Headline could be misleading, but it basically means that (according to one independent analysis) China’s emissions have just stopped growing this year. They are still the world’s largest contributor by far. This hilariously optimistic chart from the same site shows them relative to the US and almost all of Europe:
Still, not gonna knock what is good news, or at least “better than the alternative” news
Given that the EU has 3x smaller population than China and the US 4x, the emission numbers aren’t out of proportion. Add to that the fact that both the EU and US have outsourced large parts of their manufacturing industry to China and the picture changes dramatically. If China can manufacture, mine and process what they do, with its current population, and if emissions have peaked, that would be remarkably positive. Given their massive investment in wind, solar, nuclear and EVs, it might just actually be the case.
They are still the world’s largest contributor by far.
I mean yeah because they’re doing all the manufacturing the West offloaded on them. When you read about emissions in America or Europe going down remember that a big part of that is simply them shuttering heavy industry.
Thank you, came here to say this.
It’s not like someone is forcing them to manufacture it all
Yes, but the point is that someone is going to make that stuff so taking your emissions and putting them in someone else’s backyard isn’t exactly something to brag about.
Tbf China wants to be the one to pump that garbage out since it helps the line go up.
They (IIRC) intentionally increased coal energy production because it’s cheap and easy to spin up.
But at the same time they’re using that power as a stopgap for renewables.
Kinda what Germany is trying to do
They keep building coal power plants because the total need of electricity in China is rapidly increasing, but they are also building everything else at an even higher rate so less of the total is actually generated by coal. Also many of them are replacing old obsolete plants with cleaner more efficient ones.
Many of them are also being built specifically because of the increase of renewable sources, to stabilize dips and provide reliability, so the overall usage of those plants has decreased.
And due to their economic system, they don’t have to profit maximize those coal plants or even use them until the end of their lifespan. They’re free to decrease their utilization or even shut them down as the the need decreases.
Now that is some high quality projection hahaha
Yeah this headline is extremely misleading.
I always find it amusing that we, in the west, have sent our mining, recycling and manufacturing to China and then clutch our pearls to gasp at how huge China’s CO2 output is.
The problem isn’t only China, the problem is us all.
Not only that, another big hypocritical thing is demanding growing countries that they need to slow down “for the environment”. I mean, ok, global warming is everyone’s problem, but the hypocrisy there is unmeasurable.
Not really. Eternal growth is a dumb idea until and unless we can go interplanetary.
Need to find a stable equilibrium for the long haul.
The impossibility of eternal growth doesn’t deny the hypocrisy parent highlights. The CO2 budget we’ve eaten for our development has eaten (and still disproportionately does) the global budget that belongs to all people. We’ve consumed way more of a practically nonrenewable resource than the rest of the world, we continue to disproportionately consume more of it, and then we (some of us) go to the rest of the world and say, sir no sir there’s not enough resource left, you’ll have to do with a lot less, and you’ll have to do it on your own! There’s deep hypocrisy in that, regardless of the state of the resource.
I don’t disagree with that.
My opinion is that the top consumers need to cut down and likely more importantly this insane push for “the economy” to be wasting resources churning away and accomplishing nothing of substance. That’s the part that needs to end.
Along with the obsession with having more and more and more babies which will grow to consume even more resources.
💯
Some European countries aren’t doing badly in that regard but it’s a drop in a bucket compared to us in NA as well as the top 1% around the globe.
Yep. Or maybe closer to the top 10-25% based on this articles like this:
And there is the hypocrisy I was talking about. Go tell that to someone from third world countries and let me know how loud they’ll tell you to fuck off.
Guess we all die then. :shrug:
That’s the inevitable end anyway, since even first world countries aren’t doing much about it, propaganda apart.
Go go gadget defeatism.
We should do nothing because we’re doomed. Better waste everything we can to accelerate it!
What you are saying doesn’t even make sense. Read again, slowly, what I wrote.
Or that we keep concentrating only on the total output. China has 4.2 times as many people as the US, yet their total Co2 emissions are only 2.4 times higher.
It’s like complaining that a family of four is eating too much food from the buffet when you have over half of their total amount on your own plate.
Yeah, China, USA, Russia, India, and the EU top countries have made a global problem for all of us.
Yup. There’s probably an analysis somewhere about how much of China’s emissions are ours. I bet it’s a large fraction.
It’s not that much:
According to https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 it’s less than 10% of China’s total emissions, meaning 90% of their emission comes from internal consumption. This is pretty bad considering China’s emissions per capita are worse than the UK adjusted for imports and exports.
- It’s 20% higher than it was 8 years ago.
- It’s China. When I worked in the air quality monitoring industry, we had to develop mechanisms to detect when someone had stuffed a rag in front of the air sensor… because of events that only occurred in China.
[X] Doubt
