How much coal has China cumulatively used in its history compared to the US or Europe? Spoiler alert: much less. Almost as if countries in the process of developing used coal for a reason...

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?

Yes, something like that. Now, while you can theoretically install that many solar panels, the kicker is that you don't have nowhere enough storage. And even if you had that 10%, you could increase solar all you want, but the nuclear would be still running at 90MW because of the storage, or better, the lack of it. And because you would have a surplus of cheap solar power energy during the day - assuming more solar panels than 10%, it would erode more expensive nuclear one to become even more expensive.
Basically if we solve storage, we can get rid of nuclear, but not before.

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.

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

It's not about regulation. China has almost the complete photovoltaic production of the world. Essentially all panels installed in the rest of the world are also Chinese. It's about a smart government knowing which technologies to pursue, instead of things like the Spanish "sun tax" of the 2010s that killed whatever solar industry there might have been in the sunniest country in Europe.

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.

Coal is unreliable and dirty.

China use absurd amounts of coal and they're not slowing down. They're the worlds largest producer and consumer of coal. They're increasing use of all power generation types - coal, solar, nuclear.

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?

They were also responsible for 95% of the world's new coal construction (2023). With just 1/5th of the world population.

I'll give them props for solar. They build a lot of it, and thanks to us outsourcing practically everything to China over the last few decades, they build most of our solar as well.

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.

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.

First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2.

It is also a metric China will not want to use. Per capita annual emissions are already higher in China then in many Western countries. More so UN population forecast shows Chinas population falling much more quickly then that of the West.

It's about energy independence. The CCP doesn't give a fuck about the environment, but not having to bring in energy from out of country is high on any governments priority list.

Coal is unreliable

How? I would've said coal is very reliable, it worked for over a hundred years.

Unreliable may have been a poor choice of words.
You can’t move coal around with pipes or wires. Someone needs to drive trucks full of coal to a power plant.

The pollution from coal tends to have a lot of externalities that drag on the economy. Lost work days, faster equipment degradation, etc.

They use coal but they have practical reasons to want to reduce reliance on coal.

You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That's lower than the US or Europe.

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

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.

95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023)

China had the largest new coal construction in 2023 but it was far below 95%. I didn’t do all the math but it drops below 50% when you compare it to just the growth of the next three biggest coal producers.

They build most of our solar but we’ve effectively banned it now. They’re not only growing capacity to produce renewables, they’re taking the outputs that were planned for sale here and installing them locally.