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.
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