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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

Full steam ahead towards greenhouse gases, climate change, and +5degree temperatures. Why not?

Because it'll create value.

Value which won't bring anything to anyone. I mean, a couple of people can be more richerer, but we and them won't have a planet to spend or enjoy these theoretical riches at the end.

So, no biggie.

Lobbyists lies a foot. “We can’t provide more power with these pesky regulations”

define 'climate pollution', this is all fine and well until they apply it to nuclear shielding.

I'm not clear what you mean. While nuclear waste is certainly a thing that could hurt the environment if mismanaged, impacting the climate isn't really a way that it does so. The shielding also seems like an unusual thing to focus on as opposed to the waste itself.

'shielding', is applied to both the energy extraction process of fission activity AND the remnants.

you're definitely not clear on the meaning.

Yeah, I'm definitely not clear on what you're trying to mean. How about you actually state your point rather than vaguely alluding to something?

Disaster capitalism is pretty much current AI is to future AI use

> Because it'll create value.

The New Yorker published Tom Toro's one-panel comic/cartoon in 2012, and here we are in 2026:

* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

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

Normally I would be concerned, but these days, we are well on our way to 3.5C. All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals.

It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren. Wait to see what happens when millions of desperate people living south of the 40th parallel start heading north in mass. No wall will stop that.

> All this will do is cancel out progess China and Europe is making on renewals

China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online in 2025, but also 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind.

And coal is mostly flat, while electricity demand is going up.

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/09/China-Energy-Tr...

(Page 14)

China mined more coal in 2025 then ever, but burned less in coal plans. Coal is slowly shifting from electricity production to synthetic oil and chemical production.

https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-coal-output-hits-record-in...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-top-coal-regi...

Which is easy to do when you live an authoritarian state with plenty of vast desert wastelands to erect solar/wind farms. Was there a village there last week? Not anymore, it was in the way. And best of all they can build it all with Uyghur forced labor. Accolades for China all around!

Yes, and?

That's not really relevant to the topic at hand. No one has said that China is a utopia and paragon of human rights.

I don't see the USA building out that much solar in its vast desert wastelands.

78 GW of coal is pretty damn near 78 GW. 315 GW of solar / wind capacity is nowhere near that level of utilization.

Would you mind sharing your source? AFAIK the coal plants are only backups, so it'd be very surprising if they're utilized as much as the solar capacity.

China is trying to become oil-independent by all means necessary. All their means of accessing oil go through geographic bottlenecks that could be weaponized against them in the event of military conflict. Coal, fissile materials, and sunlight are the alternatives they have access to, so they're going for all of those.

With some luck, the net effect will be fewer greenhouse gases than keeping themselves oil-dependent, though that isn't necessarily the, or even a, goal. If it happens, it'll be as a side effect.

Are you saying China is doing whatever it needs to do to satisfy its power needs, hands forced by geopolitics, and not pure altruism? Say it isn't so.

In a saner world, they wouldn't need to be wary of a catastrophic oil shortage due to another power deciding to cut off their access to oil. A saner world is achieved when all countries agree to an international system of rules and conflict resolution and abide by agreements, so things are predictable in the long term.

The less predictable things become, the faster everyone ramps up potential solutions to bad potential scenarios.

Some are trying to bring that sanity back. Others are trying to increase the chaos as much as they possibly can, and preferably more.

You can't bring back something that was never there

Not in an absolute sense, perhaps. But it was there enough to mostly function most of the time. And international life was more stable because of it.

is this supposed to refute the parent comment's point?

Complement.

> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

Despite all of that, Electricitymaps predicts that they can generate 48% of their total energy from carbon-free sources at noon-hours.

Now, this is impressive, despite building 50 new coal plants in 2025 alone.

Last year France produced 94% of electricity from low-carbon sources, that is impressive.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/france#how-much-of...

China produced 41% of electricity from low-carbon sources last year.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#how-much-of-...

For me, both are equally impressive actually. Europe has some great clean-energy countries.

Interestingly Turkey passed 50% mark apparently. That's also an out of left field revelation for me.

This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.

Population of China is 1404 milions, population of France is 66 milion, so per capita France produces more electricity.

95% and 50% show that France has electric grid with much lower carbon emissions per unit of energy then China.

France build most of its nuclear reactors in 1980s (54 reactors within 15 years), as a reaction to oil schocks in 1970s. This transformation was faster then what is currently in China (again when compared per capita).

This is HN. This is a site for engineers. We’re discussing one of the largest and fastest energy buildouts in the history of humanity, larger by orders of magnitude than anything that’s come before. You can hate China if you want, but then you should be scared and worried. Minimizing the scale of what they’re doing isn’t interesting.

I don't hate China, in fact I have many colleagues from China. Energy buildout in China is big, because everything in China is big, because it's a country of 1,404 million people. And India is on the same trajectory as China, only 20 years delayed:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix?tab=line&...

What I'm worried is that people don't understand the energy priorities of China, they are first and foremost: energy independence and cheap plentiful energy. Any decarbonization efforts are pursued only if they are not conflict with the first goal. This is very different from the goals of many European governments of phasing out nuclear energy, fossil energy, even when it causes dependence on energy imports and high energy prices (high when comparing with China, US).

When comparing growth of low-carbon energy in China, France. In 15 years (2010-2015) China's share of energy from low-carbon sources changes from 4% to 12 %. In France (1976 - 1991) from 5% to 38%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-mix?tab=line&time=...

The biggest difference between China and France is: China has plentiful coal reserves and mines a lot of coal, France has only small coal reserves and had to import lot of coal.

"Despite its wealth, France has never been self-sufficient in coal, and even at the peak of production in the 1960s, it always imported foreign coal (from Belgium, the UK, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, etc.)."

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

I'm perfectly aware that we (we as the whole humanity) are turning our planet to hell with our CO2 emission, but Asian countries is not following the path of European countries of decreasing energy production and Asian countries are building renewables not to replace fossil energy production, but to add to fossil energy production.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Germany/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/india/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/china/coal_production/

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/indonesia/coal_production/

Yet coal burning isn't going up in China. They also built more solar in 2025 than the US has in total. Also currently building 35+ reactors.

> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.

coal usage has declined there the last two years. Would have declined even more this year, except for a certain very smart war.

> China brought 50 new coal plants online in 2025 alone but keep telling yourself that.

If China (and India and …) sees the US and other industrialized doing nothing, why should they do anything?

The most straight-forward way of solving is either through cap-and-trade (like acid rain was dealt with) or 'carbon dividend' (which Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Volker, etc endorsed):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...

Then you put a 'carbon tariff' on imports for any country that does not have a similar system (e.g., EU's CBAM).

The US could help itself by reducing per capita energy consumption.

Since they don't seem to consider this as an option, why indeed should China or India do anything?

Any nation is free to set a good example.

Let the self proclaimed leader of the free world lead by example.

And yet their coal usage dropped (for electricity) or was flat (when you include e.g. coal to chemicals) while both electricity use and GDP grew about 5%

Half-coal powered electrification is cleaner, greener, cheaper and smarter than sticking to ICE cars and gas heating for homes and industry.

China has gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to 30% this century while US and Europe went from around 20% to just above 20%

> It is to bad these people do not care how much of a sucky life they are handing their grandchildren.

It's a cryin' shame these people don't care how much of a sucky life they are handing everyone's grandchildren, and not nearly enough people actually cared when we could have still done something about it...

According to Al Gores movie (shown to US students) we were already supposed to be beyond 2C by now. When the ClimateGate "hide the decline" emails were released that also raised a few eyebrows. So saying the world is now going to 3.5C rings on deaf ears. That's not science that's just the fact of what actually happened so far.

Your narrative is repeated less and less because it isnt compelling.

My narrative is substantially different because the trend was correct and 1.4 vs 2.0 does not prove a negative.

The massive FUD and misinformation campaigns by industrialist operations, along with opportunist/capitalist denials and misdirection, has successfully confused enough of the US public to withold opinion on the matter. This has allowed politics to treat it as a marginal issue where there are 2 sides, rather than a morally catastrophic eventuality.

1.4 vs 2.0 is a massive miss because that diff isn't starting from 20 years ago, but rather a pre-industrial baseline. So the actual diffs are something more like +0.2 (actual) vs +0.8 (predicted) over that 20 ish year interval, and the prediction of the warming trajectory is off several times. (that is if the movie actually said that, which I didn't check).

Maybe you should check? Because we definitely weren't at +1.2°C warming in 2006.

Why are you getting your information from movies?

Après nous, le déluge!

US energy usage is flat in real terms since 2000 despite skyrocketing population growth. In per capita terms, it's plummeting.

China builds hundreds of coal plants a year while they are exempt from scrutiny.

Don't forget India as well

India increased renewables drastically in the last 10-12 years.

https://mnre.gov.in/en/year-wise-achievement/

India emits 30% less total CO2 than the US and 84% less per capita than the US, and is massively expanding renewables.

For their population even without the renewables they are using far less than their share of any fair way to allocate whatever we decide we have to limit worldwide emissions to.

Since 2000, how much production did the US offshore to China?

If this trend keeps going for a decade+, China might begin to approach US per-capita emissions.

Their coal burning isn't going up though.

It is usage of plants that matters, not number of plants.

Most of the new Chinese coal plants mostly have have low capacity factors. They are being built as backups and peakers rather than baseload, designed (or retrofitted in the case of existing plants being upgraded) to be able to cycle up and down to balance wind and solar.

Many are idle so much that their owners have financial difficulty keeping them open, and the government has had to start paying them for their idle time so they won't go under.

Many are also built to replace existing plants that cannot not yet be replaced with renewables, so are at worst neutral on coal usage and are usually actually more efficient than the old plants so there is a reduction.

The USA is already holding the record for greenhouse gas pollution per capita and they elected the lunatic that raved about climate change being a hoax. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.

The fact these regulations didn't make it through the normal law making progress (senate/house) doomed it before it even took shape. With presidents like Trump undoing everything his predecessor(s) did just to feel powerful, legislation like this is doomed from that start.

There’s no denying Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

And now that the Data Centre Industrial Complex has come along it’s somewhat sidelined the Climate Change Industrial Complex*.

Funny how that happens.

> Climate Change is a big industrial-complex.

Can you tell us more about it, honestly, sounds interesting.

Well yes, every piece of industry ends up contributing to climate change, but data centers are the one that's having a massive expansion in the west.

And when there are cheaper, faster built, renewable sources of energy that the whole world is building out. I don’t think the lost time can be fixed post Trump (if he even gives up power that is).

Because it stops society falling apart and regressing. Humanity is not some angelic, monolith stoic super species, which is just programmed wrong. Its half-sane monkeys which fall apart in a regression as soon as the surplus bribery stops and then try to sew the bakeries oven apart, so everyone has something to eat.

One can not create policies that destroy the thing they want to protect from a crisis to come, by inducing a different crisis by ignoring the material you work with. Trump is your doing, you brought this guy forth, by deindustrializing the west, by making western buisnesses unable to compete. Stop working with idealized paper-cut outs of people- and actually engage, with the species you got. And no, your good intentions and noble goals, do not entitle you to wing it.

Sorry but you can't have EVs everywhere, WA and CA banning natural gas for heat and cooking, WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power. The math does not add up.

Solar and wind output is not constant or reliable. NIMBYs sabotaged nuclear years ago. It takes how many years to bring a new plant online?

A lot of feel-good rules and regs were passed, pushing a massive shift to electric power, with no consideration as to where the additional power would come from.

You can't wave your arms like a Peanuts cartoon and have all that extra power appear, which is the logic that was used in passing many of these impractical regulations.

Solar and wind is extremely reliable. What isn’t reliable is deployment of it.

Energy storage is required along with solar farms.

Until the sun goes down at night or the wind stops blowing. You ignored the word "output".

> Energy storage is required along with solar farms

How many batteries are we going to need for that? They literally just figured out how to get the child slaves in the Congo out of the supply chain with a shift to LFP.

Enough to store the energy between gaps, plus a buffer?

Batteries aren't exactly made from gold. Grid scale batteries especially, where weight and size doesn't matter as much, are totally viable on a mass scale.

Fear really IS the mindkiller! Stop being afraid and start educating yourself. You are on HN, you are supposed to be smart.

Smart people understand pragmatism, which means not throwing the baby out with the bath water in the name of ill thought-out feel-good measures.

That is literally what you are doing right now.

You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.

Fox brain alert!

We have batteries for this. See Texas and California.

This gets tiring. No, china has no electricity problem in the night and their share of solar is off the roof.

There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example. It consists of heating something very big that holds a lot of heat and releases it slowly, then using that stored heat to generate electricity while it cools down. This isn't suitable for home use, but at the city scale, or larger, it's quite efficient:

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

> There are technologies for battery storage that don't look like batteries. Thermal energy storage is an example.

Yeah, there's also pumped water storage, and other forms of gravity/kinetic storage, various means of chemical energy storage, and all kinda other neat battery-like ideas folks have been trying/using.

The UK has Dinorwig power station, a pumped hydro station capable of storing over 9 GWh of energy. This alone rivals the entire combined 10.5 GWh of battery storage across the whole country. It certainly seems much more feasible when you have the terrain to allow it.

Oh yes, as opposed to the famously free from abuse oil and gas industry.

What an opinion to have when thus far evidence has concluded the opposite. Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors doesn’t make the anti-renewable parrots correct. There are situations where —at minimum- hybrid solutions are far more viable options but for many locations just those two solutions work very well.

> Just because funding for the infrastructure keeps getting derailed, delayed and lied about by bad actors

Speaking of infrastructure, how about pushing a mass rollout of EVs before giving a single consideration as to where the charging infra would come from?

Charging infra would only exist if there's demand for it, if you have a better solution for this catch-22 I'm all ears.

Though it looks like rolling out EVs before the charging network existed worked, there are thousands upon thousands of chargers now that there are enough vehicles to use them.

That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.

It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.

Are you from the past?

> the math doesn’t add up

There’s no way for you to know that. You don’t do the math. People like me, who work in the clean energy industry, do the math. The math works fine. You should try working as hard as the math does, instead of complaining.

> WA and OR sabotaging hydro plant output for salmon habitat restoration, while shutting down your most reliable sources of power.

Have a closer look at the hydro dams that have been removed for salmon habitat.

From what I've seen capacity was tens of MegaWatts [1] and some were just for irrigation. Meanwhile, large dams [2] are doing gigawatts.

Large dams also have negative environmental effects and maybe one day they'll get removed too, but accepting the tradeoff for large amounts of power makes more sense than destroying samon fishing to get irrigation water or a piddly amount of power.

Especially at a time when electrical power use was trending down due to efficiency gains and offshoring manufacturing, and samon fisheries were in danger of failing, it made sense to remove dams that weren't terribly productive. And start considering actually doing the work to make the larger dams fish friendly, eventually.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161221064310/http://www.water....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Coulee_Dam

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