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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

The old reports were somehow protecting us?

Carbon emissions can only be reduced by engineering and manufacturing advances

In a way, yes, they were: they forced us to contemplate the long term consequences of our short term actions. Denying that is the opposite of protecting us (and, eventually, our offspring, who will deal with the consequences in a way that we never will).

Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Everything else is just bookkeeping and icing on the cake.

> Carbon emissions can first and foremost be reduced by reducing the combustion of fossil fuels.

Exactly! It can’t be reduced or increased by edits to federal PDF files that nobody reads

Commercial efforts are the only solution, and will happen because new energy is cheaper and better. Photovoltaic and battery improvements are our best path forward. Industrial policy can help but we’ve never really had that in the US

If nobody reads them and they have no effect, why are they being rewritten?

Because politics is hopelessly dysfunctional

The impression I get from the extreme right (trump and his fans) is that they don't want to reduce carbon emissions at all and are working for the opposite. Denying the reality of climate change is one tool in their chest to get others to ignore it as well.

Carbon emissions can also be reduced by our extinction.

No you see, carbon emissions can also be reduced by moving production to china and not looking too hard how they do it. Yay for climate champion Europe!

World in Data has carbon stats including imports and exports.

It makes a difference but basically doesn't change the big picture.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

In 2020, China had 253GW of total solar capacity. In 2024, China installed 277GW of additional solar capacity. In June, they were up to 1,100GW of total solar capacity. In 2023, 60% of the global solar installation happened in China.

China is so far ahead of the world in green energy it's ridiculous. We can't pretend that it's still 1995 and China still gets most of its energy from coal anymore.

Top four coal consumers as of 2023 (last year for which this data set is available):

China 91.9 exajoules

India 22 exajoules

United States 8.2 exajoules

Japan 4.54 exajoules

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/coal-cons...

China uses a shitload of coal. The US uses far less because we moved to other fossil fuel sources. It turns out that coal is not the only ghg emitter. China is installing way more zero-emission power generation. Looking only at coal and ignoring gas is very odd.

https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix

Their green energy line _is_ on the increase, but it's effectively flat compared to the growth lines on coal and oil.

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