I guess given that those two countries are keeping Russia afloat by buying their oil it shouldn't be a surprise, but its still disappointing to see those countries choosing the path they did.
> someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money
Which means Canada has money. India is much poorer on a per-capita basis. They can become wealthy by developing their economy. India can't spend as much per-capita on clean energy as Canada or any other wealthy nation.
India has much more to lose from climate change compared to Canada. The heatwaves are already horrific, and many cities have water supply problems so drought due to climate change could spell disaster.
The air quality in most Indian cities is terrible. No one is burning coal for fun.
Gasoline is CA$1.81/l in Mumbai, in a country with a fraction of the per-capita income of Canada. Cars are much smaller on average and most people take public transport.
The electricity grid isn't as reliable as Canada and of course most people don't live in houses. It's mostly apartments, often with no assigned parking. Despite that I saw many electric cars and scooters on my last trip, even in small towns. I don't know how they charge. But I began to question why the US or Canada can't build enough charging for apartment-dwellers.
The "choice" India and China are making is no choice at all. They can either develop their economies or languish in poverty. Poverty means less food, less medical care, less education. It means lower life expectancy, higher infant and maternal mortality, an overall lower quality of life. Staying poor means when climate change gets worse, they'll have less money to mitigate it.
If you want developing countries to decrease their carbon emissions, invest in cheaper clean energy. Support programs and policies that give developing countries subsidies on clean energy technologies.
India's population density (people/land) is about the same as the Netherlands. The birth rate is nearly at replacement and continues to drop, and it's still a poor country! That's nearly unprecedented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Remember, poor countries can't just print dollars to buy batteries from China. If they don't have domestic manufacturing capacity, they have to spend foreign exchange reserves to pay for the imports. That gets expensive real quick.
Developing countries also often lack the technical talent available in wealthier ones. Quickly spinning up battery manufacturing can be difficult to do.
All I'm saying is: don't assume these countries haven't done the math for themselves. Saying "just use solar" might be sound advice. But it might also be a rich person telling a poor person to buy a Costco membership because it saves money. It's objectively correct but it may not be feasible for the poor person.
If anything developing countries are more open to the cheapest solution. They can't afford to get into ideological debates about whether climate change is real or worry about saving coal jobs by promoting "clean coal".
In India where the biggest load will be air conditioning and thus correspond with sunshine? Definitely.
But the answer was different two years ago. Electricity projects are often decades in scale and takes time to propogate.
But you're right about costs. Solar and batteries are all the cost up front. Poor people and poor countries are often forced to buy more expensive things just because they can be purchased on an installment plant. A fossil fuel plant is cheaper up front but you have to continuously buy fuel. It only becomes more expensive after ten years or so.
Helping with the financing would go a long way.
China is building an unbelievable amount of renewables and nuclear, more than the rest of the world combined. Like every other part of the world, they're backstopping these variable power sources with fossil generation -- mainly by building modern coal power plants that can be spun down when renewable generation is high. They've also developed a framework to pay coal plants not to generate. And of course they're leading the world on the deployment and pricing of battery storage, pumped hydro and HVDC grid upgrades.
I'm posting this because your conclusion ("China has said FU" to the world) is almost the polar opposite of what's actually happening. If we survive the climate crisis, it's going to be because of what China is doing with renewable buildouts and manufacturing.
But Co2 doesn't only count in 'last years'. It counts as a cumulative effect. The Co2 damage of Canada per capita is way beyond that of China, cumulatively.
In cumulative terms, China has emitted 'only' 7.5 times as much Canada despite having 35x the population. In other words, Canada's per capita cumulative emissions are about 4.5x those of China.
And that's a lot. It means Canada has damaged way more, and should have a bigger burden to reduce future damage, or undo damage already done.
Generally yes it's always frustrating to see any country keep emitting Co2. But Canada is a worse offender, both in the past, as well as now, and that's a pretty sad record for one of the richest countries in the world which also happens to be the country with probably the biggest per-capita natural renewable resources of all time. (land for wind and solar, as well as insane hydro).
I don't doubt that on a per capita basis Canadians emit more than Chinese do; furthermore, China is the source of many of the goods that western nations consume, and so they're producing emissions "for" the western nations in a sort of de facto shell game.
However, China has no interest in giving its manufacturing base "back" to the west, and does not take emissions reduction seriously. It is a deceptive claim that Canada is "worse than China"; China is out-emitting Canada, doesn't take emissions reduction seriously, and plans to continue to out-emit Canada into the future.
Then the solution is to ban Chinese imports or tax them to a level that it's no longer economically viable to import them.
Problem "solved," right?
I kind of want all that to happen, though, so I think it's a good move. I don't like living in a nation that is able to consume at a functionally unlimited level for very little national sacrifice or engagement in manufacturing and production. If manufacturing is inherently pollution-heavy, then it would be healthy for Americans, Canadians, etc. to actually bear the consequences of pollution in their own countries and then decide as nations whether or not to sustain the current levels of production, or curtail their consumption habits properly.
What does China to do their forests? They chop them down
"Canada's Record-breaking 2023 Wildfires Released Nearly 4 Times More Carbon than Global Aviation"
Slightly unfair because climate change makes those forest more likely to burn down. But still.
All your claims in your last sentence I'd like to see sources for as well, because it appears to be the opposite. They're at the forefront of renewable energy production, has ambitious goals for reduction, despite already producing less per capita emissions than much richer countries with cumulatively larger emissions.
And as others have mentioned sources for numbers greatly help the collective conversation.
Of course all on a per capita basis, I thought I was sufficiently clear.
What is the apples to oranges comparison?
The goal is the maximum production per unit of CO2 - for every unit of CO2 you maximize what is produced from it.
Yes, the US produces 13.49% of all global CO2, but it also produces 25.22% of all output.
China produces 31% of all CO2 emissions, but only 17% of all production.
The data doesn’t help us inform an opinion of whose carbon use is better than others.
Whatever profit you captured can be spent on whatever.
So the US imports 2% of its GDP from China.
Rounding error.
Imports power GDP growth. Let me illustrate.
60% of Wal-Mart's imports in 2023 came from China.[1] Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the world.[2] Wal-Mart generates billions of dollars of revenue and profit - GDP in other words - by selling imports from China.
Imagine the economic hardship if even just Wal-Mart was cut off from Chinese imports. They'd lose at least half their sales overnight. Up to half their stores might close, or half the workforce might lose their jobs. That's almost 800k people. The unemployment rate goes up 60 basis points overnight. That's just one company.
Extrapolate that to the rest of the US economy.
1. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/walmart-shifts-to-indi...
China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
https://grid-analytics.ece.utexas.edu/chart/fuel-type-genera...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861358
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2024/01/03/plan-to-...
What I do hear about is this (possibly outdated, I'm increasingly noticing the references there are not kept up to date) claim on Wikipedia:
> On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links, although the Texas Interconnection does not intend to connect for regulatory reasons. The Eastern Interconnection withdrew from the project in 2015, rendering the project moot. Construction was never started.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/how-texa... ("How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the country")
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-bat... ("As brutal heat tests Texas’ power grid, batteries play a small but growing role in keeping the lights on")
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240707022007/https://www.eia.g... (EIA 12 month forward looking generator deployment; scope to Texas and gray icons, which indicate battery storage)
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("HN: Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")
Related citation wrt battery costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
Short term - nothing much is happening. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The US can idly sit around and burn it's own natural gas and oil. The US at least has the option to maintain the status quo for a long time (it won't). But China doesn't even have this option.
Additionally, auto manufacturing (ICE cars) accounts for ~5% of US employment. For China ICE auto manufacturing is ~0, and they have the opportunity to produce a huge chunk of the worlds EVs. They're not only incentivized massively to get off oil - they're incentivized to get EVERYONE ELSE off of oil, too.
China needs to IMPORT natural gas and oil. They'd much rather lead the world in renewables EXPORT EVs and renewable generation than be reliant on Russia & KSA for energy (the basis of their current economy)...
China will likely cut their emissions faster than the US has - which if you're realistic - the US has done an impressive job.
The US emits ~30% less carbon per capita than it did in 2000. And we're on pace to be at ~40% less by the end of 2030: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
In 20 years, China is likely to be around ~75% less than today. The US probably won't get from ~40% to ~75% over that time.
The lobbying from our own energy producers will too much to cut that deep that quickly.
The US and China are close to ~50% of emissions: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
No one else besides India is really going to move the needle (certainly not in the wrong direction - no one else is growing fast enough).
India will be the wild card. Will they import renewable energy generation from China or fossil fuel from Russia and KSA?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewabl...
Oof. Before we start pointing fingers, over 50% of China's energy consumption is manufacturing, and a significant chunk of that manufacturing is western countries outsourcing their manufacturing needs, i.e. claiming to be coal-free while really just burning the coal elsewhere and then blaming the landowner.
If you want to truly be coal-free, don't just pay for it to be built in Canada for your wooden house that consumes a few kilowatts. Pay for it to be built in China for all your manufacturing outposts that make your computer, TV, phone, kitchen gadgets, kitchen ware, disposable items, containers for food delivery, and everything else, that take an enormous amount of power to create. They are equally a part of your energy footprint.
Do you have iPhones in Alberta? It takes about 1 GJ or 278 kWh to make a single phone [1], which is about enough to heat an entire house for a month. For a computer you're looking at about 1 MWh, about a large house's heating usage in an entire year.
[1] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2011/papers/hotnetsX...
Both governments are actually very pro-clean-energy and more willing to deploy it, given the money, than a certain two ~80-year-old farts that take turns every 4 years playing stupid politics games and picking fights.
Eh, nuclear sure but in general no. That's the whole reason solar is becoming so popular is that it's cheaper [2].
If you have to pair solar with storage then it becomes more expensive [1] (general X+Y is more expensive than just X or Y). But uh, people tend to work when the sun shines so you can add a ton of solar to offset the increased energy usage during the day.
[1]: https://www.powersouth.com/is-solar-cheaper-than-natural-gas...
[2]: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/natural_g...
New builds in developed countries can be 100% renewable because there's enough installed non-renewable capacity available as fallback. Developing countries don't have that.
If their economies are growing, the grids are constantly playing catch-up with demand. Otherwise they're in a state of managed decline, or are an actual dumpster fire.
Whatever the case may be, the one thing they don't have is reliable base generation capability. A safety net for when renewables can't produce enough.
Developing -> Developed in my original comment.
https://www.aeso.ca/market/market-updates/2023/new-assets-ca...
how exactly do you propose India meet the growing electric demands of her residents?
The Russian gas and oil story is more pragmatism than evil intent.
One part of your comment is accurate - India’s exports are tiny relative to its population and economic size.
lol they did just that. China is not "growing so many people" anymore, and neither is India, really. I suppose they could cull some of the previously grown people to get under 5 million like Alberta and to make your advice actually useful. But maybe your obvious solutions just haven't occurred to them yet.
As Canadian, the only disapointment is influence ops against Canadian fossil industry has stalled development so much for so long that we're not a larger fossil exporter and reaping in benefits of current geopolitical turmoil. EU could have been buying overpriced Canadian oil + lng.
Its amazing how most western countries bash coal so much and then proceed to generate electricity using natural gas.
To me it's Canada that is saying FU to the world and then preaching about it.
As a Canadian (but not Albertan) I've never had direct access to the residual economic effects of oil resources, or the slight tax offset that comes with having no Provincial Sales Tax, aside from general gov redistribution. I've never not had electricity, and I've never not had renewable electricity, which is quite remarkable.
If BC's population went up by a factor of 1.1B/40M = 27.5x, most likely the hydroelectric resources in the province would become insufficient and BC would have to switch to alternate forms of electric power. Maybe that is solar+wind+nuclear, but maybe it's just gas and coal.
Please note that in Canada, electricity, heat, and transport emissions dwarf those from all other sectors [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
https://financialpost.com/opinion/canada-may-already-be-carb...
This is frankly a dumb article. It’s an unhelpful reframing of the issue at hand by trying to take credit for what’s happening across large swaths of undeveloped land that happen to be within our border. It will quickly be abandoned the moment the natural carbon release of former permafrost regions cause us to be a colossal emitter instead.
Consider how unhelpful it would be if countries began trying to solve their emissions issues by laying claim to vast swaths of ocean, to take credit for algal carbon sinks.