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Comment by buckbova | Hacker News Reader

> According to research published last year, spending a day in Beijing is currently akin to smoking almost 40 cigarettes. Decoupling emissions from economic growth thus helps both people and planet. Convincing Mr Trump of this fact is now an urgent and daunting challenge.

How is convincing Trump here the answer? Isn't convincing China more important? How about convincing the American people? Do this and politicians will follow.

Perhaps if Trump can bring back more industry to the US, he is on his way to helping already.

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I'm confused with this statement but I'll try to clear up something you seem to be missing.

1) China is already convinced. It's in the article. They are the world-leading user of solar power and are pushing harder than anyone to get away from dirty power.

2) Trump wants to push and invest in dirty power. He wants to significantly increase the production of coal and gas. The very stuff that causes global warming. Convincing Trump is about saving the world from itself. If Trump has his way, the last 20 years of progress towards renewable energy will be wiped out, with a strong possibility of making life very difficult for humanity in the next 50 - 100 years.

> are pushing harder than anyone to get away from dirty power.

Where do you gather that from? They use more coal than the entirety of the rest of the world combined. Their coal usage has more than doubled over the past ~15 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

This is from your link:

> Now Beijing is trying to slow things down.

> In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018.

Whether this will amount to anything, who can say?

It seems like for it to amount to anything, they would also have to close down currently operational plants.

china's coal use peaked by 2014: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/20...

According to that article: "China’s coal consumption growth was responsible for more than half of global CO2 emission growth in the past 10 years."

China gets over 70% of its electricity from coal. Yes, they are building more solar but it'll take over a decade for there to be significant change.

Anyway, the real problem is that even if everyone somehow meets the Paris limits, it's not enough.

https://www.beforetheflood.com/

And they're building nuclear plants too.

They currently get 2-3% of their electricity from nuclear:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/539691/china-will-soon-le...

A 5x increase in 15-20 years gets you to 10-15%. While that's good, I don't think it's enough given the current rate of CO2 production. It's hard to complain because they're doing a lot more than everyone else. Unfortunately, we need to find a way to do more.

I'm glad someone else brought this up on here, and you guys have some sources to back up your viewpoints. My understanding, until now, is that China has been full-blasting the environment as hard as it can even in the face of smog that chokes their entire cities. I'm happy to see they have some resolution to start curbing the problem. But for a long time it seemed like no matter what steps we were making to change, they were taking 10 steps in reverse and killing us economically because of it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/20/chinas-meat-co...

This too, additional to other links. Meat consumption has a huge carbon footprint.

Their government institutions see the problem and invent guidelines. We'll see the same stuff from the USA, most likely never.

>We'll see the same stuff from the USA, most likely never.

So at what point does the rest of the world intervene?

The problem is that these green energy politics are working within a artesic system of problems, meaning if you start for example the massive creation of bio-ethanol- you destroy by demand and supply jungle in other countrys (freeing carbon dioxide) and unleash social unrest (due to starvation - Egypt, Africa and the south America). The cost of re stabilization, eats via tax into the economy but is unable to reach the cost-creator, creating cascading instability's as the burden is shifted upon those who are unable to evade it.

Solar is fine though, once it paid back its energy production debt. I think bio-fuels should be taxed for the undoing of the distributed damage.

Mixed feelings never make for good punchlines :.)

China is convinced.[1] The American public is convinced, although not as much as they probably should be.[2][3][4]

The problem here is to convince world leaders to actually do something.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-16/china-tell...

[2] http://climatepublicopinion.stanford.edu/sample-page/opinion...

[3] https://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/

[4] http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eig...

Biggest problem is that climate change aggressively challenges many foundations of capitalism and consumerism.

That's a religion to some people. And this is akin to changing it.

Capitalism has been and will be an essential ingredient to solve the problem and switch to other sources of energy. The issue is that the costs to the global environment are not borne by the polluters. Put a price tag on pollution and the market will do the best it can.

Well in the end capitalism determines everyone's personal incomes. As long as the rich keep getting relatively richer and the population bigger the economy has to grow in order to leave at least near as much income for people in general as before.

Yes, people are convinced. But ask them to give up a little of their comfort and they start rioting. I see it in my (european) city, even smallish measures to restrict car usage lead to major contestations.

China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

They burn slightly more coal than the rest of the world combined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/business/energy-environmen...

> China is convinced? Then China should tell China to stop building coal power plants.

You realise you're source says they're doing exactly that?

"In guidelines released on Monday, China halted plans for new coal-fired power stations in many parts of the country, and construction of some approved plants will be postponed until at least 2018."

They've also gone all in on solar, having more installed capacity than any other nation. They're far from perfect, but they've started to acknowledge the problem at least.

Not only that, but they've taken all these steps while they're bringing hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty doing sustenance farming and into cities. Cities where they want things like electricity and cars. Look at the history of the world, development like that is usually fueled by burning as many hydrocarbons as possible. It's very good to see a country able now to at least start to break away from that. The rapidly dropping price of solar, thanks in large part to China plays a big role in that.

Despite setbacks China is also actively building up more nuclear capacity, something I wish was taken more seriously in the US http://energypost.eu/china-2016-year-nuclear-power/

China also has a sizable population to match.

We (the US) are in a good position to lead the renewables industry, and part of that is dogfooding what we make. But that dogfooding is harder if our domestic nonrenewable prices are low. Yes that means that, for now, those products aren't fully competitive. But they could get there with scale, and we get that scale by rolling them out domestically. It helps us build this industry in the long term.

China is also jumping on this opportunity, by the way. I saw an article recently that competitive solar will be a big focus point for its electronics industry.

This is exactly what I think we should be doing (as a nation). We should be pushing innovation and becoming a leader in R&D for green energy. It seems like a fantastic way of creating jobs and I have a hard time comprehending why people are so resistant to it.

I hate to beat this drum, but it comes down to money. Oil and coal spend so much money spreading false information about the issues, so it's hard for people to be informed about what our options actually are.

Not to mention that Oil and Coal are sources of energy where western corporations directly profit. Not so much with solar and nuclear.

Fear. Put yourself in the shoes of a 50-year-old coal miner who's had the same job since he was age 18. You lose your job, and the town in which you live is starting to decline because the major source of money is gone. You have no idea how your going to pay for your bills and food.

Do you really think such a person is going to be enthusiastic for retraining for a new, competing with younger people, and moving? Or do you think this person would rather support politicians who promise to restore the coal mining industry?

The thing is, we're not going to get rid of coal and oil for quite a while, even if we do convert mostly to green energy we won't (for better or for worse) abandon the infrastructure we already have. I say this as conjecture, but it seems reasonable unless otherwise shown.

China pretty much destroyed the US solar panel manufacturing market. If the US wants to "lead the renewables industry," ironically for you, the only way to do it is probably Trump-style protectionism. Otherwise China will continue to wipe out the next crop of Solyndras with its subsidies and other dirty tricks.

Of course, we can always put solar panels on top of things. That's a thing. They're doing that in Africa too. But the profits mostly go to solar panel manufacturers in China. And solar panels can't sustain a heavy industrial base... you need coal or nuclear for that, as other industrial nations know very well.

I tend to believe that if we stop subsidies for dirty energy sources, the market will take care of the rest.

So it comes down to policy.

The US would be in great position to take the lead here. For example, I don't understand why not every house in Southern California is covered with solar panels. Instead Trump's program seems to be to burn as much coal and oil as possible.

I think all of the above are part of the answer. Convincing Trump not to try to prop up coal as he's promised.

The Republican leadership has already said there's not much that can be done because coal is private and that government money shouldn't be spent on it. They know, and have known for some time, that coal is a dying industry, but you have to appeal to voters.

As far as building renewables is concerned both countries are currently doing their share. But that trend needs to accelerate and at the same time fossil sources need to be scaled back. Trump's statements on energy policy are mostly contrary to the latter part.

http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/REN12-GSR201... (page 20)

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