First of all greenhouse gases not just CO2

For cumulative that's debatable. CH4 is the second most important gas, and its half-life in the atmosphere is short enough that over spans of 100s of years it can decompose into CO2 which has a much lesser greenhouse potential.

Per capita annual emissions

See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn't fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.

That's why China is working hard on the greatest desert reforestation projects in the world, and why it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves.

I think you call it eminent domain in the US. But I think it can still be challenged in court, but wait a couple months.

Yes, the US is becoming China. You put a guy into power that admires Xi Jinping for the same reason China made Xi President for life: wanted a strongman to run the economy and protect you from evil foreigners. And now you're getting corporate socialism, just like China has.

it exports an insane amount of solar panels instead of keeping them for themselves

How altruistic of them.

See? Moving the goalposts. Moving from cumulative, the real important metric, to per capita current emissions during a renewable transition, because otherwise the data doesn’t fit your preconceived, chauvinistic anti-china views.

I initially just wanted to point out that China does in fact consume a lot more coal, then you claimed. If you want to have the moral discussion, we can have that. The fundamental problem with your logic, is that you presume future emissions do not matter. The fact of the matter is that we will emit much more in the coming decades. Higher current per capita emissions make it much more likely that future emissions will be higher as well. At the 2023 rate of emissions, China emits as much as the EU cumulative did until 2023 in 25 years. Last year China increased its emissions by 0.8%. Current UN forecast put the population of China 633million and the EU at 347million. I hate to say it, but it is very realistic to presume that China ends up just as guilty by your metric as say the EU.

So let's start hating on the world capital of photovoltaics and nuclear because of a lemmitor's predictions of energy production over the coming 20 years in China?

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.

I know nothing about Chinese economics and society but at least Im not pretending I do because this is what I imagine it sounds like lol

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.

I'd rather not debate that particular topic. I'm not up on all the nuances. But I will say that while coal was maybe the right choice for generating abundant energy once upon a time, we know a lot more now about why it's a bad choice for other reasons, and, besides, we have more options now than we used to. So it's good to see the world's second largest economy at least trying to build solar capacity.