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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)

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Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth levels have already started leveling off, and actually showed a slight decline as of late.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...

Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend make. As per the link:

  The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.

We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide reduction, or beef.

(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).

That would be great. I was looking at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure that could save some emissions over time, though of course also things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and the world than vice versa.

If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.

There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.

Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.

China has been a developing country for most the time of the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit China’s per capita growth for most of the past two decades

If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as Americans, you don't really have a point.

Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO₂ emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.

I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.

The point is about quality of life.

Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.

There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the skip has now gone…)

There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.

The easy way isn't the same from one year to the next.

China is currently building out all of this renewable energy and EVs, when the early industrial powers didn't, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is now the easy way.

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