- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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And thanks to Trump, the US is perfectly placed to be entirely left behind.
This moron doesn’t understand that green energy was a new sector where US could dominate for decades.
A lot of countries are forced to import fossil fuels as they can’t produce their own so replacing that with local alternatives actually increases national security.
Do people think China went into renewable energy because suddenly Xi became a tree hugger?
From what I’ve gleaned of the ravings of the angry stupid right blogosphere, a lot of people actually do think that only tree huggers want green energy.
And I have little doubt that that’s an opinion that Trump shares, but that’s not his main motivation in all of this. His main motivation is big fat bribes from the fossil fuel industry.
It’s the moment Sears let Amazon take the lead on mail order shopping just because Sears didn’t understand how the internet and shopping could work together.
Not only the US , Germany is also far behind
don’t worry, you can start shutting down france’s nuclear generators once you run out of your own
They are already shutting it down on their own due to recent heatwaves raising the temps of the water used to cool down their reactors
Which is an ecological measure, not a technical one, and can be circumvented by existing technologies like cooling towers
Just use solar panels to power the ac to cool the water that makes the nuclear. Bonus points for floating solar arrays that cool the panels while shading the cooling water.
Extra bonus: you get to blame perfectly functional renewables when nuclear fails.
Germany is worse than average for Europe, but it’s far better than America and about on par with China. Per capita emissions are a little lower than China’s, but China is a bit better if you look at consumption-based emissions instead
China’s electrification efforts are substantial and to be applauded and encouraged.
The problem is when you tell one sided stories, the important details get lost.
This is the most recent figure on China’s total energy mix from the IEA. They have a stupid long way to go on emissions.
It sounds nice to say they installed more solar in a month that australia has ever in it’s history. Let’s look at the trends…
Coal is up. Way up. Why did this article lose the narrative so badly? Because it’s a fluff piece, not an informed, intelligent discussion on emissions.
Literally worse than America.
What’s the source of these graphs? I’ve seen them used before for a different country and they look really cool. I could probably waste a few hours just browsing different countries
https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix
You can look at any country.
Man, they’re twisting the data hard to try to make China look good here. They’re falling back on per capita, and cumulative to try to hide that they’re the largest emitter of carbon by far, much of it is from burning coal, which they are still doing much more than any other country.
This is greenwashing, nothing more.
National emissions should be approached per capita. It’d be silly to expect that Luxembourg and France should have the same total emissions
Per capita emissions favour densly packed high population countries.
I dont think countries thay have 5m people should be held to the same number as ones that have 1billion. For nz the best way for us to reduce our per capita emissions is to add another 50m people but that would be counter productive since we want to reduce overall pollution.
Do you have actual data for that? Here are some comparisons of population density and emissions per capita:
The first chart is every country and territory that wikipedia had numbers for on both population density and emissions per capita.
The second has outliers with the highest densities and emissions per capita removed in order to make the rest visible (removed entries are Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bermuda, Brunei, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macau, Maldives, Moldova, New Caledonia, Palau, Qatar, and Singapore. I hope you agree that these are not particularly comparable to the US or China for a variety of reasons and are okay to exclude).
The third cuts it down to only countries that have a “very high” rating (at least 0.8) on the Human Development Index, as a proxy for advanced economies. As you can see, there is not a strong correlation between high densities and low emissions. Chile, Sweden, Argentina, and Norway all actually have both significantly lower densities than the US and significantly lower emissions (and there are more, I’m just counting some with populations of at least ten million). Same goes for NZ, there are several countries with comparable or lower densities and also lower emissions. The densest countries are not particularly low emitters, and the sparsest cover the full range.
I can think of a few potential factors explaining it. Yes, high density makes transport easier, but it also means less access to land for clean energy (which is generally much less compact than fossil fuels). Additionally, even in very sparsely-populated countries, most of the population actually tends to be fairly concentrated around a few cities anyway. Consider Australia; it’s not like Australians are evenly distributed across the continent, so the very low population density isn’t particularly representative of the infrastructure challenges for most people there
Subsidies for solar going away because it was getting cheaper than coal/oil. bribes paid in exchange for subsidies. it’s still cheaper than new fossil plants. oil still getting subsidies.
I think I need to talk to my friend Luigi about this.
not until we actually stop using fossil fuels. we are still using more fossil fuels than ever. And when/if renewables actually start eating into the fossil fuel market, then fossil fuels will get cheaper. So either we are going to burn through most of our fossil fuels regardless, or we will eventually need to take some kind of punitive actions against using them.
anyway, you’d think republicans would be on board with renewables for exactly the same reasons as china. it makes economic and national security sense if that’s all you care about.
my dad once said that if he was in Bush’s position, he would have used 9/11 to justify decoupling from Saudi oil and push for more solar and wind development
I still think about that. So many missed off-ramps to this…
If the US has tried that, SA would have tanked the dollar.
