US and Rest of World Must Follow China's Lead On Green Energy, Says John Kerry (theguardian.com) 205
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: China is leading the world in moving away from fossil fuels, and the rest of the globe -- including the US -- must now follow, the former US secretary of state John Kerry has told the Guardian, as Cop watchers wonder exactly how China is going to approach this year's climate summit. As Cop31 opens -- this year the climate conference is in Turkey -- there is plenty of speculation about whether China will finally step into the leadership role that it has long avoided. In its latest "five-year plan" adopted in March 2026, China for the first time pledged to "actively participate in and lead global climate governance". Cop31 could provide the first indications Beijing is ready to put that rhetoric into action, something it has historically been reluctant to do.
In 2025, clean-tech exports surpassed $220 billion, and they should grow again this year; the world's largest emitter is now the world's leading supplier of clean energy technology. China accounts for about 85% of solar and 80% of lithium-ion battery supply chain production capacity, and in 2025, nearly 75% of electric cars were manufactured there. Smart moves now by China would position it as a linchpin in a future electrostate world order, persuade rivals to cooperate, and solidify its influence in the global south. "The only country that has hugely accelerated is China," said Kerry. "The rest of the world is stumbling along while Mother Nature is sending us more powerful signals every week, every day."
"[China] realized suddenly they had way too much dependency on oil and gas from other places, and they decided they needed to be independent. Other countries, since the war in Iran, and since the strait of Hormuz has been interrupted, have made a similar decision, and they're moving independently. There's been a massive uptick in deployment of renewables. Thank you, Donald Trump."
For autocratic states without free and fair elections, seeing the economic benefits reaped by China would be the spur to adopt low-carbon growth, he added. "They'll see where the market is going, and they will recognize where the cheaper alternatives are. Even they can read a spreadsheet, and understand where costs are exorbitant [in fossil fuels], and where you have a better deal," Kerry said. "Right now, renewables together with storage, together with some transitional gas, is cheaper and more effective, than just going with fossil fuels."
He added: "The marketplace has made its decision and globally is moving to electrons, and electrostate status. People are going to electricity and they're going to try to do that as clean as humanly possible. That's the choice that I see being implemented in many different places. It is unstoppable."
In 2025, clean-tech exports surpassed $220 billion, and they should grow again this year; the world's largest emitter is now the world's leading supplier of clean energy technology. China accounts for about 85% of solar and 80% of lithium-ion battery supply chain production capacity, and in 2025, nearly 75% of electric cars were manufactured there. Smart moves now by China would position it as a linchpin in a future electrostate world order, persuade rivals to cooperate, and solidify its influence in the global south. "The only country that has hugely accelerated is China," said Kerry. "The rest of the world is stumbling along while Mother Nature is sending us more powerful signals every week, every day."
"[China] realized suddenly they had way too much dependency on oil and gas from other places, and they decided they needed to be independent. Other countries, since the war in Iran, and since the strait of Hormuz has been interrupted, have made a similar decision, and they're moving independently. There's been a massive uptick in deployment of renewables. Thank you, Donald Trump."
For autocratic states without free and fair elections, seeing the economic benefits reaped by China would be the spur to adopt low-carbon growth, he added. "They'll see where the market is going, and they will recognize where the cheaper alternatives are. Even they can read a spreadsheet, and understand where costs are exorbitant [in fossil fuels], and where you have a better deal," Kerry said. "Right now, renewables together with storage, together with some transitional gas, is cheaper and more effective, than just going with fossil fuels."
He added: "The marketplace has made its decision and globally is moving to electrons, and electrostate status. People are going to electricity and they're going to try to do that as clean as humanly possible. That's the choice that I see being implemented in many different places. It is unstoppable."
Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you like about China, but in this they lead the world.
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The United States is the second-largest emitter, at 12.60% (2022), though its emissions per capita have been declining for the p
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America is still responsible for the most cumulative CO2. [ourworldindata.org] More than China. More than the entire EU added together.
If we take your number 12% of the current world CO2. But America less than 5% of the world population...
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America would be doing better if we hadn't killed off passenger rail or had high-speed passenger rail like China has. When people have to drive from point a to point b, it adds a lot of emissions that the typical Chinese person wouldn't have to use due to rail/air. Pew says only 17% of Chinese households have a car. This is changing, which will make China look worse, I suspect, in the future (even with EV you need power to charge batteries).
I realize that there are heavily populated corridors in the US whe
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Right, and what would their emissions be were it not for the renewables? Much higher, right?
We have to stop with the nirvana fallacy (anything other than the perfect solution is invalid). China's emissions plateauing is a GOOD THING. No, it's not the BEST THING, but it is a GOOD THING. If the trend continues, China will be able to demonstrate meaningful reductions in their CO2 emissions over time, which is more than what could be said for most other non-European countries (European scientists saw this as a
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I agree with the thrust of what you say, but with the slight quibble that actually, many non-European countries are also about to see emissions fall, from Pakistan, to sub-Saharan Africa, to Ethiopia, to Australia. The common thread is cheap renewables and storage. Largely solar, but for Ethiopia it's hydro too (and a ban on ICE cars).
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
Because China's population is 1.4 billion people.
What's more important is the rate of change. Every country goes along a curve where emissions increase, peak, and then drop. China was on the up slope as it industrialized, and is now starting on the down slope. The peak was far, far below where the US and Europe peaked per capita, the only reasonable measure unless you think their One Child policy was a good idea.
The rate at which China is installing renewables and storage is staggering. Just the newly installed renewable capacity from 2025 produced as much electrical energy as the whole of Germany consumed that year. Just the new stuff, and this year they are on track for it to be even more. They are adding more than a Germany sized amount of renewable generation to the grid, PER YEAR, and accelerating.
If Europe and the US were doing that too we would be in a much better position regarding climate change. It would doubtless be a huge boon for those economies as well.
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If Europe and the US were doing that too we would be in a much better position regarding climate change. It would doubtless be a huge boon for those economies as well.
This goes to show the utter fecklessness of the right wing positions. If you ignore the environmental side (which is also just abject stupidity), it's obviously good economically, and for national security. These are things conservatives claim to be in favour of, though I've never seen any evidence of it.
Being insulated from externally imposed
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You can slice it different ways. China is at over 4PW/year renewable generation, the US is around 1.1PW/year.
I think per capita emissions are the fairest way, but we should also look at how fast each country is installing renewables.
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I am not entirely comfortable with the term "renewable energy," as it only encompasses solar, wind, bioenergy/biomass, hydro, and geothermal energy. Renewable energy sources are often intermittent, meaning they are not available all the time, and the term excludes nuclear power, which accounts for about 9% of global
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"A large proportion of China's CO2 emissions comes from coal."
Obviously. Equally obviously, they are keen to replace coal with renewables as fast as possible, because it's cheaper for them. Avoiding an intermediate stage of going to natgas is going to make their transition faster than ours.
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Yes, we all need to change, but China accounted for 31.84% of global CO2 emissions in 2025.
That's not a "but", if anything, it's an "and".
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While it is deeply troubling that the only capable leadership in this question seems to come from China, this is the best chance for human civilization to survive. The West has proven itself to be not capable enough (Europe) or completely incapable (the US). And time is running out fast.
Yes, this will give China power and influence it should not have. But there seem to be no alternatives left.
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We have environmental laws and they don't.
They have.
You are either uninformed or a troll.
They have some of the most strictest environmental laws of the planet.
Since several decades.
So I assume you are just a troll.
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China lags, not leads. There is an enormous amount of misinformation in this space -- exporting large numbers of solar cells does not mean you are cutting emissions at all, it is a completely different metric.
For the record, China gets half its energy from coal, about 20% from oil, about 15% from natural gas. It is not leading in any sense. They are massively investing in new oil fields, fracking, and deep water drilling, they added 225 new oil fields, they are building out new coal plants and new natgas pi
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China gets half [50%] its energy from coal, about 20% from oil, about 15%
That is 85% - and obviously wrong.
Stupid troll, try harder.
The "leading" in the article is about yearly installations.
Try to get some reading comprehension: troll.
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Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Informative)
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China's per capita carbon dioxide emissions amount to 8.77 tonnes in 2025, 8.745 tonnes in 2024, and 8.65 tonnes in
2023, they are therefore increasing, and in absolute terms, they are nearly (though not quite) three times the level of
declining US emissions.
Yes, China has nearly three times the emissions of the USA in "absolute terms." But per capita, China is way below the USA. In those same years, the USA per capita emissions were 14.34 tonnes in 2023, 14.22 tonnes in 2024, and 14.50 tonnes in 2025. So, a recent uptick (but see below.)
These numbers come from this source [ourworldindata.org] which appears to be the same as your un-named one.
Over the past quarter-century, the overall per capita trend for the USA is declining, and China's is increasing. And China doesn't look too g
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Consider emissions in relation to consumption: https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
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Interesting. Briefly, this chart shows a country's per capita consumption but with emissions counted where goods are used rather than where they are made.
No big surprises though: the USA is above China and falling, and China is well below and rising. Just as they were without re-assigning emissions for imports and exports from the manufacturing countries to the consuming ones.
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See also the consumption-based data per country [ourworldindata.org] rather than per capita.
Accounting for imports and exports in the consuming country shows a smoothing out of the trends, but they're still there.
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
What other fair measure is there? Unless you expect China to somehow reduce its population to US levels, per-capital is the only way to do it.
And let's not forget that a lot of those emissions are things made for American companies and sold to Americans.
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he, very specifically stated "very nearly (though not quite) three times"
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Great, now divide by number of people.
Already was. Let's face it, so many people like propaganda. While everyone gushes about China, leading the world to a new green future, like some Olympics of responsible goodness, while the nexus of all evilz, 'Murrica, is hell bent on destroying this planet....
The fact remains that we are being told we must emulate the number one emitter of greenhouse gases.
The energy retention characteristics of an atmosphere based is ruled by it's gaseous composition.
Per capita is no where in that calculation.
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That's not important unless you think a person living in China has less of a right to energy than a person living in the USA.
Per head of population (Score:3)
IMO the amount of people in a country shouldn't have anything to do with it.
It should be based on the size (area) of a country.
The world isn't getting any bigger, nor is the planets ability to absorb GHG, even though the population overall maybe increasing.
Re:Per head of population (Score:4, Interesting)
IMO the amount of people in a country shouldn't have anything to do with it. It should be based on the size (area) of a country. The world isn't getting any bigger, nor is the planets ability to absorb GHG, even though the population overall maybe increasing.
There is only one way Total emissions and resulting radiative forcing. All else is a weird tapdance that has nothing to do at all with radiative forcing.
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That's a very shot-sighted view. All energy consumption and waste that we care about are for humans and by humans. So obviously everything has to be looked at in terms of per-capita when we want to bring in improvements and controls. You cannot have one human consuming the energy and waste of a 1000 humans and say 'Oh that single human is occupying a continent so it is ok for the pollution because the continent is large, while the other 1000 humans are on a small country so they are bad'. And as others have
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China's per-capital emissions are falling now.
The US peaked around 21.5t in the 1970s. China peaked at around 14.5t in 2025.
I suppose it's possible China will grow again in future, but it's looking unlikely given the amount of renewable generation and storage they are installing. The war with Iran has helped that too.
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China is not deforesting .
They do the exact opposite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I really wonder if you Murricans are all trolls, or some kind of brainded people?
How can it be that except "Anti China propaganda" no one of you knows anything about China?
In the recent 40 <--- fourty years, Chine planted 66 billion trees.
And since a decade they use robots for that. Plant something like a million trees per month.
Deforesting my ass.
Some other troll before you, claimed they have no environmental regulati
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Yes, but if we say something like “All countries must reduce their greenhouse emissions by a percentage”, should that percentage be the same for all countries, or should it be weighted? If it should be weighted, how (population, land mass, GDP,)? I agree that emissions per capita is not a particularly useful measure, but the only way to avoid regurgitating propaganda is to actively think about the problem and try to come up with potential solutions.
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In fact, China's per-person emissions peaked at a fraction of the US ones, and the European ones. They were never, and will never be as bad as us.
It will be a long time before they have our average standard of living also. All this comparison of CO2, per capita or total does not matter, the conversation is incomplete without a discussion of what those emissions buy, because that is not even close either. You may aspire to China's carbon footprint. You might not be as happy when you see what it gets you. They may build a lot of EVs, but most Chinese still can't afford one.
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During this time China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Having visited, I can see that many of them enjoy a good standard of living. In fact some of the apartments and homes I was in are much, much nicer than the ones in the UK. They looked like something out of a catalogue. I could hardly believe that people were living there, with kids and pets no less.
While it's far from universal, it's still hundreds of millions of people. When it comes to quality of life, things like air pollut
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It will be a long time before they have our average standard of living also.
They have the same standard of living as Europeans and are far beyond Americans since decades.
Under which rock do YOU live?
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It will be a long time before they have our average standard of living also. They have the same standard of living as Europeans and are far beyond Americans since decades.
Under which rock do YOU live?
I'm sure the Chinese people you know do. You can search income per capita just as easily as you can search CO2 per capita.
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Informative)
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It's not a troll, it's a shill.
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That decision was taken after the tsunami wrecked Fukushima and that happened in March 2011, something which makes for a very long "decade". I never saw the immediate point, the chances of an earthquake triggering a tsunami which takes out a nuclear power station are not that high in Germany.
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Insightful)
The Russian gas lobby (Schroeder anyone?) rode an understandable emotional public reaction to shift power generation from nuclear to gas. That didn't pan out well could be the biggest euphemism of the century.
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Agent Merkel didn't do anything bad. For that you should look to her predecessors. By the time Merkel implemented a policy that was craved for by the democratic voting public, Germany's nuclear infrastructure was in an already borderline obsolete stage thanks to 20 years of lack of investment in upgrades. At the point they started shutting down, all but 3 nuclear plants were either at end of life, or had their life spans dangerously extended. Merkel did a good thing here. Funny thing is, Merkel was historic
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Most directly, the decision belonged to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Unlike other world leaders, she is a trained scientist, with a Ph.D. in physics.
She reached the momentous decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022 after discussing it one night over red wine with her husband, Joachim Sauer, a physicist and university professor, at their apartment in central Berlin, according to people who spent many hours debating the
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If you want to point the finger do so, but point it at Gerhard Schroeder and Helmut Kohl, and note that both were from opposing political parties and both of them championed the end of the nuclear industry in Germany through systemic underinvestment.
That is double wrong.
Actually tripple wrong.
a) it is not the role of the government to invest into nuclear, so there is no underfunding. The plants made absurd earnings - why can the owner not invest himself?
b) Kohl was pro nuclear, but it was not his job to pla
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That is incorrect.
The shift was from Nuclear to renewables.
However Merkel torpedoed both, the nuclear exist, and the switch to renewables.
It is Merkle's fault that Germany (especially in Bavaria) build new gas plants. not Schroeder's
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That decision was taken after the tsunami wrecked Fukushima and that happened in March 2011
That is wrong.
The original legislative vote took place on December 14, 2001, when the German Bundestag approved the plan to shut down all of the country's nuclear power plants within approximately 20 years.
Merkel reverted that vote.
And after Fukushima, she regretted it, and re-installed the exit.
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
They also lead the world in the number of coal fired power stations and they're still building them.
China's coal consumption has decreased over the past decade. At this point they are building more efficient replacement options for areas where no suitable logistical alternatives exist.
This makes sense for them, but unfortunately it gives certain morons a perceived scapegoat to point a finger at as an excuse to not fix their own dirty practices.
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No, China's coal consumption has increased, not decreased over the past decade:
2025: 2300 MToe
2015: 2047 MToe
That is an increase of 13%
https://chinadata.live/data/co... [chinadata.live]
Re:Renewables are the way to go (Score:5, Informative)
The number of coal power stations isn't the crucial thing, what's important is the quantity being burned. That has peaked and is going down, because of two effects:
1. the new power stations are often replacements for older, less efficient ones
2. the new power stations are being used as peakers, not for baseload
China has no oil fields, such that (Score:2)
they are forced to rely on coal if they want a buffer from global disturbances, such as a Toddler Clown started a stupid war in the M.E.
And they are pulling ahead of us on renewables.
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On the first point, they are at the moment, but they are looking to reduce this buffer by the build out of renewables, BESS, other storage, other low carbon power gen, etc. TBH, they will want to keep the anthracite coal for hard carbon for sodium chemistry batteries if they can, rather than burning it. Coconuts only get you so far.
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No, it is not declining and has not peaked.
2025 (last year on record) is at an all time high,
https://chinadata.live/data/co... [chinadata.live]
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2. the new power stations are being used as peakers, not for baseload
That is called: load following. Not "peakers".
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don't like that fact but it's also true they've been building state of the art supercritical & ultrasupercritical plants for the past decade so that's somewhat of a mitigation, emphasis on somewhat.
they're also building quite a lot of nuclear plants too.
Unfortunately (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, when I see "John Kerry", even after all this time... my mind immediately goes right here [youtu.be].
Just saving on coal for now (Score:3)
With EU and the US already being on gas instead of coal, the percentage of renewable for China doesn't give them much to brag about till they actually roll out net zero.
They are soaking up the extra capacity caused by their industrial policy of wage suppression for industrial expansion, but even for them long term storage is too expensive.
Re:Just saving on coal for now (Score:4, Informative)
With EU and the US already being on gas instead of coal
Coal consumption in the US is the highest its been since 2022 and saw a 10% increase in 2025 alone. Don't celebrate until the Orange Dumbfuck in Chief is gone. The EU is holding steady but has seen no meaningful decrease since COVID thanks to the restriction in gas supplies causing all countries to put on hold plans to shut down coal plants.
Also "already on gas" is a bit dishonest. The USA is still burning 8.7 exajoules of coal a year. All of Europe (not the EU, but total continent) a place with 2.5 times the number of people (but keep reading) is burning 7.33 exajoules. In the USA that's about 20% of the gas consumption, and in Europe it's about 35%. But a reminder nearly 30% of Europe's total gas use is residential and not substituting coal.
Coal still makes up an embarrassingly huge part of the USA and Europe's energy mix. We have a long way to go.
*Numbers from the 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy by the Energy Institute.
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Also, gas is NOT carbon neutral. "Better than coal" is extremely weak praise.
Works for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get overly bent out of shape based on the source of an idea anymore. If it's a good idea, then that's enough for me. If China can help us on that path, then let's do it. I'm on board.
I'll take renewables and MSG. Both make my life better.
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Yes. Sad as that is, this is very likely the only viable way forward.
Conflating two things (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no environmental gain from using more renewables, only from reducing fossil fuel consumption. China is doing the former, not the latter. I hear you bickering that they'd use even more fossil fuels if it weren't for renewables, and you're right, but they (and humanity in total) are still pumping out far too much CO2, and that, not the amount of renewable energy production, is the benchmark.
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Well, with a bit of artistic license, I'm going to make a parallel, albeit not too convincing, but I think there's still a point or something in it -- that this is not unlike people who have made deliberate choices like driving an electric or becoming vegetarian or getting a heat exchanger but they'll still go and have two or three kids. In absolute terms those two or three kids are the biggest factor.
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No, it's ~10%. Where did you get that 1.5% from?
https://www.iea.org/reports/breakthrough-agenda-report-2025/road-transport
Step 1: Find the Car Emissions on the IEA Road Transport Page
On the IEA Road Transport Report page, look under the "Emissions" bullet points near the top. It gives two figures for 2024:
Total Road Emissions. The road sector reached just over 6 Gt CO (gigatonnes) in 2024.
Passenger Car Share. "Over 60% of road emissions are from passenger cars or vans."
Resulting Car
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Again one of your stupid nonsense posts.
Flight alone is close to 2% world wide emissions. That would actually be neglectable, if it was not about the height at which the planes fly.
Then all the other transportation comes on top.
In Germany total CO2 emissions by transport is 23%.
And your country: is far worse.
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but they'll still go and have two or three kids. In absolute terms those two or three kids are the biggest factor.
No they are not.
When the kids are grown up, there won't be any ordinary ICE cars anymore.
Energy production will likely be 100% green.
Kids are not polluting the planet. Grand parents and parents did, and are still doing it.
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You only see the past, not the trend.
In terms of pure generation per capita, China is very afar from true leadership on generation.
In terms of gross generation they are, but just because they have a massive population. They are doing a significant effort and narrowing the distance from the true leaders, but the big population smash any difference, so I can see why other people see them as the most significant contributors in the change.
They are. They started being very pollutant, and while they still are, t
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reducing effectively the fossil fuel consumption
No, this isn't a thing. It's either being increased or reduced. The USA is doing worse by increasing, but we also need to be actually decreasing the use of fossils.
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only from reducing fossil fuel consumption. China is doing the former, not the latter.
The numbers around the numbers matter. China's energy demand is massively increasing and the portion of fossil fuel consumption dedicated to both energy production as well as residential consumption is decreasing at the fastest rate in the world. Blaming them for still burning fossil fuels is insanely dishonest or woefully ignorant of how energy works in general.
The world would be in a far better place if we even remotely matched China both in terms of emissions per capita (China's is way lower than any wes
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The world would be in a far better place if we even remotely matched China both in terms of emissions per capita (China's is way lower than any western country)
You have that backward [europa.eu]. China isn't in the top tier of the very worst countries, but they're in the next tier just below that. In 2025, China's per capita CO2 emissions were 9.07 tons. The EU as a whole was only 5.52. Portugal was 3.67. Costa Rica was 1.93.
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portion of fossil fuel consumption dedicated to both energy production as well as residential consumption is decreasing at the fastest rate in the world.
That was my point. If you burn 1 ton of coal and also create 1 GWh of renewable electricity this year, and then burn 1.1 tons of coal and also create 1000 GWh of renewable energy next year, you've dwarfed the portion of fossil fuel consumption and helped the environment NONE.
China has not reduced CO2 output: https://statbase.org/data/chn-... [statbase.org]
You're being hoodwinked through misdirection. From an environmental perspective, it strictly does not matter how much electricity you create from renewable sources. It's
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Remember all the whining about how we would have to go back to being an agrarian society and suffer a massive decline in living standards to get to net zero?
China is proving that isn't true. In fact, it's proving that all the fearmongering about net zero costing us too much is nonsense, and it's actually a huge economic opportunity. They can't make solar panels, wind turbines, EVs, batteries and all the other stuff fast enough to satisfy the huge demand. The energy produced is the cheapest available, which
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We do need to do a lot more.
We need to burn less (and reduce other sources of atmospheric CO2.) If you want to have electricity, you need to generate it with much less CO2 output. But no matter how much electricity you generate renewably, it will not reduce the climate impact of the CO2 you're still releasing into the atmosphere. This isn't an argument to reduce our standard of living. It isn't an argument against renewable electricity. I'm just pointing out that it all means nothing if the CO2 output isn't reduced, and rather quickly
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Climate change won't be fixed by a revolution, more like a critical mass. If, when the current gen comes up for closure/retrofitting/replacement, the same capacity can be replaced (including baseload) with renewables for less money... It will be. What we can do in the meantime is make sure there's s
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Why tear down a bunch of fossil fuel power plants still in their prime just to replace them with a technology that's still rapidly getting better?
Certainly don't tear anything down. Mothball those plants in case they are needed in wartime, during unprecedented weather activity that disrupts solar production for long periods, etc. Maintain a reserve of fuel for them in the bargain. Coal is great for this because it's great at lying around. You certainly don't want to use it if you don't have to, but it would be foolish to dismantle it. It's worth paying to store it.
Modern industrialization (Score:2)
That's rich (Score:2)
This guy, along with Al Gore and Hazel O'Leary led the effort to kill the Integral Fast Reactor which was operational by 1991 which simultaneously solved the nuclear waste and energy generation problems.
From what I can tell getting this going was the only thing GHWB did right.
It's said Gore did it to pay off Greenpeace, Kerry did it for the Lincoln Labs tokamak project, and O'Leary did it for Big Oil (like Ford killing Project Liberty). Later Gore parlayed this betrayal into his slide show grift.
Now 35 year
Re:Faking numbers is OP (Score:4, Informative)
Wasn't it Trump who fired the people who gave numbers he didn't like...
America pulled out of the Paris Agreement (that it had no hope of meeting anyway) and Trump [whitehouse.gov]
In 2025 America increased coal CO2 by 78 Mt , and China decreased by 48 Mt. [iea.org]
How much extra coal will AI in America cause for 2026...
Re:Faking numbers is OP (Score:5, Informative)
It is surprisingly easy to be in the lead if many of your numbers are under extremely tight wraps from the regime eeeh party and you make a lot of your published numbers up out of thin air.
Greenhouse gas emissions are monitored from space. If the numbers were exaggerated too much, the whole world would know about it.
A few examples:
https://climate.esa.int/en/Sci... [esa.int]
https://www.esa.int/articles/a... [esa.int]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There's a bigger problem here, though - The US will never, regardless of whether the evil or useless side of the aisle is in charge, accept China's lead on any matter of real significance. If China becomes the world's (political) leader in renewables, you can bet the farm the US will double-down on fossil fuels.
We have ODD at a global scale.
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Batteries arn't generators, they're load balancers so while they're a nice to have they don't solve the main problem of green sources not supplying enough power in the first place. Eg here in the UK we've been stuck under a high pressure for a week with grey skies and so wind and solar have been at less than 10% total.
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No, they're not equally important. Without generation those batteries are useless. Without batteries plenty of things would work just fine on mains power. Even cars used to have crank starting.
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Because Spain and Portugal are connected to the European grid.
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The Iberian grid went down big time last year so no one will be relying on them as backup. Plus the connectors over the Pyrennes can't supply nearly enough power for the rest of europe.
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They do not need to supply "the rest of Europe".
The power loss in Spain was France's fault.
And has nothing to do with renewables.
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That was one of the hypotheses on the day. However, the final report [windows.net] says:
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The "Magic battery!" crap is getting reeeeeeaaalllly old. As are the idiots that fall for it.