Last year, China generated 834 terawatt-hours of solar power.
Which is more than the G7 countries generated, and more than the US and EU combined. In fact the only country group that generates more solar power than China is the OECD, all 38 countries of it.
Data: @ember-energy.org
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielbullard.com/post/3lsbbsg6ohk2j
Pollution per GDP is a better measure. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.
Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.
China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.
They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.
They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.
Pollution per GDP is a bad measure. Mali has a high CO2 intensity, but the GDP per capita is low, so pollution is low. The best measures are emissions per capita in consumption and production terms. China is not a saint in either of those metrics, being rather close to the EU in both of them today.
GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.
I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.
Why is Polution per GDP a better measure? I don’t care how much they export when they’re killing the planet at a faster rate every year with no intentions to stop it. I will praise China and the rest of the world when they reimplement and follow through with plans to ethically lower the world population, such as investment in education especially for women and incentives or fines based on numbers of children.
You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That’s lower than the US or Europe.
They’re attempting to raise the replacement rate to maintain their still massive population. It is problematic.
So you’re saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?
From 2021 to 2022 they added another 38 Million Tons of CO2 per year to their 10,575 Mt
If they want to reverse that in one year then they need to have 4,166,667 less people plus extra to account for increasing CO2 per person. Obviously thats a nonsense plan, they need to set a target year and slowly change their replacement rate with overcorrection over the duration, but thats precisely what they are not doing.
That’s not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that’s the vast majority of China’s population) doesn’t produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.
Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.
China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It’s a nonsense plan because there’s no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.
While there’s a clear trend of China using more coal there’s just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China’s power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they’re solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they’ll need to shrink their population to do it.
It’s a better measure because western countries outsource manufacturing and associated pollutions to other countries and then pretend to be green.
And China is continuing to increase market share on goods like electronics and vehicles, by choice.
The USA has the highest GDP in the world and has a CO2 per GDP of 0.26 to Chinas 0.44. Are you saying China is just pretending to be green and the USA is a beacon of hope for the environment? Rhetorical Question, Farley.
It’s a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.
Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don’t exist without the manufacturing.
That’s why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it’s the biggest source of pollution and it’s the source you can do the most about (ie there’s a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).
Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there’s still a long way to go.
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I am not comparing them with USD, the user who brought up GDP did because their source specifies it.
You’re right, you’re referring to the original source, which is supposedly already in PPP dollars, so I deleted my previous comment. Thanks for the correction. Regardless, that data is 2011, so it’s kinda useless to me because that’s before the energy transition of China.
They wanted a measure that makes China look better.
Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.
It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.
Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.
I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.