Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

People worship China for being "green focused".

The reality is that they don't have a good source of fossil fuels, and energy independence is a core necessity.

And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.

>And thank god they have this incentive alignment! Chinas greentech buildout and export is the only thing with a chance of getting us out of this climate mess. Imagine how fucked we’d be if they had their own oil.

IIRC that list of companies that polluted the most on the planet, 1 and 2 were Chinese state owned entities. China Coal and China Petroleum from memory.

OFC they are dwarfed IIRC by the US Military.

sure. But today china is the #1 producer of solar panels (80% of global production capacity), #1 producer of wind turbines (40%), #1 producer of batteries (~80%), #1 producer of EVs (75%).

Noone has done more for global clean energy, and its not even close. Sure they polluted a lot up until now, but honesty who cares about the past, times change fast.

Oh I dont care so much. Its more that:

A. Where would we be without China, well with a significantly reduced problem. But they are doing their part and doing it well.

B. That list gets used as a bludgeon against free enterprise and a great deal of the entities on the list dont represent free enterprise.

The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.

Who is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.

China isn't "going green" to go green. They're doing it because it's cheaper.

The elites are pinning us to fossil fuels and driving up the cost of necessities.

You might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.

Solar panels are being built like crazy in really poor developing countries like Pakistan, simply because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If they can afford it, average American surely should too.

They have a large coal mining industry.

And consume 50% of global coal production.

But coal is the worst fossil fuel from a practical stance. It's really only good for energy generation. You can't really power tanks or warships with it.

Oh, you can convert coal to liquid fuels if you have to. Germany produced low single digit millions of tons per year during World War 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

Something something Black cat or white cat, doesnt matter as long as it catches mice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com