Submitted by lughnasadh t3_zp5tn5 in Futurology
Europe and the U.S could do everything in their power to go green. And China and India alone would make up the difference. They do not care.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/lughnasadh:
Submission Statement
Some of the facts and figures in this report are truly staggering - "In the 2022-2025 period, we expect China’s renewable power generation to increase by almost 1,000 TWh, equivalent to the total power generation of Japan today." - yet as China is growing so fast, that is only going to put a small dent in its coal use.
If there is any silver lining its that the IEA has previously said that relatively small tweaks in government policies on financial backing and planning could accelerate renewables adoption by a further 25%.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/zp5tn5/the_iea_says_humanity_used_the_greatest_amount_of/j0qwcl7/
Yep. A lot of people blame USA for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but they are only partially correct.
"Single stream waste management" was huge in the USA for years, throw all your trash and recycling together and the service sorts it for you at their processing facilities.
Processing facilities in the USA got overwhelmed, ao they subcontracted to ship containers of unsorted trash to facilities in India and China and Mexico, using the return leg of cargo ships to get things overseas.
When the processing facilities in India and China got overwhelmed, they just dumped it into the sea.
The report says... >From 2022 to 2025, global electricity demand is forecast to grow 2.8% annually on average, or by an absolute of ~2 496 TWh. Renewable energy will provide the majority share of additional demand at 90%. The remaining gap of ~83 TWh will be covered by coal- and gas-fired power generation. The largest increases in coal burn are forecast for China (+5%), India (+7%) and Southeast Asia (+14%). Meanwhile, coal-fired power generation will continue to contract in the United States (-18%) while a return to a declining trajectory is expected for the European Union (-29%).
IEA consistently underestimates renewable growth. If history is any guide this report should be saying quite the opposite. That we have likely hit peak coal and fossil fuel consumption this year and that renewables are the champion that is doing this.
Edit: I expect this op report doesn't include these upgraded expectations. https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-ieas-renewables-forecast-grows-76-in-two-years-after-largest-ever-revision/
Upshot: renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. The major driving factor is cost
More than 2,000 people die every day due to coal smoke.
thanks environmentalists for causing this with your anti nuclear cheering
On the bright side almost all of China's coal plants are ultra-supercritical, they emit way less and way more efficient than all coal plants in US, a comparison of modern coal plants to the ones used by the US built 40 years ago which are mostly sub-critical(which is the majority in US) is not a fair comparison.
It's more like the fossil fuel industry lobbying like crazy. Environmentalists certainly have their sway but nothing talks like giant piles of money
Thats nice, but how does this help when they still emitt more CO2 than last year and the year before?
Joe Manchin must feel like he popped sidenafil after reading those stats
>>They do not care.
That doesn't seem a correct way to characterize the situation.
China gets almost 45% of electricity from renewables, which is double what the EU or US does.
Furthermore, not only are they building all their own solar capacity, they are building most of the rest of the world's too, and account for 80% of global production.
Looked at that way, it might be fairer to say its Europe and America that "doesn't care".
I read somewhere that electricity only accounts for around 30% of all energy usage. I hope this is outdated or a misunderstanding on my part. Can’t seem to find confirmation.
you mean who the environmentalists take money from because they hate nuclear to.
Environmentalists is what did in germany not oil and gas money Environmentalists is what smashed it into peoples minds the sierra club kinda assholes. Environmentalists working with oil and gas is why the governments support solar and wind which are garbage
Electricity isn’t used to create steel, glass and cement. In the 5 years after the 2008 financial crisis, China used more cement than the US has used in all of history.
Much of this construction was directed toward speculative properties that will never be lived in.
China doesn’t give a fuck.
It's actually only about 22%, you can check on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption
That's the installed capacity, renewables never deliver the full capacity. The actual energy delivered by renewables is closer to 28%.
The US produces twice as much CO2 as India, despite having only 1/4 of it's population and per capita, we produce twice as much CO2 as China.
But by all means, blame China and India if it makes you feel better.
Everything you buy is produced in China. Where do you think they get the energy to produce it? If you close down the factory near you and move it to China, how is that green?
It's a shell game.
I've never heard anyone blame the USA for the so-called garbage patch.
Don't believe China's numbers.
Anyhow, electricity isn't the only thing that needs energy.
You have to include nuclear as well, to look at all low-carbon sources.
China is climbing, but hasn't matched the US yet, much less Europe.
Also interesting:
Most of China's emissions are for domestic consumption.
Don't trust that data.
China was building a lot of steel and cement for themselves. But that's over.
On top of producing everything consumed by the world. They still have to do that. That's where the emissions are from.
Where do you think your plastic hose comes from? From the plastic mine?
I trust data over gut feeling. "Don't trust the data, trust my intuition" isn't a great argument. China is still building housing, electric cars, and all kinds of things.
>Where do you think your plastic hose comes from? From the plastic mine?
Are you pretending that anyone said that China doesn't export anything? China does export things. But they also have a huge domestic market. Cement and steel are not the entirety of their emissions. They also have a middle class, and more people with money to buy stuff.
You trust Chinese data. That says it all. lol
Yep..all fake buildings like the ones demolished when evergrande went bankrupt
>you mean who the environmentalists take money from because they hate nuclear to.
Lobbyists give money to politicians, not activists. Follow the money
>Environmentalists working with oil and gas
You're joking, right?
Usa is usually the nu.ber one carbon producer I see. Though thats usually from stuff made in China. So it's weird. Cause they count the location of end stage of production
Pff. I got solar. My bills about the same as it was before and I got 6k from uncle Sam. And im.pretty sure the power company will be cutting me a check. It's a 30% tax credit right now. And it'll only become more and more cheaper in co.parison to renting you're electricity from a private monopoly.
Well. I had to watch something in school, about how it is the US fault, because they just ship their problems to other countries, without the necessary infrastructure to deal with it.
Though I do think a real big problem lies with the manafacturers. They make recycling hard as fuck, with ysing all kinds of miterails together that, that are hard to sort from eachother. Also many countries don't have the necessary infrastructure to deal with garbage, so they just throw it in the ocean, and since things like plastic degrade very slowly, they accumulate and create thebbig garbage patch.
It's more how it's run. So local communist party leaders bid for large projects to a government that needs to spend money or face the massive amount of debt piling up. They get these. Which pushes them higher up in the politics. Also gets them and all their friends a bunch of bribe money. It was also to get all the farmers and country folk to leave the countryside. Which happened. But not as much as they hoped.
What do you mean by so-called? Is it not a patch of garbage?
I thought they are caught in the wild on the ho island.
It's better to fear monger. People are stupid and lazy. If we say the world's gonna burn. Which it will. People will do something about it. If we say it's all fine and dandy assholes will feel they're entitled.to pollute without care again.
We got fusion. Let's go for that. And nuclear is a high risk high reward system. "They won't fail without human error" And they're run by humans so they're gonna fail. A coal plant fails and the local is smelly and burned up but everyone not near the blast is pretty much fine.
A nuclear plant explodes and that entire area around it is dead for the rest of humanities days. It's not worth the risk.
If the usa just stopped giving away tons of subsidy money to Fossil fuels and didn't tax them I know my cou try would go renewable within a decade. It would be soo quick and easy and wouldn't cost taxpayers anymore taxes.
I've never heard anyone blame a specific country at all, although if that is true, it sounds like the US is largely the source of the trash, so maybe it's just that I live in America so I don't hear the rest of the world blaming us.
It's not so much that China doesn't care as that China doesn't have a ton of options. They have no real oil or natural gas reserves worth speaking of as far as I know, and while they are investing in renewables at an impressive rate, their population is just so damn big, and rising in power consumption so damn fast, that they need to use whatever power they can find, or they risk rolling blackouts, so they use coal, because it's what they have.
Additionally, while China has excellent locations to build solar and hydro-electric power, those spots are generally in the north and west of the country, while the population that requires most of that power is on the southeastern coast, so transmission poses a major challenge, which they're attempting to solve by more or less just building enormous high-voltage lines all the way across the country, which leads to a lot of power loss on the way and is enormously expensive to do, given just how much China there is to cross.
That said, China isn't purely a victim of circumstance here, the bureaucratic and legal structure of the province-level electrical grids does lead to some wildly inefficient incentives when it comes to buying energy from another province, iirc.
So, yeah, it's not that China just doesn't give a shit about green energy, it's more that they are in the middle of a genuine energy crisis and desperately need fuel to keep the lights on. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of things you can criticize the PRC for, they get up to all kind of deeply nasty shit, but this issue in particular seems like they really are stuck between a rock and a hard place rather than just apathetic.
Not fake buildings, the buildings are mostly real houses, it's just a colossal real estate bubble, possibly the largest in history. Due to the volatility of the Chinese stock market, real estate is seen as the most common personal investment, as it is less likely to lose its value by crossing the Party. (Empty houses are really good at not pissing people off.)
At some point, the negative consequences of burning coal at increasing levels have to outweigh the benefits, right? I've never been to India, but I can't imagine the air quality in the cities is all that breathable.
Actually, a lot of the things you would traditionally think of as "made in China" aren't made there anymore. They've made an effort to pivot their economy more towards high-added-value manufacturing, like electronics, and away from labor-intensive low-cost bulk goods like clothing and little plastic knickknacks. Most of the cheap stuff moved to various parts of Southeast Asia.
Also, what reason do you have to believe that China is not investing in renewables? They're an emerging superpower with minimal fossil fuel reserves, reliant on international shipping to keep the lights on. They want to be energy-independent so they don't need to worry about starving of electricity if the US were to blockade the South China Sea from the string of naval bases it has on allied islands, or their oil pipelines from the Middle East getting sabotaged.
Additionally, the numbers they report aren't actually all that impressive for what they've built. Chinese hydroelectric dams have pretty low levels of efficiency, and they've displaced literal millions of people to build them, and done some pretty brutal damage to local ecosystems in the process.
That doesn't sound like some sort of attempt at winning good-boy points in hopes that it'll make NATO like you, it sounds like a major nation-state attempting to secure energy independence by any means necessary, which is very common in geopolitics.
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A mitigating factor when you consider energy instead of power is that somewhere between 30 and 50% of energy in most cases is expelled as waste heat. Those thermal power plants and vehicle transport energy cases shouldn't be compared one to one with renewables.
The US and Britain both consumed massive amounts of coal when industrializing and developing, now other countries that are developing now arent allowed to do the same apparently. Its unfair to develop your country first then look down on all the countries developing now.
Not to mention that America produces far more pollution per capita. You are comparing countries that have wildly different populations.
Europe:
Turn off nuclear reactors. Never built new reactors. .. Gets addicted to gas from a dictator. Gets f*cked over. .. Now has energy crisis. Buy their gas elsewhere for twice the price. .. Restarts coal plants. Proceeds to burn more coal while promoting green energy.
modern nuclear plants cant explode. you are uneducated on this topic.
Coal plants kill over a million people a year
Ps. We already knew about thorium decades ago
Yes! I was just talking about this earlier. Natural gas utilities are bankrolling a massive anti-nuclear propaganda campaign in media.
We don't have fusion. Even if it is viable, it won't be commercialized for decades. Nuclear fission is the lowest risk energy technology, period. It is the safest energy technology in existence.
Many of the impoverished people now gaining access to electricity previously cooked their food by burning wood and animal dung inside the dwelling, causing millions of air pollution deaths. For them, coal-fired electricity generation may be a significant improvement in their health. Also, a lot of the air pollution in India comes from the open burning of rice stubble.
Population always goes up. We just hit 8 billion people.
In 1900, the era that we think of when we think of coal, there was only 1.6 billion people.
China and India DO care. They just don't want their populations to suffer because their economies aren't as advanced as ours. Many Western countries got there "first," polluted the crap out of the world, and these countries are operating on the same substandard fuel sources we gleefully used in our development phase. Don't playa hate.
Blame Australia and the bitch that runs the main coal company responsible. The world should put sanctions on the bastards
Not surprised to see a blatantly racist comment like this so upvoted. Why would India and China not care? You think only white people have the capacity to care about the environment?
India and China aren't using coal for laughs and gags, they are using it because not using it would mean plunging 100s of millions of people into darkness. Of course, I don't think you really give a shit about the people in India/China.
If the West really cared then they should provide the capital and technology so that the developing countries can switch faster.
First world countries need to introduce a green tariff on cheap goods arriving from these countries. If it violates trade agreements, say it’s for national security. The world doesn’t need never ending consumption. Our Canadian government bans single use straws but dollar stores pump out millions more plastic tons of stupid party supplies and “glitter everything”
When it runs right yes. I wish it'd actually work. It sounds wonderful. Especially with the new processes that pretty much use every speck of fuel. But so far it'd fucked up twice. And been close many times. And in my country. Most are well past their due date for reconstruction. Right now. There are much better ways. Personally I like a intercontinental hyperloop that has those new super efficient massive wires running with it with solar, wind and hydro power all along it. Combine it with solar water purifiers and pumps on the oceans to create new water batteries along routes needed. Would be able to provide clean fresh water for the inside of the continent while the central part of the continent provides all the power. Could cut our military budget and pay for it within a few decades in time for fusion to supplement the rest.
Maybe fission as an interim instead of more coal or gas burners. But nothing more than that. Radiation doesn't go away. It's to risky no matter what people say. It'd fucked up twice. That's a pattern.
I swear I've heard that same thing said before. That they are impossible to explode. Three separate times from three separate countries. All of whom said the same thing in the last 100 years. Thankfully there is a 33% chance that the area isn't contaminated for 10,000 years.
Not exploding is only true when humans don't fuck shit up. No one is lazy. No one is greedy or corrupt. I've read a couple other stories of shit getting close to blowing up or causing a leak. I honestly wonder how many have fucked up and nobody was told. Then you've got the waste. Which, can you honestly tell me? You trust every government with a plant to dispose of properly for the next 10,000 years. I certainly don't. Fuck NK has hydro ones. I bet they dispose of it by feeding it to their cave prisoners.
Please clarify.
A careful reading of the thread title reveals that in the single year 2022, humanity used an amount of coal greater that in all of human history.
I'm betting you mean "an amount of coal greater than in any other single year of human history."
Be careful what you write: words have meanings and meanings have power.
Five minutes after I wrote the above, I ran across this lead sentence from another thread: TIL that under Writers Guild of America rules the phrases "written by", "story by", "screen story by" and "screenplay by" all have different, and precise, meanings.
Then, three minutes later, I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/zpf90y/where_are_the_spoons/
As I said, words are important!
The ideal locations for green energy being “too far away” is a terrible excuse considering places like Quebec get over 90% of their energy needs through renoua les and all the big dams are out in the middle of nowhere in the subarctic. You pay a bunch of guys to build the dam things, route the pylons and cables back to the population centres and build a town there for the workers who do shifts of 2 weeks on - 2 weeks off. If a place with only 8 million people can do it, it should be a piece of cake for China considering they seem to have a enough workers to build entire empty cities and skyscrapers for fun just to tear it down again
I'm not sure you understand the sheer scale of China.
Having more people doesn't mean your energy needs are easier to fulfill, it means you need more energy, and you can't just build more dams, because you're limited by your rivers. Quebec has 8 million people, Guangdong Province has 126 million. The biggest dam in China, The Three Gorges dam, is literally an order of magnitude larger than the largest dam in Quebec, the Daniel-Johnson Dam (at 27.2 million cubic meters to the DJD's 2.2 million). On top of that, the distances they need to build and maintain transmission cables across are more like if you had to use transport that power from Quebec to Vancouver, not from an isolated part of Quebec to the rest of Quebec.
Also, if we're comparing the provinces most reliant on renewables, Tibet derives 97% of its energy from renewables, more than Quebec.
China isn't magic, and it isn't evil for evil's sake, and it isn't deeply mysterious in its motivations, it's a major nation-state pursuing all the things major nation-states do, it's just very very big.
> which leads to a lot of power loss on the way
HVDC is expensive, but not that lossy. Crossing China the losses are still dominated by the interconnect.
In a lot of countries the waste heat is used for district heating. Raising the system efficiency to 80-90%.
That sounds biased as hell.
Western countries exploit the fuck out of SEA countries.
They offshore recycling and trash storage to these weak nations with under-equipped recycling and storage and then send them literal hundreds of tonnes of shit that can’t be recycled or stored… where does it go? Into the ocean. Suddenly those hundreds of tonnes of British waste are now attributed to Sri Lanka.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/01/20/asia/malaysia-plastic-waste-return-scli-intl/index.html
Malaysia sending back 100’s of containers full of trash labeled as recyclables from countries like United States, United Kingdom, France and Canada.
The US sends its manufacturing to China and sets up a carbon offset system (instead of reduction) to make itself look "green"
In fact the world does need never ending consumption. Well not the world, but our economic system which dominates the world we live on.
Lol! That 1.2% from Australia is sooo bad... idiot
They do not care? Explain the numbers seen in china’s green energy sector.
People have been saying the world is going to burn since the 90's. Hasn't really made a big difference.
If there wasn't 1 billion people there they wouldn't be burning all that coal. Seems to me they could have done something.
Can't wait for all the bullshit that are gonna be said when fusion is a thing.
Ironically, coal causes more radiation per energy unit than a nuclear power plant
I understand the scale difference, I was being pedantic about the point raised that “while China has excellent locations to build solar and hydro-power, those spots are generally in the north and west” and therefore far from the population centres.
Of course China’s energy needs are massive and it will take time to meet them, but presenting long distance between power sources and population centres as a hurdle is ridiculous considering my example with Quebec (which gets 95% of its energy through hydro alone and the rest through wind). Obviously the real hurdle is the sheer scale of what needs to be built since it will take long no matter how many workers you send to those far flung regions, but if it’s still a viable option.
I also never said anything about China being evil. I complimented their capacity to build things considering they have a knack to build skyscrapers and cities figuratively overnight to the point where their speed outruns demand leading to empty skyscrapers.
If anything, I believe in China’s capabilities to completely switch to green more than you
Sure. Never ending growth is absolutely necessary for the economic system to avoid a crash.
The world, and everyone living in it will eventually come to a halt because the micro plastics and PFAS coarsing through our veins causing all sorts of medical conditions, the collapse of insect populations causing massive food shortages, mass migration causing collapse of urban housing and incredible amounts of homelessness. I’m in my mid life, but I probably won’t see these issues at their worst, but they are all happening now and it’s just the beginning.
This comment is so out of touch with reality it hurts...
Is there not over 1 billion people in both China and India? If there weren't that any people in those places, would they still need to burn all that coal? Please tell me how any of that isn't realistic?
If you propose depopulation there is a start for that...
If you cannot even be bothered to read up on one child policy and while it failed miserably we are back at insanely stupid comment part.
Compressed biomass is taking the place of coal in many places now so that’s something 🤷🏻♂️
Can you show me a photo of this garbage patch?
Where have I made a proposal? I don't recall making any proposals. I don't care how the Chinese and India have gotten to the point they are at with their population but that is a them problem. Why should the world enable them to have way too many people? Is it "insanely stupid" to conclude that 1 billion people are going to consume more coal than 100 million people? I don't think so.
They have too many people? By metric of the amount of whine on Reddit maybe? Or what actual metric you use here, really interested in that.
The world is dying because there are too many people on it. Both China and India have over a billion people. The next most populous nation has 330 million. That is almost 3 times as many people. That is my metric. The world needs less people. Logic says you start with the 2 countries with over a billion people.
Never read a more stupid comment, both of them care far more than US where climate change is still a debateable affair.
US hasn't done much at all, it's coal has been replaced with easily available Gas, an option not available to China or India.
Why not start with the country that pollutes the most per capita? Killing an American does far more to "save the planet" than killing an Indian or Chinese person does.
I would invite you to come and try.
Bro you okay? Do you normally take statements of fact as personal threats?
This. If anything, there is just burnout on this and people hear it and roll their eyes and move on.
Yeah I'm fine. While you did make a statement of fact you also included a threat of killing Americans. Hope you aren't here in the States. The FBI takes a dim view of foreign people making terrorist threats. I can see you have a problem with the US. Can you tell us where the bad American touched you? Do you need a stuffed animal to hug your pain away?
Imagine implying that Chinese & Indian people should be killed then getting butthurt when someone points out it would be more productive to kill Americans if you wanted to reduce waste. Good thing it's winter, snowflakes like you melt outside in the summer.
Where did I imply about killing anyone? Please show me where I advocated for the death of anyone?
>The world is dying because there are too many people on it. Both China and India have over a billion people. The next most populous nation has 330 million. That is almost 3 times as many people. That is my metric. The world needs less people. Logic says you start with the 2 countries with over a billion people.
You can copy and paste. Good for you. Where in that paragraph did I say anything about killing anyone?
>The world is dying because there are too many people on it. Both China and India have over a billion people. The next most populous nation has 330 million. That is almost 3 times as many people. That is my metric. The world needs less people. Logic says you start with the 2 countries with over a billion people.
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>Where did I imply about killing anyone?
Your attempt at being a Captain Save-a-hoe is commendable but flawed. I never mentioned violence as a solution to our overpopulation problem. Those are your words, not mine. Your whole premise is based off your flawed assumptions and assumptions do not make good debate. Maybe you should have joined the debate team in high school. It would have served you well.
>The world is dying because there are too many people on it. Both China and India have over a billion people. The next most populous nation has 330 million. That is almost 3 times as many people. That is my metric. The world needs less people. Logic says you start with the 2 countries with over a billion people.
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>Where did I imply about killing anyone?
Why are china and India exempt from carbon emissions reduction measures?
They did! China famously had a one child policy to reduce population growth, which led to a demographic crisis
To be clear, are you proposing the slaughter of millions of civilians? How would you plan on carrying this out?
No. I wouldn't carry any plan like that out.
So you're saying that "we need fewer humans", but apparently China, who put legal limits on the number of children you were able to have, weren't doing enough. Aside from mass murder or sterilization, how could it be possible to produce a world with substantially fewer humans?
And the US emitts double the amount per capita compared to China.
Hey man, just an outside observer. I think I speak for about 90% of the population when I say this, you made an absolute fool of yourself in these comments and any intelligent person who read this can feel the stupidity oozing out of your comments. You probably know you’re not the smartest guy, but DAMN you really went off.
lughnasadh OP t1_j0qwcl7 wrote
Submission Statement
Some of the facts and figures in this report are truly staggering - "In the 2022-2025 period, we expect China’s renewable power generation to increase by almost 1,000 TWh, equivalent to the total power generation of Japan today." - yet as China is growing so fast, that is only going to put a small dent in its coal use.
If there is any silver lining its that the IEA has previously said that relatively small tweaks in government policies on financial backing and planning could accelerate renewables adoption by a further 25%.