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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 :.)

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