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ialsoagree t1_jdym6qv wrote

Reply to comment by ToothlessGrandma in The Greenland Ice Sheet is close to a melting point of no return by Vucea

>Instead of investing in renewable energy, they're doing everything they can to contribute to global warming.

This isn't an accurate or fair claim by any measure.

China has issues, and it needs to address them, but straight up lying isn't helpful to the conversation.

In 2022, China added 26.8GW of new coal power capacity.

In the same year, China added 125GW of new solar and wind power.

While the US is investing about $141 billion in new renewable energy, China has invested a whopping $546 billion in 2022.

The idea that China isn't making efforts to build out a clean grid just isn't true. Yes, they are expanding coal power generation, and they are the nation with the leading CO2e emissions - and they do need to address both of those problems.

But to suggest that China isn't committed to building renewable energy just isn't accurate by any stretch of the imagination. They're doing more to expand renewable than the US and EU combined.

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ToothlessGrandma t1_jdymqch wrote

I acknowledge all your points, but still disagree with your overall logic. It doesn't matter what they're doing with renewables, by adding an additional 90 coal plants, you're really offsetting all that progress and it's pretty meaningless now. If they were serious they wouldn't be proceeding with new coal plants. I'm not sure anyone can explain why the coal plants are needed except because they're cheap and fast, which has been china's motto for decades.

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ialsoagree t1_jdynh5z wrote

>It doesn't matter what they're doing with renewables

Then why did you lie about what they are doing?

Instead of investing in renewable energy, they're doing everything they can to contribute to global warming.

If you hadn't lied about it, I wouldn't have mentioned it.

>by adding an additional 90 coal plants, you're really offsetting all that progress and it's pretty meaningless now.

China needs more power. They should not be building coal, but it's not fair to say that it's "cancelling out" anything.

They added 150GW of power between coal and renewables. Instead of it being 150GW of coal, it's 120GW of renewables and only 25GW of coal.

That cancels out a lot of coal emissions - and saying they're not investing in renewables is a lie. You lied.

>If they were serious they wouldn't be proceeding with new coal plants.

It's incredibly easy to criticize a country that is trying to develop itself, especially in areas that lack the technology and infrastructure to support more advanced power plants.

It's especially easy to do while you sit in a country that emitted far more emissions from coal than China ever has when it went through the same development cycle centuries ago.

Compared to the US or Europe, China is doing an incredible job of bringing power to millions of people while minimizing emissions.

EDIT:

To clarify, the US has emitted about 2x more emissions than China since the industrial revolution. And the EU has emitted about 1.5x more.

That doesn't excuse China, but it does make the idea that China isn't doing enough to limit emissions laughably ridiculous when it comes from the EU and US.

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ToothlessGrandma t1_jdyord8 wrote

Nothing cancels out those emissions. They're still going into the atmosphere and contributing to the overall greenhouse gases.

You seem like you're a shill for China, so this conversation isn't going anywhere. Wasn't China caught recently as being the only country on the planet secretly using ozone depleting gases?

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ialsoagree t1_jdyqcsf wrote

I never said anything cancels out those emissions. Infact, it was you who said that some emissions cancel out a lack of emissions, am equally ridiculous claim.

If you think pointing out facts makes me a shill, I think you're just unable to admit when you're wrong.

Everyone is wrong from time to time, it's how you respond to being wrong that defines you.

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Inevitable_Syrup777 t1_jdz715q wrote

CO2 Emissions by Country

Country Share of world

1 China 29.18% 2 United States 14.02% 3 India 7.09% 4 Russia 4.65%

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ialsoagree t1_jdzm6d1 wrote

Yes. I've literally pointed that out elsewhere.

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MightyH20 t1_jdzk1vi wrote

No offense but all these numbers are useless given the massive scale of the quantity of a percentage increase or decrease from a reference point.

The only metric that is relevant in terms of climate change is the amount of emissions and in particularly the progression towards climate targets.

A fair question would be how far a country has progressed towards that target?

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