This is also such BS the west has outsourced our pollution to China. They manufacture almost everything and we go look at them.

I think that you misunderstood his comment. He's not criticizing solar energy, he's calling out China's green washing as they have the same solar production per Capita than Europe but they have way more coal production per Capita than Europe.

A right wing politician would throw a fit about how solar energy is dangerous and make kids trans.

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.

You're comparing GDPs in dollars, not PPP. Your calculation is invalid because of that. Since cost of life in China is several times lower than in the USA, pure GDP metrics in dollars are a bad comparison unless you convert them to purchase power parity (PPP), which gives a much more comparable metric in terms of amounts of goods/services manufactured and traded than straight GDP. Run the calculation again using PPP adjusted GDP and tell me your findings.

I am not comparing them with USD, the user who brought up GDP did because their source specifies it.

But in Europe they also burn coal, no? Or burning gasoline, natural gas, trash, anything.

What's the point of comparing coal if not for CO2? Most other forms of pollution from coal are local, not global, the international debate here is on climate change, a western-world inhabitant has no right to say what China should be doing with the local pollution. The discussion on coal is started because of its horrendous climate change potential, which comes exclusively from its cumulative CO2 emissions.

But if you want to compare coal numbers, I ran the calculations using this source for US production and this source for China production. Downloading the CSVs from both sources, I get that the US has produced 85643270043 short tons of coal, which at 21GJ of energy per short ton amount to 496731 TWh, whereas China has extracted 617787 TWh, i.e. a bit below 25% more than the USA. Since China has 1411 mn inhabitants and the US has 340 mn inhabitants, i.e. China has 415% the population of the USA, China has along its existence as a country extracted about 1/3 as much coal per inhabitant than the USA.

So yeah, China would have to literally consume twice as much coal as it's already consumed to reach US values of per-capita historical cumulative coal consumption.

Now what will you come up with? Suddenly coal numbers don't matter anymore?

You need H2 only after solar + EVs provides more than 24 hours of needed energy in an area. Although H2 does save on transmission costs for medium to long distance. One of the remarkable aspects of BYD Dolphin, now under $9000 for 32kwh battery is that the battery value alone is $260/kwh capacity, and if you never drove it, but sold electricity 2.6c/kwh higher at night than you pay at day, then you pay for the car in its entirety. Just batteries can be sold under $100/kwh in China, and you could make 200% ROI from 3c/kwh price differential. EVs and batteries can be paid by private sector instead of utility investment markup model.

H2 technologies are advancing, including storage and pipes. Electrical transmission is more than 10x more expensive than transmitting gas/H2, and saves money on that end relative to efficiency loss. Surplus solar with input cost at 2c/kwh or less achieves under $2/kg H2 target which is equivalent driving distance to $1/gallon gasoline, and 10c/kwh electric only value delivered energy, and 6c/kwh combined heat and electricity value.

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.

EVs provides more than 24 hours of needed energy in an area

Only if it was fully charged, you don't drive with it and you live in a house. And thus are not a reliable energy source at all, even less for general energy problems.

H2 technologies are advancing, including storage and pipes.

All technology is All technologies are advancing, but do you have a solution today? And even with advancements, you'll hardly solve H2 flammability. Even keeping it contained is problematic.

They burn more coal than Europe because there's more energy demand in Europe and solar alone can't fulfil it. Which is also the same in Europe.

V2L and V2H are desirable features worth paying for. Grid sharing is not rocket appliances. In other thread, I showed how a 2nd EV that is barely used can pay for itself, but some static batteries are cheaper. 10kwh can power 2-5 homes overnight. Apartment units don't individually pay for exterior flood lighting. Mid to higher end cars have 50-100kwh battery packs. As an overall society, 80%+ of cars are parked somewhere at any time. The point of powering one house, applies to sharing for 1m houses.

That's why we have all that power available, right? You guys keeping listing various technologies but it isn't they aren't available nowhere at scale. Even this feature is not that common among the cars of today.
And 10kWh is nowhere enough during winter (and perhaps summer with A/C), perhaps for single not big house with heat pump. Good luck with big cities.

Electricity production by source

Measured in terawatt-hours.

Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org)

(chosen OECD because it makes the numbers easier to compare, and doesn't cherry pick EU countries which are actually better than places like the US)

A lot less coal, which is about twice as bad as gas for CO2 emissions per kWh.

Places like the UK have got rid of coal completely. The last remaining coal power station shut down last year. When you look at the graphs for the UK, we've actually reduced electricity consumption as a whole, despite a growing population and the growth of electric vehicles.

Still plenty to be done about gas. I can see why China still uses enormous amounts of coal. They don't really have any oil, so it's the cheapest fossil fuel they have access to. In fact, cost is mostly why solar is getting popular, because it's become extremely cheap. You can't rely on it completely though, unless we all agree to turn off our power at night. Power storage is not a solved issue by any means.

China also never embraced nuclear power. They really got big on the world stage right around the time Chernobyl happened, and it was already getting too expensive even then.

Actually energy from fusion reactors on Earth does make a lot of sense. Sadly we are advancing slowly there.

To be clear: Are you saying China is in the process of developing?

Now what will you come up with? Suddenly coal numbers don’t matter anymore?

Do you think I am here to hate on China or something? Your inital claim was:

How much coal has China cumulatively used in its history compared to the US or Europe? Spoiler alert: much less.

And when you looked at the numbers and you were clearly wrong, you moved the goal poast again:

So yeah, China would have to literally consume twice as much coal as it’s already consumed to reach US values of per-capita historical cumulative coal consumption.

Or 50% more to be at the level of the EU, using the Our World in Data numbers from 1900(thanks btw). Given current production, China would overtake the EU around 2040 in that metric.

I mean the UK has 6% of its energy over the year come from solar, and 30% from wind, and installations are only accelerating, so this amount of installed solar is far from unrealistic.

Installing storage approximately doubles the LCOE of solar energy, so this is also feasible from a cost point of view as we get rid of dispatchable gas turbines.

Basically if we solve storage, we can get rid of nuclear, but not before.

I am not saying we should get rid of nuclear. I am saying we should keep some nuclear, also once we have got less gas and more storage. Does this resolve some things in this discussion for you?

The important metric for the moral debate is cumulative CO2 per capita, because that's the whole reason why we're measuring coal production history, not because we hate coal per se.

I showed you that, even moving to cumulative coal production, China still has 1/3 that of the US per capita, which is the important metric because why the fuck would we compare a country with 1.4bn inhabitants to one with 340mn without taking population size into account.

So yeah, China still has a lot of margin for coal burning until they reach the evil levels of the US/EU, but thankfully they won't because they're the strongest country in renewables, producing essentially 100% of all solar panels in the world.

Compare GDP PPP per capita. China is very much on a lower place than the US or Germany. China is very developed compared to, say, Philippines, but still developing when compared to Japan or UK.