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Comment by computerdork | Hacker News Reader

Good point. But one factor is China is also greatly reducing their emissions. For instance, their pollution levels have plummeted after enacting strict controls:

https://epic.uchicago.edu/insights/china-has-quickly-and-sha...

Still, that is a good point, a lot of the emissions from manufacturing have been shifted to other countries.

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>China is also greatly reducing their emissions

Are they? because looking at these charts[0], although fossil fuel use as a percent of total energy may be going down, the absolute values for coal, gas and oil only go up year over year.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...

Aye, but that data is up to 2024, here's an update: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

"flat or falling" let's be honest. The amount of "fall" in that graph is basically in the noise. It's been flat.

It's still a big change from the previous status quo. I've been checking on absolute emissions on various industrial countries for a while now and this is the first time I've seen them actually flat (and not decreasing as a fraction but increasing in absolute terms)

Sure. Difficult to say much from so few datapoints alone.

On the other hand, the apparent cause suggests the trend will continue.

On the other other hand, perhaps China will suddenly decide to build 100 GW of data centers meaning they ramp all the existing coal plants up to 100% load.

I'm mostly hopeful, but not absolutely so.

Ah, right. Yeah, I've been reading about their incredible decrease in pollution overall, and not on just their C02 emissions. Didn't know these had still been rising over the years, and it's really only in the two years have these been falling too. Still, amazing turn around.

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