Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

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> We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.

In this specific context, it's primarily the things outside of your control - far outside of your borders and political influence - that make that an impossible action for a given person.

China is currently adding nearly as much coal power output (+121 GW) as exist in the whole of the EU combined. [1][2] Their companies are working on adding even more output and plants than that around other parts of Asia. Domestically China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined, in fact.

China has approximately 987 GW of coal power in operation, soon to be 1,100 GW. The EU has 149 GW. China passed the EU in coal plant GW output around the year 2000 at 200 GW, they passed the US in 2006 at around 340 GW, and are now closing in on 1,000 GW this year. Next year they will have 4x the coal plant GW output of the US.

The US has reduced its coal-based power output by ~80 GW (1/4 reduction) in about 12 years and continues to close coal plants. China has an additional 149 GW of coal power output under construction. China's actions trivially wipe out anything the rest of the world can do to counter it.

The article properly lists the US as a mega emissions culprit, along with China and India. Except the US isn't massively expanding its emissions, it's reducing. The US isn't opening new coal plants, it's rapidly closing them. The problem in the US is that it isn't moving fast enough.

How does a person from, say, Finland do anything about any of that to try to make this the best possible of worlds? China's actions alone will wipe out any chance of stopping (much less reversing) the accelerating climate damage. It guarantees there can be no positive outcome. How do you force China to stop building hundreds of new coal plants? You can't and they won't.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c1feee40-0add-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957...

[1a] outline version of the FT article: https://outline.com/dbCT6e

[2] https://fortune.com/2019/11/20/china-coal-power-plants-pipel...

The scope of China's coal is incredible. Truly Mordor-like on the Carbon Monoxide map. Every time there's a forest fire issue around climate change I go look at the map to remind myself. Examples I documented with screenshots:

Australian bush fires vs... China and India: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1197612762039554048

The October California forest fires vs a Normal Day In China: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1189229024951881728

I should have documented Brazil, too. Those fires cause serious pollution and carbon emissions, but they're peanuts compared to every single day in China.

This blame China narrative is pretty ridiculous.

China's per capita emissions are about half those of US or Canada (though still over the global average). That should help you understand how incredibly profligate North America is. China's growth in per-capita emissions also seems to be slowing while in the US, the per-capita emissions are basically static since 2012.

The USA is also the world leader in cumulative emissions (which is what really matters if you're trying to draw up a carbon budget or assign blame). While the biggest historical emitters continue to do so little it's no wonder that others don't take climate change as seriously as we might want.

Cumulative emissions sources and plots:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/historic... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/cumulati...

These emissions figures will be assigning the manufacturing emissions of exported goods to the country that exports them, not the one that imports them. This is one contributor to China's high emissions: manufacturing loads of stuff for the west. Those emissions should really be attributed to the purchaser.

Source for CO2 emissions over time:

Nice table: https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/CO2-emissions-per-capita?base...

Source data for that table: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2019&ds...

We shouldn't use China as an excuse not to do anything. But we also shouldn't dismiss the fact that China is emitting more CO2 per year than the U.S. They emit nearly double: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...

The closer you get to the present day, the closer you are to the time on the historical timeline where climate change is understood to be a threat, and the more moral urgency there is to reign in emissions. It also makes more sense to consider what should be done differently about emissions last year, this year, and next year than emissions from decades ago.

Nearly twice the emissions with over four times the population. Nearly 20% of the world's population is in China. Of course they're going to emit more.

But if China were rapidly increasing its emissions per capita, that could still be a problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case. China seem to have held their emissions more or less still for the last few years where data is available:

consumption adjusted: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita

per capita with comparison countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

In the same period, the US, and indeed most states have achieved only quite small changes to their per capita emissions. So the US has reduced emissions a bit, but from a much higher starting point.

My gripe is that westerners often leap to talking about China and India or, worse, overpopulation.

The implicit belief seems to be that foreigners are an inconvenient drain on global resources, that they deserve less than us.

This is not true.

There's a part of what you're saying that I really strongly agree with, which is that I don't think anyone in their right mind can just say "Well look at China" and use that as a basis to give up on trying to curb emissions everywhere that isn't China. Some people are making that argument in this thread, and I think that way of thinking is deeply confused, and you are right to criticize it.

What I'm not sure I follow is the relationship you seem to believe exists between per-capita emissions and responsibility to curb them. Emissions need to be curbed in proportion to their percentage of overall global emissions, not in proportion to per-capita consumption. You can vary the per-capita statistics however you like, and as long as the absolute emissions are the same, the damage to the planet is the same. Those emissions could be coming from one person or a trillion. If China had ten billion people, or fifty billion or a hundred it would still be just as incumbent upon them to curb such emissions as they are producing.

Everything else about "implicit beliefs", the "leaps" you believe people to be taking, the questions of who should or shouldn't be blamed are abstract, highly subjective, and while important, should be considered without letting them derail the conversations around needed next steps to curb emissions.

When I faced a global warming threat playing Civ2 because my neighbours were not cleaning up pollution, I just bombed them into oblivion, then moved in my settlers and cleaned up the debris.

You can't fix climate change with a war. Modern climate change modeling and concerns grew out of Cold War studies of the atmospheric impact of thermonuclear weapons (referred to as "Nuclear Winter"). Bombing a major country into submission is very likely a humanity ending event because of the amount of material blown into the upper atmosphere (the Nuclear Winter research was itself a direct result of modeling done at Cornell to understand the aftermath of a large asteroid or comet hitting the earth's atmosphere at the end of the Cretaceous era to kill off the dinosaurs). We've reached the point where MAD isn't just mutually assured destruction for you and your opponent, it is for everyone.

Indeed. Look at Syria. Not long ago a country well enough off. The destruction is total. This with conventional weapons and the superpowers weren't even trying hard..

But the real question is "Is Syria emitting more or less carbon than it was in 2010", not "is there destruction".

Hey, in Civ2 I wasn't bombing people with nuclear weapons! It just creates more waste!! No, basic rockets work just fine. And SDI to kill off enemy nukes.

>Bombing a major country into submission is very likely a humanity ending event

WW2 disagrees, I think. You don't need to carpet the place with nukes - a few well-placed, climatically-harmless strikes will do. Will it trigger a species-ending global nuclear war? Maybe - but very likely not. Maybe people are smart enough not to end the species over such a thing. Maybe other people are smart enough to abuse that fact.

The world generates 40% of its electricity from coal. It has been like this for decades. Seems like addressing this now instead of complicated solutions later would be a good idea.

Consumers globally can choose “Not coal”

https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...

What happens today if everyone in, say, the United Kingdom switches to 'green' electricity providers? I hardly think the result will be blackouts...

“Not coal”

Natural gas is not coal. It’s cheap and much cleaner.

What happens if, today, 4th December at 13:05:00 GMT, the UK specifically stops using coal is that it switches from exporting 802 MW to France to importing 1290 MW from France.

Right now, even though we’re pretty close to the Winter solstice, the UK is producing about 1.5 times more electricity from solar than from coal.

Yes, there are other fossil fuels besides coal in the UK, and yes renewables only supply about a third of the UK’s electricity right now, but coal itself is practically dead.

https://gridwatch.co.uk/

It's even nearer dead than that small number implies. Much of that is from keeping the few coal plants idling on standby or tiny load for fast spin up, if the grid asks, with coal as source of last resort.

Two of the six plants we have left announced last month they wouldn't be bothering going to the 2025 coal elimination date, and will close in 2020. Leaves 4 I think.

Same month the lovely government approved a new deep coal mine in Cumbria. huh?

I mean, you could let the remaining coal miners dig it up but don't allow it to be burned. At the same time work hard to establish new ways of earning money in the communities.

It would be nice to think that. The party proposing this policy is the party that closed the coal mines in the first place.

You post suggest China doesnt care about climate change, and that's super misleading.

China is investing more in renewables than any other country [1], they have the most electric buses in the world [2], the largest high-speed rail network so you don't have to take a plane, the largest nuclear power build-out in the world and their emissions per capita are lower than US.

The younger and poorer countries actually take climate change more seriously than the West, we had 50 years to address the issue and did nothing about it. I would bet on China and India achieving 100% renewable energy before US does, despite them being poorer.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/799098/global-clean-ener...

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-sh...

China is trying to avoid importing oil and reducing pollution in its large cities. Electric vehicles solves this problem.

Coal is cheaper and they can dictate exactly where they’re built.

Moving 1 billion people a year by high-speed rail is far more efficient and flexible than by plane. 20,000 miles of rail in a country the size of the United States makes perfect economic sense.

China is making its decisions for reasons other than climate change.

Individual action is indeed of very limited effect. That's why we need political action. It's not just coal that matters, and not just in China; all the other fossil fuels, methane emissions, and deforestation matter as well. As do all the other countries.

>That's why we need political action.

Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go "oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village lifestyle to save the rest of you".

Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to increase in a few others.

The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out".

Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with".

We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle.

Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world it would take decades at best to replace them and making the concrete for pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to mention all of the structural steel.

Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.

Firstly see my comment above, China and india take climate change more seriously than any US government ever did and invest more than anyone else in renewables.

Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air than not to emit it in the first place.

>China and india take climate change more seriously

China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually.

What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?

>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/

China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more gadgets, more plastics, etc.

Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff" they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with concrete, etc.

>That's why we need political action.

And in terms of global coordination, it helps to negotiate from a position of moral high ground if you can show that your country is doing its part to reduce emissions.

What seems completely, off-the-charts crazy to me is NOT the "China is emitting too much CO2" claim. It's the "therefore" that people stick on the end, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit: "therefore we should do nothing." I lack the language to fully describe how crazy that way of thinking is.

The most plausible (and least palatable) path seems to be offering them trillions of dollars in subsidies for alternatives.

stop the global economy stop emissions problem solved

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