Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions.
https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-foss...
And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people.
Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
> Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Yeah, it's because of the above points.
No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days.
The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time.
You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal.
> Yeah, it's because of the above points.
Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal?
Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.
I literally laughed out loud, sorry. Providing baseload with BESS alone? That's rich. Literally. Extremely expensive. In addition to impractical amount of batteries it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
> Then why is no other country burning that amount of coal?
China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants. They are working on it though. Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
Battery storage has a levelized cost of ~$0.20/kWh. Solar is ~$0.04/kWh. If you're using the batteries for 50% of kWh you end up at an average of ~$0.14/kWh, which is in the same range as coal.
> it requires impractical overcapacity to compensate for seasonal variation.
Only if you're trying to do 100% of generation from one source. Solar generates more power in the summer, wind generates more power in the winter. Meanwhile you don't have to use overcapacity at all when your target isn't fully 100%. You have enough solar to not need fossil fuels in the warmer months at all, enough wind to only need them 20% of the time in cooler months, and then only 10% of your kWh come from fossil fuels.
> China does about 30% of the world's industrial production and 40% of metal production, while having around 50% of world's coal power plants.
Those are unwelcome numbers even proportional to the amount of manufacturing.
> Many of their new coal plants are peaker plants.
"New coal plants" is rather the problem in itself. The number we need to be going down is instead going up.
Wind is more expensive. Onshore wind turbines have higher variability. Offshore ones are limited to coastal areas. Overall, there's a lot of practical problems. It's all doable, but building infrastructure takes time.
China's onshore wind potential is 12.6 PWh/year[1]. China's 2024 energy consumption is 9.85 PWh[2]. It's not much of overcapacity potential. Huh. I though it's higher.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... [2] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/20/cont...