slack and create more pollution just to cover what the US stopped making.
It's not real. Even if it's real it doesn't matter what I do. Any more lies?
Sorry I don't follow your point here. What are you trying to say?
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Orders of magnitude more? Do you have a citation for that tremendous claim?
Stopping 100% of emissions from the US would not be enough, but it would absolutely matter. We're still the #2 CO2 emitter. China is only about 3x more, not anything like "orders of magnitude." India is quite a bit less than the US.
Thankfully none of the serious solutions are nation-specific. Also they do not emit "orders of magnitude more"
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025
That an often repeated old lie even if out of ignorance
China now has 51% electric vehicles, they are switching the whole country to electric
USA won't do that for many decades
https://electrek.co/2025/08/29/electric-vehicles-reach-tippi...
Canada is now allowing Chinese cheap electric car imports which will be a fascinating experiment
not per capita though
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> Because of climate activists and their small-scale geoengineering, thousands of people lost their lives in floods in Spain last year.
What small-scale geoengineering are you referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Spanish_floods#Environmen...