This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.
This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.
The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.
Thanks.
Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)
Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth levels have already started leveling off, and actually showed a slight decline as of late.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
That would be great. I was looking at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades
If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.
Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
The point is about quality of life.
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)
There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.
The easy way isn't the same from one year to the next.
China is currently building out all of this renewable energy and EVs, when the early industrial powers didn't, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is now the easy way.
Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.
It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump I)
US: 335M / 5,000M ton / 15 ton
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US. People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
> So how else do you propose we compare countries
dCO2/dt
The earth also doesn't care about national borders, so why are national numbers more useful in this regard?
Governments have a lot of control over things within their borders, and are held responsible when bad things happen within them.
I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.
Yeah currently the biggest source of oceanic plastic is phillipines IIRC
The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
> Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
The lack of a single world government is why.
Agreements between nations are only enforced by honour, and while that's more than nothing, it's not great.
The practical outcome of this is that who is "allowed" to do anything is dynamic, and who may do something the most can be inverted extremely quickly.
Yes thats right.
I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.
EU isn't a country, it's a union of 27 countries with their separate legislatures. I live in Finland, a country of five million people. According to your math I think I'm allowed to basically burn a lake of oil every day, right?
Exactly the EU isnt a country and China still produces more pollution than all 27 countries combined.
"My maths" is that countries cannot use per captia stats as an excuse to produce tons of pollution. Would it be acceptable for every country to pollute as much as China if every country in the world had 1.5b people? No it wouldnt we would say thats to many people.
If a country wants to have 5million people and produce 15(units) of co2 per captia thats fine that is not globe threatening levels of pollution its living within their means. However if that country were to have 2 billion people and had a per captia of 10(units) I would say they need to significantly reduce that to about 2.5(units).
Whereas you'd be making the argument that the country is actually doing a lot better even though they produce 20billion(units) total.
Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion then. I'd like to know too.
Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.
Per capita emissions are relevant in the sense that if China broke into ten separate countries tomorrow, with each new country maintaining their current level of emissions, the effect on the planet would be the same even though an entity called “China” is no longer at the top of the leaderboard.
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
I don’t see the value of expressing a supply side issue in terms of demand. You can’t just ask people to choose clean energy. That happens from the top, not the bottom.
That's not the point.
Why are some people entitled to more than others based on where they live?
The US is the world leader in per capita CO2 emissions. Has been for over a century. Only in 2021 China has reached 8t per capita. Do you know when the US reached that figure? 1899.
The inhabitants of the US, and of the UK before it, have been enjoying the benefits of energy-intensive industry for hundreds of years. But the externality of that process - the emissions - is a burden shared with everyone else in the world. As others have mentioned, the planet does not care who emitted CO2.
None of those countries is in a position to criticize the emissions of China or India or Brazil or whatever other country.
You seem to be conflating CO2 emissions with energy production.
No, but if some people are outputting way more CO2 than others, these are the ones we should be focussing on first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently fallen for the past 25 years or so.
Yes China is outputting way more C02 than the next 6 biggest pollutors combined. Lets focus on them first. They are the only ones not reducing their emission growth.
Serialization is a losing strategy here. “Focus” is irrelevant. We need fundamental shifts in energy production.
> Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?
I don’t follow. Energy demands can be met with renewables. We don’t have to decrease energy consumption at all. We only need to eliminate fossil sources.
Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.
We all breathe the same air. Every state needs to do everything it can.
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Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.
Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing in china.
It's called China, not china.
If we're going to pick nits, I'm fairly sure most of the Chinese population don't speak English, making it neither China nor china but 中华人民共和国
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good faith
This article is propaganda. Its part of a green washing campaign China started a few years ago to offset their reputation of being a dirty country powered by coal. Think about how often you hear about China's solar despite it being a tiny part of their energy grid.
It's both a fact that China has significantly lower emissions per capita than the west, and that they need to eliminate coal from their energy mix to become carbon neutral.
The propaganda aspect is comparing absolute emissions of China to the absolute emissions of some smaller nation. That's only done to confuse people and delay the transition to emission free energy production.
Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so it’s nothing to sneeze at
“Their” coal emissions
Aren’t they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only dream about?
Edit: for the downvoters
https://gemini.google.com/app/6da2be1502b764f1
And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that there is a strong environmental pressure within the country and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an anti-environmental agenda.
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
I wonder what kind of forest China is making? I was watching a really fascinating PBS documentary on Kanopy and it was talking about a lot of the planting efforts haven't been very good worldwide because planting a monoculture of trees doesn't do much and an old forest with tons of diversity stores twice as much carbon or more, which I thought was neat. So protecting existing forests is much better from a climate change standpoint. But either way, planting trees is better than nothing.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/15418989
Given the goal is to introduce trees to prevent desertification, in this case the relative benefits of old growth are irrelevant.
They're building an insane amount of nuclear. It's the only thing with a hope in a country where a "small" city has like 6 million people.
Are they?
They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a 10% increase)
That seems more like a modest increase.
Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear linear at best.
Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
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would you prefer zero trees being added?
Of course not - but it is quite fair to examine articles like this with a critical eye given all the greenwashing that takes place.
Liking waffles!= Hating pancakes.
Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
> Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.
There are import corrected CO2 emissions data you can check if you care. Tl;Dr it's not as big as you think it is.
These are 3 relevant data sets from Our World in Data:
"Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions" (emissions adjusted for imports/exports)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
"Imported or exported CO₂ emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as tons)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
"Share of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as percentage of total)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.
AS if they don't consume the products themselves with their 1.2 billion people?
My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they consume much more than us.
So what? I'm sure I personally consume much less than your country of 40 million
The point is China consumes a lot, for the rest of the world and for itself.
Was pretty obvious, but I wrote it down for you as you seem to be having trouble understanding the concept.