They care about cheap energy and energy security. They've been relatively transparent that they are pursuing all available options as far as those options will go. It has been a wildly successful strategy for them in securing prosperity and I wish the west had that sort of ambition.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...
Carbon is a much more abstract problem even in the USA, since you don’t feel climate change right away like you smell black dirt gas air. But that only really matters for high carbon low pollution energy sources like natural gas, and China doesn’t have so much of that anyways to use it in lieu of renewables.
Just a point of reference: back in 2009 we transited through Beijing to fly to HK and even just spending a few hours in the airport resulted in my daughter having to use an emergency nebulizer.
This time hardly anyone had a problem. Beijing used to be dry and dusty (from what my wife tells me from visiting 30y ago) now they've pulled in a lot of water through some newer canals and the humidity is really high (mosquitos are starting to become a problem).
Another improvement is: nearly zero 2-stroke motors. All scooters and mopeds are fully electric. Also 50% of the cars are electric (green license plates). All city buses and taxis are electric. Road noise is greatly reduce given the sheer volume of traffic (though they love to honk - like India).
Do you have some reading on the incident that led to Twitter being blocked? I haven't heard of that and can't find anything online
China wasn’t measuring 2.5 ppm at all back then, and was rather touting improvements in 10 ppm because a tree planting effort in the gobi temporarily solved northern china’s dust storm problem. They were basically pretending that 2.5 ppm pollution didn't exist.
This also doesn't account for the fact that countries that produce more of the worlds goods through mining and/or agriculture are obviously gonna be inflated. Banana republics (which the US continues to uphold and profit from) are using a lot of energy "per capita" but all the wealth from that is stolen so it's senseless to assign that consumption to the nation exporting rather than the nation importing
Ten "facts" or so in that one statement. Would be great if you can cite any one with a modern reference.
Which banana republic with high per capita is US upholding and profiting from? Who is stealing their wealth? Why is that country a banana republic?
US per capita is falling while China's is rising.
https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2023/the-changi....
Keep in mind that electricity demand in the US is decreasing.
If you reduce your manufacturing, of course it'll reflect positively on emissions. China demonstrates that it's possible to make CO2 emissions decrease even while energy demand keep growing (even if it doesn't grow as much as before)
(As I linked in another comment in this page: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-falls-1-in-q... )
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
But with more up-to-date data, it could be even 8x
https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/related-research/atmospheric-ap...
(Depending if you count cumulative emissions from 1960, earlier or later)
> Between 2014 and 2020, Dr Ma served as Chief Economist and then Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China. Over the subsequent years, Dr Ma played a key role in the development of sustainable finance in China and around the world. He led the drafting of China’s green finance and green bond guidelines; he led work on green finance at the G20; he pushed for the greening of China’s Belt and Road initiative; he set up initiatives with the global accounting and standards bodies; and he helped enlist the world’s major financial centres in the drive to green the capital markets.
https://www.cleaningup.live/how-china-became-a-green-finance...
They also, after the success of those efforts, just recently upgraded a whole raft of green measures and regulations.
What's the evidence?
Note that this statement obviously runs into contrary to the OP. I.e., renewable and CO2-less energy is invested more and growing more than coal.
How the OP translate to "they dont care about CO2 at all"? Your comment provides no linkage at all
This is energy security policy that kind of aligns with co2 goals, but they definitely don’t sacrifice economic growth for co2 mitigation.
Their motivations are not purely or even mostly environmental.
There isn't a link. I think the whole anti-CO2 thing is one of the stupidest ideologies since Communism. I'd still happily invest in solar energy; it looks like it might be very profitable. The fact that the Chinese behaving in a clever way doesn't imply that they are doing so for stupid reasons. They are probably behaving rationally for rational reasons.
But it is more of an abstract problem and requires thinking about long term rather than short term consequences.
The reason for the retreat of the ice sheets remains elusive, however.
Whereas there was a change in the relative strength of the sun roughly 20,000 years ago thanks to variations in the planet's orbit, it was smaller than changes that preceded it and failed to trigger a melt.
What Thawed the Last Ice Age? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-thawed-the-l...
Similary in 2010 Columbia Climate School looks at the same discussion of possible causes: https://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2707
In fact, one telling point is that it demonstrates that in 20,000 BCE industrialisation and rapid global warming of 4 degrees would have ushered the world into the unthinkable horrors of ... somewhat better than the present day because they'd have consumed more energy than we have. Change is clearly not automatically a bad thing.
Core of the issue though, isn't it? The planet can't support 8 billion humans right now. This living standards of around 7.8, 7.9 billion of them are unacceptably low IMO. So if it can't support 8 billion now and it can't support 8 billion in the future, I'd like some fairly concrete explanations of why we shouldn't be promoting cheap energy and industrialisation in the here and now. It appears that industrialisation drives down population and may even lead to transhumanism, so per capita improvements to prosperity seem to be the most viable solution to our sustainability problems. I'd also bet working on cheap energy will probably drive up the carrying capacity too, that is what happened all the other times securing energy got cheaper.
And as we can see in the Chinese example that we're talking about today, if we had just gone full-greed and kept building coal plants we'd probably have stumbled on a low-carbon equilibrium by accident anyway because that is more or less what seems to be happening in China. Coal and oil aren't that competitive these days. There is a pretty high chance fossil fuels would have been pushed into 2nd class status already if the deplorable fools in the 80s and 90s hadn't succeeded kneecapped western nuclear programs.
The problem is only if we get the opportunity to make hard choices for better outcomes. Do we have the self control to do that as a species, or are we doomed to act like petulant five year olds who can only think about short term benefits? Can humanity pass the marshmallow test?
They care about smog (or really the protests/health externalities), which is caring about CO2 by proxy, hence peaking coal by 2025 (end of 14th 5 year plan), and phasing/reducing coal starting 2026 (15th 5 year plan).
Their government explicitly has carbon reduction and measures to mitigate climate change as a priority, it's not a secret.
https://meeb.sz.gov.cn/hdjl/ywzsk/fsaq/content/post_10828605...
> 核能的安全健康可持续发展有利于提高能源供给能力，有利于调整我国能源结构，降低对煤炭、天然气、原油的依存度。
> The safe, healthy and sustainable development of nuclear energy is conducive to improving energy supply capacity, adjusting my country's energy structure and reducing dependence on coal, natural gas and crude oil.
This is just the first link I found, there's tons more of course, since becoming a "Ecological civilization" is one of their Communist Party tenets:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_civilization
It was already obvious years ago that they were on a good track for success:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-green-revolution-is-quie...
(of course, they are succeeding: CO2 emissions are decreasing (!) or anyhow flat (over the whole of 2024), despite the growing energy demands: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-falls-1-in-q... )
but it's at least since the 18th CPC National Congress that the Communist Party is outspoken about the future being low-carbon, e.g.
http://www.qstheory.cn/dukan/qs/2019-11/01/c_1125178869.htm
> 然而一段时期对煤炭的过度依赖和粗放开采，导致产业结构失衡、生态破坏严重、经济一度断崖式下滑等结果，给山西人民带来切肤之痛。
> 指出，能源低碳发展关乎人类未来；中国高度重视能源低碳发展，积极推进能源消费、供给、技术、体制革命；中国愿同国际社会一道，全方位加强能源合作，维护能源安全，应对气候变化，保护生态环境，促进可持续发展，更好造福世界各国人民。
> over-reliance on coal and extensive mining for a period of time led to an imbalance in the industrial structure, serious ecological damage, and a cliff-like economic decline, which brought pain to the people of Shanxi.
> pointing out that low-carbon energy development is related to the future of mankind; China attaches great importance to low-carbon energy development and actively promotes energy consumption, supply, technology, and system revolution; China is willing to work with the international community to strengthen energy cooperation in all aspects, maintain energy security, respond to climate change, protect the ecological environment, promote sustainable development, and better benefit the people of all countries in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Socialist_Values
Fortunately, unlikely democracy and the rule of law, the CCP appears to actually care about cheap energy and rolling back obvious pollution in major cities.
I demonstrated that their words match their actions (ecology and energy policy wise)
It's hard to put a precise date on it but some think it happened in 2023, some 2024, the official goal is peaking by 2030 (note they've hit other renewables goals by about 7 years) but generally it's agreed that it's flattened and about to decline, if it hasn't already, due to rapid renewable rollout.
"The rate of increase is lower" is not the same as decreasing.
Will that be sustained? We'll soon see, but let's not be ignorant of the progress being made
You might as well compare an individual person to the entire US, and then declare that that individual person is going a great job at combating the greenhouse effect. John Smith is doing 300 million times better than the US!
If you wanna make comparisons (I don't, you do), per capita obviously matters. There's no reason why you should be holding members of one nation state to a stricter standard than members of another.
Suppose there were only two countries in the world. One had 99.99% of the world's population and the other emitted twice as much CO2 per capita. Which one is most in need of changing if you want to make an impact on the problem?
China cares above anything else about power, both political and electrical.
"Coal power additions were about 40 GW in 2023, while the first half of 2024 saw only 8 GW of new coal capacity, according to Rystad Energy’s estimates."
the additions is significantly lower in 2024, and the trend is showing a decreasing, dramatically.
also, any country does not seek political influence is non-sense. then what is your point?
If these number are real, it's vaery good news!