Yeah, but you need to make everyone nudge it, or we're in for a bad time

Social acceptability is important for economic viability, as new laws will need to be made about this

You can't just jettison everything in Earth orbit, unless you want to get trash rings that make life difficult

Adequate regulation of orbital pollution could solve that, even if it means dumping all our space borne trash into the sun or something

I mean, plenty of pro Ukrainian groups and anti-government Russian groups also have plenty of motive.

I mean, don't get me wrong, they're doing their best, the Amazon is just really big, so they haven't finished yet.

Pretty sure they haven't managed to clear the whole Amazon yet

So you're saying that "we need fewer humans", but apparently China, who put legal limits on the number of children you were able to have, weren't doing enough. Aside from mass murder or sterilization, how could it be possible to produce a world with substantially fewer humans?

To be clear, are you proposing the slaughter of millions of civilians? How would you plan on carrying this out?

They did! China famously had a one child policy to reduce population growth, which led to a demographic crisis

I'm not sure you understand the sheer scale of China.

Having more people doesn't mean your energy needs are easier to fulfill, it means you need more energy, and you can't just build more dams, because you're limited by your rivers. Quebec has 8 million people, Guangdong Province has 126 million. The biggest dam in China, The Three Gorges dam, is literally an order of magnitude larger than the largest dam in Quebec, the Daniel-Johnson Dam (at 27.2 million cubic meters to the DJD's 2.2 million). On top of that, the distances they need to build and maintain transmission cables across are more like if you had to use transport that power from Quebec to Vancouver, not from an isolated part of Quebec to the rest of Quebec.

Also, if we're comparing the provinces most reliant on renewables, Tibet derives 97% of its energy from renewables, more than Quebec.

China isn't magic, and it isn't evil for evil's sake, and it isn't deeply mysterious in its motivations, it's a major nation-state pursuing all the things major nation-states do, it's just very very big.

Actually, a lot of the things you would traditionally think of as "made in China" aren't made there anymore. They've made an effort to pivot their economy more towards high-added-value manufacturing, like electronics, and away from labor-intensive low-cost bulk goods like clothing and little plastic knickknacks. Most of the cheap stuff moved to various parts of Southeast Asia.

Also, what reason do you have to believe that China is not investing in renewables? They're an emerging superpower with minimal fossil fuel reserves, reliant on international shipping to keep the lights on. They want to be energy-independent so they don't need to worry about starving of electricity if the US were to blockade the South China Sea from the string of naval bases it has on allied islands, or their oil pipelines from the Middle East getting sabotaged.

Additionally, the numbers they report aren't actually all that impressive for what they've built. Chinese hydroelectric dams have pretty low levels of efficiency, and they've displaced literal millions of people to build them, and done some pretty brutal damage to local ecosystems in the process.

That doesn't sound like some sort of attempt at winning good-boy points in hopes that it'll make NATO like you, it sounds like a major nation-state attempting to secure energy independence by any means necessary, which is very common in geopolitics.

Not fake buildings, the buildings are mostly real houses, it's just a colossal real estate bubble, possibly the largest in history. Due to the volatility of the Chinese stock market, real estate is seen as the most common personal investment, as it is less likely to lose its value by crossing the Party. (Empty houses are really good at not pissing people off.)

It's not so much that China doesn't care as that China doesn't have a ton of options. They have no real oil or natural gas reserves worth speaking of as far as I know, and while they are investing in renewables at an impressive rate, their population is just so damn big, and rising in power consumption so damn fast, that they need to use whatever power they can find, or they risk rolling blackouts, so they use coal, because it's what they have.

Additionally, while China has excellent locations to build solar and hydro-electric power, those spots are generally in the north and west of the country, while the population that requires most of that power is on the southeastern coast, so transmission poses a major challenge, which they're attempting to solve by more or less just building enormous high-voltage lines all the way across the country, which leads to a lot of power loss on the way and is enormously expensive to do, given just how much China there is to cross.

That said, China isn't purely a victim of circumstance here, the bureaucratic and legal structure of the province-level electrical grids does lead to some wildly inefficient incentives when it comes to buying energy from another province, iirc.

So, yeah, it's not that China just doesn't give a shit about green energy, it's more that they are in the middle of a genuine energy crisis and desperately need fuel to keep the lights on. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of things you can criticize the PRC for, they get up to all kind of deeply nasty shit, but this issue in particular seems like they really are stuck between a rock and a hard place rather than just apathetic.

I've never heard anyone blame a specific country at all, although if that is true, it sounds like the US is largely the source of the trash, so maybe it's just that I live in America so I don't hear the rest of the world blaming us.