True, but the positive dynamics is there.

The country needs a lot of energy, and it does good job making a lot of it renewable/hydro. The coal industry growth is slowing down, while solar roars up

5 years ago, they had one-third of the current solar capacity.

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.

To give China credit the solar push was very capitalistic and very well executed. There are so many solar salesmen that will bother you to no end with one offering better deals than another. They come install everything and set up for you and guarantee returns in like 5 years plus mountains of other bonuses (obviously based on location etc.). The environment kinda make you feel stupid for not taking the deal too so you're really pressured which imo is a win. It's basically a free market under a dictatorship for a product in high natural demand.

Though I can't comment on industrial solar panel fields but the consumer part is very well executed and the rest of Asia is like 10 years behind.

True, but the positive dynamics is there.

The country needs a lot of energy, and it does good job making a lot of it renewable/hydro. The coal industry growth is slowing down, while solar roars up

5 years ago, they had one-third of the current solar capacity.

Last year China installed more solar than the rest of the world combined, but they have less than 1/5th of the worldpopulation

There are lot's of things you can criticize China about, their commitment to renewable energy isn't one of them.

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.

The question is simple. If you have installed solar power of 40% your country peak use, how much nuclear power you need - assuming simplified you have only these two power sources.

Not so sure about that. China overtook the EU in 1987 in coal consumption, but today it is at 25,000TWh or so. In 1965 the current EU countries were at 4,500TWh. It certainly is not much less, if China has not overtaken the EU by cumulative coal consumption.

Coal consumption

Coal consumption by country or region, measured in terawatt-hours (TWh).

Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org)

Good on them. The earlier they can shut down those coal plants, the better.

to be fair, they have about 3x the population too. but nonetheless good to see that they are moving fast. dictatorship works faster when it comes to regulation ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Not really enough information. I will assume that by "installed solar power" you mean peak generation when the sun is shining, and that instead of peak use, you mean 40% of average use, i.e. let's suppose that at an average moment the country consumes 100GW and, if the sun is shining, generates 40GW from solar.

Assume further the sun is up for half the year and the sky is clear for half the year, meaning the total amount of your yearly electricity you can generate with solar is 10% assuming typical weather. Then you would be able to reliably power the country with a combination of nuclear totalling 90% of average use (90GW) and enough storage that you can ride out cloudy periods.

3 times as much solar as the EU.

Has 3 times the population.

They are using 50% of the world's coal though, so maybe let's not start tugging each other off just yet.

the coal industry growth is slowing down

Wow I hope that really really recently changed. Last I checked China was one of the world's worst polluters, and they reached a 10 year high last year.

China’s construction of new coal-power plants ‘reached 10-year high’ in 2024 - Carbon Brief

A “resurgence” in construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s...

Carbon Brief (www.carbonbrief.org)

Please explain how being the #1 coal guy is a "positive dynamic".

This has been going on for years and will continue.

China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure.
Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.

Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.

China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.

If you "aren't sure" about that, then why the hell are you trying to discuss it making guesses instead of informing yourself?

China, a country with 4-5 times the US population, has half the cumulative historic emissions. And yet you have the fucking nerve to blame china for coal. The US and the EU get to pollute the fucking Earth for 2 centuries, and China does a renewable revolution in its 40 years since industrializing and you cry about how they still have plans for coal.

Just, seriously, stop arguing from ignorance. If you do not know about cumulative emissions, don't make "Oh I'm not so sure about that because look at the trends for the past 60 years", as if the US and EU hadn't been emitting fossil CO2 since the fucking late 18th century.

Ain't that neat! Do they just happen to be the biggest coalie bois too?

You sound like all the right-wing politicians the world over who don't want to implement zero carbon solutions because "China still burn coal".

We're on a sinking ship and you're complaining that you don't like the colour of the life raft.

If China was the only country in the world that burned coal, but they exclusively burned coal, and everybody else was on solar panels the world would still be an infinitely better place and it is right now. Not doing something just because other people also aren't doing it just ensures that nobody does anything.

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.

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.