Comment by sarchertech

A few days late for the discussion, but I just happened to watch an interesting youtube video today [1] which seemed worth sharing.

A summary of some of the points early in the video: in 2025, China added 300GW of solar and 100GW of wind power. In comparison, between 2015 and 2014 China added a total of 78GW of coal power capacity, and for 2025 onwards an additional 161GW has been proposed or reactivated. So, clearly just one year of additional renewables capacity far exceeds the additional coal capacity over multiple years.

Around 5:25, the video then talks about the difference between capacity (maximum possible power) and generation (the amount actually produced) and another chart at 5:52 shows that even though capacity has increased by 6% from 2024 to 2025, actual coal power generation decreased by 1.2% over the same timeframe. So even though the headline is that China is building more coal power stations, in practice they're to cover peak load and to provide energy security and the actual energy production (and hence) emissions is decreasing. FWIW, the same chart shows a similar global trend.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qde4r4_uMU0

Actually, if you Google the rankings, China is 27th per capita, behind, of all places, Iceland.

Almost like the entire worlds manufacturing was pushed to China the last 40 years (and is now getting moved to cheaper countries with the rising Chinese middle class). Is there a similar explanation for why the US number is so high?

You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita.

There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada all have significantly developed economically important countries. And they all have GDP per capita much greater than China's. What's your rationale for excluding them? There's a whole host of smaller countries with higher GDP per capita than China between those I listed above and China on the CO2 per capita results.

We should agree that ALL countries should be working to reduce CO2 emissions. But it sounds like you have a strong US bias and given Trump not only denies that climate change is even a thing, has withdrawn from international agreements on reducing emissions and even tries to pressure other countries to burn oil instead of investing in windfarms, it seems a bit disingenuous to try to make out that China is the only country that needs to improve. Before commenting on the speck in someone else's eye, first remove the plank from your own, yadda yadda...

> Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?

From the GP [1], US emits 4,632,164,876 and UK emits 292,419,359 tonnes CO2. Which, sorry my bad, is actually only 15x. Looks like I did the ratio of China to UK which is 45x.

But either way, it shows that comparing total emissions is stupid because it's biased against bigger countries. Emissions per capita is a far more sensible metric.

> Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad.

Sure, but the same can be said about China, in fact I'd argue even more so. As a resident of the UK, the majority of things I buy is made in China, almost nothing from the US.

> The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations.

Sure, but they are higher than China's, which was the point I was making to refute the GP. The only reason China's total emissions is 3x US is because its population is 4x US.

> Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.

If you re-read what I wrote that you're replying to, you'll see that we agree on that.

It was the GP post that tried to compare China and US in terms of emissions, and deliberately chose total emissions to portray China as significantly worse than the US and getting worse year-on-year, while conveniently ignoring the population size differential and that the increase in emissions is still negligible compared to the overall difference, because it'd take 81 years for China to catch up with the US on emissions per capita. I then compared the US to the UK to show that comparing total emissions instead of per capita is stupid, because the population size matters.

But, as I said in the post you replied to - both countries can and should do much better, but as China isn't even in the top 10% of emissions per capita, this is a worldwide problem and trying to pin it all on China is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...

That's while being the world's factory, having lots of green energy, electric cars and an ACUTE motivation to reduce oil imports. Coal is a problem but at least they're not canceling half-finished green energy products when administrations change.

Just to quote a poster above:

"You seem to think China is the evil polluter here. Just sort by per capita, and you'll see it's not even in the top 10% most polluting per capita."