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Analysis: Clean energy just put China’s CO2 emissions into reverse for first time
(www.carbonbrief.org)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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Headline could be misleading, but it basically means that (according to one independent analysis) China's emissions have just stopped growing this year. They are still the world's largest contributor by far. This hilariously optimistic chart from the same site shows them relative to the US and almost all of Europe:
Still, not gonna knock what is good news, or at least "better than the alternative" news
Given that the EU has 3x smaller population than China and the US 4x, the emission numbers aren't out of proportion. Add to that the fact that both the EU and US have outsourced large parts of their manufacturing industry to China and the picture changes dramatically. If China can manufacture, mine and process what they do, with its current population, and if emissions have peaked, that would be remarkably positive. Given their massive investment in wind, solar, nuclear and EVs, it might just actually be the case.
I mean yeah because they're doing all the manufacturing the West offloaded on them. When you read about emissions in America or Europe going down remember that a big part of that is simply them shuttering heavy industry.
Thank you, came here to say this.
It's not like someone is forcing them to manufacture it all
Yes, but the point is that someone is going to make that stuff so taking your emissions and putting them in someone else's backyard isn't exactly something to brag about.
Tbf China wants to be the one to pump that garbage out since it helps the line go up.
Fuck that graph! Make it per capita, why compare 300 million Americans directly to 1.3 BILLION Chinese?
Same with EU, EU is also way more people than USA, yet we pollute less.
We need CO2 Tariffs on USA NOW!!!
Americans claiming it doesn't help for them to reduce CO2 because of China are disgusting!
USA abandoning the Paris agreement is disgusting!
The richest country in the world refusing to do their part is disgusting!
Probably because total amount of CO2 is what matters to avoiding ecological doom. Further, economies and CO2 regulations are largely segmented between US, EU, and China.
Yea tbh. I'm in agreement as someone from the US. Anything that potentially reduces CO2 is a good thing.
Although that's true it's still a BULLSHIT argument.
The a target is better measured as a global average per capita, and then the countries can be compared on how close they are to that average.
That would CLEARLY show that Americans are behaving like pigs regarding CO". While both EU and China are way ahead of USA.
The above graph is worthless and a very misleading representation of reality.
I've been arguing this point for more than 20 years now, but the world is apparently still not serious enough to draw the necessary consequences.
To top it off, if the US was pressured to reduce its CO2 as harshly as possible, you'd probably force the US to improve its walking and bicycle infrastructure in cities and add additional pressure to incentivize people to move closer to work, likely drastically improving the average American's quality of life through shorter commutes, less dangerous driving related deaths, less pollution, and less social atomization.
The only people external pressure to reduce CO2 would really hurt are like the richest 10-5% of people here anyway. So I'm all for it even beyond the environmental benefits.
You are absolutely right, there is so much USA could do to improve society.
But the only thing that really counts for half the population, is to ease taxes on the 1%.
IDK why, but that's apparently a very popular thing for both average and poor people in USA?
I used to have hope for USA, thinking they always turn in the right direction eventually, but since George W Bush was elected for a 2nd term, that hope has been chipped away. Obama did provide a glimmer of hope, but followed by horrible to mediocre to horrible again, so shortly after Bush. That's a very bad average, and the tendency has been tracking towards worse for a long time now. Hopefully USA is at the bottom right now, but my hopes for that are near zero.
This doesn't make sense when it's Americans using China's pollution to justify not scaling back our pollution.
They (IIRC) intentionally increased coal energy production because it’s cheap and easy to spin up.
But at the same time they’re using that power as a stopgap for renewables.
Kinda what Germany is trying to do
They keep building coal power plants because the total need of electricity in China is rapidly increasing, but they are also building everything else at an even higher rate so less of the total is actually generated by coal. Also many of them are replacing old obsolete plants with cleaner more efficient ones.
Many of them are also being built specifically because of the increase of renewable sources, to stabilize dips and provide reliability, so the overall usage of those plants has decreased.
And due to their economic system, they don't have to profit maximize those coal plants or even use them until the end of their lifespan. They're free to decrease their utilization or even shut them down as the the need decreases.
Now that is some high quality projection hahaha
Yeah this headline is extremely misleading.