Comment by bamboozled
7 days ago
Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it. Personally this is making me trust them more than the USA because, facts.
I mean lesser of two evils thinking, if one is intentionally leading us towards climate disaster, while the other isn't then yeah. What else can be said? Should I trust the authoritarian country who believes in engineering and science, or the one that doesn't?
>Agree, China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it.
China brought 80GW of new coal power online last year. The US added 0, and plans to add 3GW next year (we all know why).
China doesn't care about climate change, they care about energy independence, and conveniently have very little natural fossil fuels besides coal. Which they heavily mine and utilize.
The new coal plants are not planned to run a full capacity (or at all) they are meant for backup in case of environmental disaster and geopolitics (war, sanctions, tariffs, etc). So the actual amount of coal being burned is still going down.
Although it is highly suspicious why they are building so much unused capacity, it is as if they expect something to happen soon.
We have a very top level strategy design and plan to make safety of our energy supply chains, I can even tell that in my hometwon we also designed and implementated a Pumped-storage hydroelectricity power station in the inner part of China.
Also suggest a very good book which details our past decades hard work on energy saftey design: 筚路蓝缕 世纪工程决策建设记述 (Blazing a Trail: How China Decided and Built Its "Projects of the Century")
Book Link: https://book.douban.com/subject/30348776/ 9 out of 10 score for this book.
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They commissioned 78 GW of new capacity in 2025, but actual coal-fired generation fell slightly (by 90 TWh, ie 10 GW). It might rise again, but it's expected to peak by 2027–28. And of course they added 440 GW of renewable capacity, 64% of global installations.
I certainly agree there's other motives (renewables even net them significant trade, like EVs) but it's not as though 'caring about' climate impacts requires selfless virtue, they stand to lose $trillions/year like everyone else.
Woah, I am blown away by these numbers. I did some research using ChatGPT. A coal power plant called Guoneng Qingyuan Power Station is 4GW in total size. (It added 2GW of capacity last year.) Normally, 1GW is considered a large coal power plant by itself. This is a massive plant!
Geolocated here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/24%C2%B024'57.0%22N+113%C2...
I asked ChatGPT how many coal train cars are required per year to fuel this 4GW plant: About 200 coal train cars per day. That is staggering! It is about 5.25 million tons of coal per year. Multiple that by twenty and that only covers new capacity added last year. It is depressing to see these numbers.
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From my understanding, yea they still stand up coal fire plants because world demand for Chinese manufacturing and the energy demand it creates exceeds how fast they can build reactors. So they build coal fire with the intention to replace that capacity with renewables later. Been awhile since I looked, but China has like 30-some odd plans for nuclear reactor construction with quiet a few of them having already broken ground, but that was about 5 years ago.
World Bank said exports in 2024 were about 20% of China's GDP. AI said 30% of China's petrochemical usage is exported as embedded energy. You're right that it is useful to think in terms of marginal generation, where it is marginally used. But that is more difficult to measure than just making assumptions at the level of the economy.
No one forces them to increase manufacturing output. They do it to make money, just like everyone else.
China builds literally everything for all countries, so why wouldn't they bring coal online? Very tiring arguments IMO.
Are you sending them extra money to fund nuclear?
China emits 3x more co2 than the US and last year their rate of increase was 2.5x that of the US.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
"big number bad" isn't a great way of analysing the data, because China has a massively larger population.
The US emits 49% more CO2 per capita than China. And even with the much larger rate of increase, 0.79% to US' 0.3%, it'll still require 81 years to catch up to the US per capita rate [0].
The US aren't the good guys here, not by any means. Compared to my country, for instance, the US' emissions are 3x per capita that of the UK. If you want to argue that we shouldn't be using per capita (although we absolutely should), then that's 45x the UK's CO2 emissions.
[0] log(13.59/9.13) / log(1.0049) = 81.4 years
In absolute numbers China produces 1/3 of the total worlds CO2, and they are still growing the amount of CO2 they are producing.
That is not the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.
China’s CO2 per capita is ahead of every large developed country except for the US, Australia, and Russia.
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I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?
Another point is there is evidence[1] China has cheated and manipulated their data[2]. I don't like this "who are the good guys" game. Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.
[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
[2]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-new-carbon-metri...
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You need to account for carbin import/exports in manufactured goods and services
If the UK imported all its electricity from Poland, it would reduce on a per-capita basis but would increase global
USA emits 2165574,97709 times more than Faroe Islands. Sounds like they should be forced to limit that to some reasonable level say 2x of that of Faroe Islands. Don't think it would be too big ask right?
China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia.
There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.
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Kind of a meta point but for those who don't know, its fun to track this comment and its responses through time. I want to nominate it for the hall of fame in classic HN post genre. It will be two decades soon!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=21&prefix=false&q...
One interesting thing would be to see how the numbers change over the years alongside the otherwise identical debates.
Can you refine that search term a bit more? I followed the link but it brings up many marginally related comments.
They make literally everything, including all the pieces for a renewable / low emission economy.
"Clean coal"
USA and Europe are basically equal in terms of yearly production of renewable energy. Texas + California alone rank 6th in the world.
>China believes in Climate change and are at least taking steps to address it
I've got a bridge to sell you!