this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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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

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[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They also expanded coal power, roads, and removed their population limiting policies, though. They produce about 3 times as much CO2 per person as India, Indonesia, and many South American nations, likely many nations in Africa as well but theres a lot of missing data.

[–] nednobbins@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.com 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

It's a better measure because western countries outsource manufacturing and associated pollutions to other countries and then pretend to be green.

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[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm curious how much of it they consumed though. I read recently the UK keeps on paying Wind farms (for example) to NOT supply the grid as they don't need it at certain times, and it wasn't going into batteries for later either. Just generated and...gone?

[–] Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 3 points 1 week ago

They pay the windfarms when too much power is generated for the grid to handle. The wind turbines are then throttled accordingly and the windfarm owners are reimbursed for the lost potential. At least that's how it goes in Germany. It's kind of an incentive to upgrade the power grid.

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Can be sold as well. I looked at this chart to get numbers, not sure about accuracy. Shows China made around 9.27 PWh and used 8.93 PWh. The G7 used about 7 PWh total.

https://countryeconomy.com/energy-and-environment/electricity-consumption

Edit: realized my typo and now I'm questioning. in Watt hours, does it use Petawatt hours like computers do... I assume? Changed TWh to PWh

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