this post seems to be used for strategic messaging to boost Bloomberg's current campaign:
> Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.
this kind of thing makes the reporting feel questionable. A shame because the message is really important.
That sounds to me like virtue signalling. Shutting down both coal and gas is wishful thinking. Those gas plants are needed as an energy storage mechanism.
> The nation has 148 gigawatts (GW) of new coal fired capacity under construction. That is compared to 150 GW of existing capacity in the European Union and 105 GW in the works for the rest of the world
What's left out is the industrial output of China -- which is probably producing for much of the EU and USA. It takes power to produce cheap phones and plastic knick-knacks for western consumers. The fact that the Chinese economy will adapt to meet these demands is inevitable. What is the coal output per capita, subtracting industrial output dedicated to exports to the US/Eurozone -- this would be a more fair assessment.
The standard measurement is CO2 emissions in kg per PPP $ of GDP.
By that measure, China emits about twice what the US does, 0.6 vs 0.3. However China has done about twice as well as the US has in reducing this number, which is why China is on track to meeting their Paris commitments and the US isn't.
Maybe China is doing all the energy intensive low margin work. Since its low margin energy must be dirt cheap, and literal dirt is still the cheapest way to generate power.
Not letting China totally off the hook, just suggesting that there is an economic force driving them toward the bottom of the barrel for cheap energy. California gets up to 50% of its power from solar during midday, but it also does a lot of much higher margin work like software, design, skilled manufacturing, etc.
The world CO2 per GDP number is falling, which is a good sign:
Different sectors of the economy have different energy intensities. China's is much more reliant on heavy industry than more developed countries, which are service-sector dominated.
Just a quick comparison of the share of industry in each region's GDP:
* China: 40% industry
* Japan: 30% industry
* EU: 25% industry
* USA: 19% industry
That isn't necessarily a more fair assessment because those things would be made using cleaner power if they were being produced in the EU or the USA. That is, moving manufacturing to China isn't just moving emissions, it's making them worse. Supposedly this is particularly bad with steel and aluminium, because China's government subsidies to their local production means that more efficient, less producing facilities elsewhere are being driven out of business by dirty and inefficient but subsidised Chinese output.
> That isn't necessarily a more fair assessment because those things would be made using cleaner power if they were being produced in the EU or the USA.
It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations. Instead, there would be other nations with lower regulations that these manufacturing processes would move to in order maintain a satisfactory profit.
This is why I said manufacturing would move to somewhere with fewer labor/environmental regulations. Things may cost more in the short-run, but that's just before some new, enticing land of opportunities pops up.
>It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations.
We should be tariffing nations who don’t live up to our human and environmental rights standards if we actually care about the issues. We should be forcing corporations to be ethical to do business here.
You can eliminate all addiction and spending on illegal drugs, but you still might have social decay because people's needs are going unmet in a given social structure.
The drug dealer is taking advantage of existing social decay but not necessarily creating it; but some do (opioid epidemic for example).
China's GDP appears to be about 20% export-driven. Subtracting this still leaves China the greatest polluter in the world, and by a large margin, the greatest polluter per unit of GDP, which is the real measure we should be looking at.
Also, you have it backwards. CCP had the option to create an export-driven economy, as well as the option on how to power it. Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."
The Chinese government has a lot of agency, and a lot of culpability, in this.
Why should we look at pollution per GDP? I'd contest that pollution per capita is a more humanistic, less capitalistic view, and helps contextualize some geographic features better than GDP.
If your concern is efficiency of production, than pollution per unit of GDP is valid. If you want fairness based on population, then you can look at pollution per person, but that metric won’t really tell you how/where things can be improved.
What it does show is that China’s CO2 use is mainly industrial while in America it is much more personal
Seems like an absurd measure when comparing service versus production driven economies. GDP doesn’t measure whether you sold 1 million copies of a film, or manufactured the cameras out of raw materials to produce them. Obviously one has a significantly more linear relationship to carbon output than the other.
> Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."
No, but experience has shown that that is the surest path to economic development - probably the only viable path for a country the size of China. A small city state might be able to develop by establishing itself as a financial or shipping hub, but for a giant country of 1.4 billion people to go from utter poverty to wealth, there's a good argument that it first has to turn itself into the world's factory.
They might cut CO2 emissions as a side effect of achieving something that matters to them, like cutting particulate emissions. There's no reason they would cut CO2 emissions for their own sake.
Sure, because it would make a marginal difference on global temperature while it makes a major difference in economics to embrace fossil fuels. Simple cost / benefit equation.
CO2 is different from AQI problems. One is a silent problem of long term consequence, difficult to get people fired up about because they can’t grasp the threat so easily. The other is “my day really sucks, they should fix this now!” Kind of problem. The problems have different solutions; e.g. the USA has largely solved its AQI problem by using lots of natural gas, but that still contributes to the CO2 problem.
China has ~1.4bn people they have to feed. If things go pear-shaped with the climate and food-growing cycle, their ability to do that could be substantially impaired. In a (not terribly unrealistic worst case) that could mean hundreds of millions of starving, unhappy citizens revolting and hanging their leaders from lampposts. I don't expect the CCP to deal with climate issues out of benevolence, but I do expect them to tend to their own survival.
They're already pretty close to fascism, it's just that the West prefers not to notice it because who makes all the iPhones? Much like Britain and France ignored Hitler's territorial exploits until it was too late. China already has the largest army in the world and asserts its territorial claims in e.g. the South Sea...
The country that performed (and continues to perform) tens of millions of forced and coerced abortions and sterilizations is already the Nazi government of our time.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on almost every point and a couple you haven't mentioned.
> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
But isn't this just the nature of globalization? And aren't the corporations in the countries you mentioned complicit in choosing to cut costs by moving production to cheap countries? And aren't we as consumers complicit in continuing to buy cheap goods like it's going out of fashion (wishful thinking lol).
No, it isn't just globalization. It's globalization done poorly. A level playing field wrt human rights of workers across wherever companies do business should be part of a just (in a humanitarian sense) globalization.
Precisely this. Trade negotiations by their nature are written by the winners, and until the voters wise up to this, we are doomed to repeat these mistakes.
Absolutely, but there don’t have to be human rights violations in order for a country with lower costs of living to be a more attractive host for manufacturing than one with a higher cost of living.
Hey let's just circle-jerk about how evil China is instead of trying to fix problems in our own country.
> - greatest polluter of water via plastics
Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky. But why blame the ones in charge on our side that made that happen and kept doing it for years? It takes effort! and what if they actually stop? There'd be one thing less to shit on China about!
> - greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
Yeah same thing, why blame the companies that actively move production and jobs over to China? Much easier to just go "took our jobs", like some evil Chinese came here with big suitcases, stuffed all our jobs in there and left.
> Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky
There was /not/ much awareness about this in the West. People would not be so good about recycling if there was, as people generally thought they were doing a good thing by recycling and wouldn’t have bothered otherwise(at least in my experience). And nothing excuses fraud, which is what it’s called when you lie about what you are doing. China committed fraud in the recycling business and that’s not okay, no buts about it.
The Chinese “took our jobs” by not following the rules we have about how those jobs should be done. We should have tariffed them for not living up to our Environmental and Occupational Safety standards, if our government was principled in its ethics. It’s not the corporation’s fault the US government is cool with externalities in other countries.
If you think Russia needs an umbrella, I have my doubts about your understanding of politics. North Korea is the only country getting meaningful amounts of support from it.
As for the greatest exporter of tech surveillance, I believe that would be Israel, followed by Silicon Valley, the greatest supporter of dictatorships (by number) would probably be the US, while the greatest destroyer of blue collar jobs would be the computer, through automation. The greatest per-capita polluter in the world is left an an exercise to the reader, but it should be noted that China isn't even in the running for that one.
As for pollution, it must feel good to have offshored all of our polluting industry, and then blaming the developing world both for polluting, and stealing all the jobs. I don't think China was driving the pro-globalization rhetoric that lead us to this point...
But its easier to blame the foreign boogiemen for all of those things... Attacking China, is free karma, after all.
Does not look like, that management of western companies would share your opinion. Latest and notable example (I am robotics enthusiast): https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20962688/adidas-robotic-... Just to save few pennies factories are relocated to Asia. I barely possess things not made in China.
The goals of the private sector sometimes don't align with the goals of human freedom. But we can nudge the private sector in a better direction.
Consider tariffs on Chinese goods. There are other countries in Asia that could serve as manufacturing bases for international companies which are not led by brutal dictatorships and better align with Western ideals. Tariffs can be effective in convincing companies to move out of China into these other more appropriate countries.
how would this happen? Would it require military intervention? Covert operations to corrupt the party and make it unstable? It seems quite impossible. I think humans may colonize the moon before this happens.
Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries, per capita is in fact the correct way to measure when trying to decide whether a given country is contributing more or less than its fair share of the world's total for any kind of atmospheric pollution.
One simple way to see this is to consider what would happen if China were to split up into 100 separate smaller countries, each with the same per capita emissions as before.
Under a per country measurement, you get the absurd result that emissions have massively improved, even though the amount actually emitted into the atmosphere has not changed at all.
One simple way to see this is to consider what would happen if China were to split up into 100 separate smaller countries
Again, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the emissions under control of any one government. There is no realistic probability of China breaking up so that is a complete red herring.
China’s government has made the policy decision to increase its emissions and I wonder if everyone will be happy when “per capita” they match much less populated countries. It isn’t required under the Paris treaty to take any action for 10 more years by which time “per capita” it will vastly outstrip any Western country, both in absolute terms and “per capita”.
Looking at it “per capita” is just the politically correct version of climate denial.
Most of these are a function of China's population than "evilness". Support for dictatorships is bad -- but even Europe burns more coal per capita.
> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
Oh come on. You are basically saying a poor country doesn't have a right to get rich. This is hardly evil - in fact a net good thing for the world if you valued a Chinese citizen the same as one in a developed country.
China is also the largest country in terms of population.
This is like saying California is bad because it has the most crime and most poor people, ignoring the fact that it is the most populous state.
The CPC could definitely be better, but you would have these problems regardless, and if China ever cleans up its act, there is always India whose problems are probably going to be much worse.
Because western nations already had their industrial booms and now see how incredibly damaging it was to the planet. Sure it's easy for them to criticize because they already reaped the benefits. But that doesn't mean they should have to stand by watching even more destructive industrial expansion continue.
They are not standing by and watching. They are involved in the tragedy. Western nations are dismantling nuclear power on a massive scale. They are blocking the growth of renewables industries in developing nations [0] under the guise of free trade instead of promoting renewables usage in those countries. US has backed off the Paris climate accord saying they should not be subsidizing solar in these countries. They are showing anything but leadership after having damaged the planet for their own benefit all these years.
Climate change is a problem, and we have to deal with it, but the west blaming India and China when the US has the largest emission per capita by a mile and more is not going to get us anywhere.
No they shouldn't just stand by. The current development and projection is very worrisome regarding the environment on a global scale.
What I think is often missing though is considering how we are contributing to the co2 output of those developing countries. A big share of their power demands is through production of goods for pretty much the rest of the world. It really grinds my gears how so many people suggest we can completely ignore that we are creating that demand in the first place, exploiting cheap production costs in China, which is in part because regulations regarding pollution are so lax over there, while at the same time patting ourselves on the back for reducing co2 output here, when you really just move more and more production to other counties.
And I don't have a good idea how to fix this either. Clearly, consumers don't care enough to vote with their money, or pressure local politicians. But turning a blind eye on our contribution entirely and conveniently pointing out how China is so horrible and we're so great isn't going to fix anything either.
> And I find this troubling. On what moral authority the west think it is ok to kick the ladder?
Most of the West doesn't think it is OK to kick the ladder. That's why the Paris agreement included the developed countries providing a lot of aid to countries like India to help them meet climate goals without having to give up on development.
If one thinks and supports politicians that believe climate change is a threat to human existence you would, logically, wholeheartedly support the following:
1. Ban all air travel
2. Ban all consumer goods made in developing nations. (a large contributor to China and India's carbon footprint)
3. War with countries producing a large carbon foot print if they refuse diplomatic efforts to meaningfully curb emissions.
4. Eat only plants and insects.
5. No cars (battery or otherwise).
6. Culling or otherwise slowing the population.
If one is not willing to adopt all of these (and more unmentioned) as part of their own lifestyle and political views one does not truly believe climate change poses as great a danger as it is made out to be.
In fact, it is proof there is a particular political end in mind and climate change is a convenient excuse for those in power to meet their own political ends.
I think climate change is an existential threat with a small but not zero chance of wiping out humanity (probably indirectly by sparking WW3). I think those policies would be an existential threat with higher probability of leading to a war that wipes out humanity, not to mention impossible to pass in a democracy.
Why not just impose a massive carbon tax and carbon import duties? This would essentially accomplish all of your goals without war (which is a TERRIBLE idea, war is VERY energy intensive and extremely wasteful, never mind the untold suffering placed upon the low-income, poor soldiers and civilizations who will die unnecessarily).
> Why not just impose a massive carbon tax and carbon import duties? This would essentially accomplish all of your goals without war
This is going to be the most cynical possible of takes, but I just don't see how this is politically viable in a place like the United States. The government is gridlocked and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the United States military is a massive CO2 emitter, so this would likely drive the dual deficits into even more dangerous territory because, let's face it, we're not going to demilitarize in any meaningful way.
Increases in gas taxes were the reason for the Gilets Jaunes protests in France, so raising taxes could lead to war in itself. Also broad scale carbon taxes will likely impact the poor more than the rich.
The nice thing about carbon taxes is that they raise revenue. You can then redistribute this revenue out to people to further address income inequality, or at least offset the regressive nature of consumption taxes.
If you tax carbon, the invisible hand of the market will incentivize creation of greener alternatives. Much cheaper to administer and less likely to have crony capitalism than subsidies.
The point of carbon taxes is to price the negative externality of carbon emissions. Since we aren't allowed to dump nuclear waste or human refuse in public parks, why should we get to dump GHG's and child-asthma-gasses into the air for free?
What is done with the revenue from the carbon tax? That's up to the policy, it could be revenue neutral w/ a progressive rebate that helps the poor, or the revenue could be used to support EV chargers, renewables, efficiency upgrades, it's all up to the policy makers. In WA, USA, they tried to pass a carbon tax, but it failed because some moderates/GOP wanted revenue neutral w/ taxpayer rebates, whereas the left wanted climate equity and green-new-deal-type policies. So, there is real, carbon-tax-killing debate over what to do with revenues.
Citation? I would bet as a percentage of income the rich do not spend as much on carbon generating stuff. Most taxes on consumption are regressive unless they are on luxuries that the poor can’t afford.
I think the basic intuition is that to make luxury product X involves lots of poor people using carbon. If you only count the direct expenditures then it looks worse for poor people, if you trace each purchase back to its carbon then it affects the people who buy lots of stuff.
Increases in gas taxes were also the reason for the currently ongoing unrest in Iran and Lebanon. Populations are very sensitive to this cost, and it quickly leads to unmanageable inflation.
We can participate in the society we live in while recognizing the deep flaws it has and try to make meaningful changes. We can't just "ban all air travel" without civilization as we know it ceasing to exist and causing unfathomable loss of human life by war, famine, and disease. We have to try to change the tires on a moving car, so to speak.
"Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account."
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States [1]. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
Carbon tariffs don't have to only be on the carbon content of the goods transferred. You can just punish a country generally for not doing their part if you'll otherwise have a tragedy of the commons type outcome.
I'm relatively hopeful that renewables will simply be cheaper though, in part thanks to China. But we could still use tariffs for global co-operation on other sources of emissions (there was a story recently about China releasing CFCs for example).
It's hard to get a good read on what really happens in China since they don't have a free press and I can only read what has been translated into English. The amazing progress in photovoltaic price:performance ratios makes me hopeful too, and it looks like we are just starting to enter the era of affordable big battery projects to use solar electricity after sunset. Those are great developments.
Unfortunately, China appears to have some historical inertia and perverse incentives to keep mining coal and building/running coal plants even if coal-fired electricity isn't the cheapest any more [1]. The incentives to keep running economically dubious coal plants to maintain employment can be very strong in some provinces, even if that conflicts with national goals for reducing air pollution. Mining coal and running coal plants requires more workers per megawatt hour than solar power. And even if they were equal, it's not like coal miners can painlessly make the transition to working in solar manufacturing or installation.
I have also read about situations where e.g. a province gets revenue for every ton of coal mined, but would not get any revenue for every hour of sunshine collected, so there are localized revenue reasons for provincial authorities to prefer coal.
[1] Like Germany, Australia, the US, Poland, South Africa... and more.
I think anything like that is going to appear retroactively very hypocritical to any developing nation that finds itself under such carbon tariffs.
A sort of reparation or settlement for western carbon output in the 20th century, which the same impact on the climate only differing in happening earlier, would help developing nations get on board. This arrangement could take the form of investment in a developing nations clean energy infrastructure or compensation in other forms.
Otherwise, developing nations besides China will probably continue buying legacy, retired coal fire equipment from China, which has been happening for some time now.
Hypocrisy is orthogonal to effectiveness. If it costs less to switch to renewables than pay the tariffs then they stop burning coal.
But the hypocrisy argument fails anyway because the renewable alternatives that exist today didn't exist a hundred years ago. It's altogether different to choose coal when the science is less well understood and no viable alternatives are known to exist than to do so today when that is not the case.
There is also a difference in scale. There are more than four times as many people in the developing world as there are in the developed world. If they used the same amount per capita then they would release more carbon in 10 years than we did in 40. Even if the First World hadn't burned an ounce of coal, they still wouldn't be able to do what we actually did. But they also don't need to today.
And it would be easier to pass tariffs than convince the population of the First World to send their money overseas. This needs to happen right now, not after people argue about it for another twenty years.
Largely, I agree with you. Just pointing out the appearance of hypocrisy could lead to tension in this decisive time where we need to act now, as you say. A mixture of tariffs / investment could be used to get the goal most effectively.
Imposing the tariffs would result in the investment you're looking for anyway. Once you make coal uncompetitive on cost, people still need electricity, so they buy renewables. The investors follow the demand.
At some point pollution will be seen as an act of war and then I suspect the problem will be solved by banking sanctions on countries that buy old, inefficient equipment.
I personally think China won't be the problem for carbon production in the future at a national level as they are heavily investing in solar, batteries and electric transportation at the same time they have started to look for gdp growth in the services industry instead of production and construction. I feel the major carbon growth is going to come from Africa and poorer parts of Asia as more people get out of poverty and start to consume more power.
I looked into a few websites tracking climate change progress. They seemed to show that China is doing relatively better compared to others, in terms of climate change goals.
Realistically, there is little incentive for China to cut back on coal usage. In an ideal world China would use the funds directed to Belt and Road to green infrastructure but in terms of its own ambition and growth prospects coal is the only reliable energy source to match the scale of China's ambition.
The global economy needs China to keep on growing. Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending. A recession in the EU spells disaster for the rest of the world.
It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades (ie. at least since the 70S) to favor its own growth.
Right, but decades ago coal was the cheapest source of power. We didn't have cheap renewables in the 70s. Solar is cheaper than coal in China.* They could certainly grow (at least) no slower by building huge amounts of renewables rather than coal.
*(I'm not sure if this is on a "spot" basis or annualised to account for intermittency, but then it probably doesn't account for the negative externalities of coal either so let's chalk it up to a draw.)
Bullshit. Not at the scale they need. Solar might be "cheaper" in very confined, specific contexts. But China needs on-demand capacity for a billion people. Renewables + batteries cannot accomplish this.
Plus, solar is cheap partially because you don't need to source that much of it. Try to source that much solar and see what happens to the price.
> there is little incentive for China to cut back on coal usage.
Besides the destruction of our planet. They must be stopped, even if it means tanking the world economy. One of my dissapointments in things like the Green New Deal is that it ignores international trade. We should ban Chinese trade until they align with climate goals.
>Realistically, there is little incentive for China to cut back on coal usage.
How about the 10's of millions of their citizens being poisoned or dying from pollution related illnesses?
>The global economy needs China to keep on growing.
They run trade imbalances with almost the entire world. The Chinese are not the best consumers.
>Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending.
Huh?
>It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades
How is China not a 1st world nation? Or not an advance economy?
> How is China not a 1st world nation? Or not an advance economy?
Whether or not you think China is a 1st world nation, a great deal of political logic in China evokes a historical animosity towards Western nations for actions during the Chinese "Century of Shame". China has certainly caught up in many ways but is still developing, and the biggest leaps in development are still only a generation or two deep.
>How about the 10's of millions of their citizens being poisoned or dying from pollution related illnesses?
Before you saying this, please update your source. Sorry, India is the most polluted country, and China is much better than lots of Asia countries, dear!
The Party survived inflicting famine on its own people killing tens of millions. It is confident of surviving an ecological catastrophe and ruling over whatever’s left.
> The global economy needs China to keep on growing.
[citation needed]. China is on its last legs of growth. It's doing an exact repeat of what Japan did that led to their "lost decade". Either there will be a hard correction or well over a decade of no or little growth. Every year the growth rate has been going down. It's now estimated for less than 6% growth for 2019.
I encourage everyone here to read the underlying report for a more nuanced view: [1].
Apparently, the central government turned over permitting to provincial governments in 2014, leading to a massive surge in permits for coal plants, peaking in 2015 (see Fig. 3). Provincial governments wanted to promote growth above all else, so they went for coal. The central government was apparently alarmed by this, and imposed restrictions in 2016, leading new permits issued per year to drop by 80%. However, the new plants that were approved from 2014-2016 are still in the pipeline, which is why there are still new plants being built. The central government has slowed their construction and has proposed withdrawing a large fraction of the permits (for example, 150 GW of permits were canceled in 2018-19, while 8.5 GW of new construction was approved - see Table 4).
But just as in the West, there's a powerful coal lobby in China, which is pushing for already permitted projects to go ahead, for restrictions on new permits for coal plants to be lifted, and for the overall cap the government has set (1.1 TW) to be increased. Playing into all of this is the general economic slowdown in China, which of course puts pressure on the government to ease restrictions.
Despite all this, the trend in China is for less coal capacity to actually come online each year (Fig. 4). The question is really whether it will fall fast enough (Fig. 5).
Misinformation abounds in climate change discussions. The issue is as complicated as our environment is. You can't write a headline like "China Set for Coal Expansion in Threat to Climate Goals" without including a whole nation of nuance by implication.
Meanwhile the US just shut down its two largest coal plants in the past month, and has shed 50 just since Trump has been in office; but people keep touting China as a "climate leader." Pretending a non-binding Paris Agreement the US backed out of meant anything at all. It was non-binding.
Bloomberg has lost my trust as a reliable source of information since the invented story about China Chip hack[1]. Contrary to the article, China is the leading investor in renewable energy[2][3].
There is nothing contrary about this report. Coal and renewables don't annihilate each other like matter and antimatter.
China is simultaneously expanding its use of electricity from coal, renewables, and nuclear plants faster than any other country in the world. This is because China is the world's largest consumer of electricity and is still growing.
Well, the share of coal in China's primary energy mix has declined to a new low[1]. Basically, China has been trying to close down small, inefficient coal plants and build renewable power stations. Resuming massive construction of coal plants does comply with what they have been doing.
Yes, the central government wants to use coal more efficiently and to curb acutely harmful air pollution. China's energy mix is now less coal-heavy than it was 10 years ago. Since China's total energy use is still growing robustly, a declining share for coal does not necessarily mean a declining absolute quantity (tonnage) of coal. According to your own link, "Among the fossil fuels, consumption growth was led by natural gas (+18%) and oil (+5.0%), while coal use rose (+0.9%), the second consecutive year of growth."
The big problem with China’s renewable energy investments is that they are largely out west while the problems are largely out east. They are planning a super grid to solve this, but it isn’t there yet and its not clear when it will be.
1. Perverse incentives in some provinces still reward coal production.
2. Diminishing incentives for solar and other renewable.
3. Pivot to interior development of interior regions, bureaucrats are adopting the same building + smoke stack strategies that worked on coastal cities. There's was some internal response - many of the proposed coal plants are being eliminated.
4. Keep in mind China is still at 60% urbanization rate. A lot of construction related CO2 is basically for modern housing stock - commonly referred to as "ghost cities" - but they get occupied eventually.
5. Renewable is still central to domestic energy security in response to US security competition. Previously, renewable was a response to air quality complaints, now it has to be balanced with security.
US-SINO trade war
5. Increased pressure for Chinese energy security - China has access to essentially infinite amount of domestic coal. Now that US seems to be withdrawing from Gulf security because US is energy independent from shale, there's more urgency in China to build up coal security at least short term.
6. Reliance on construction to maintain growth. Related to 3&4.
7. Related to #3, economic pressures from trade war might motivate more coal plants to be built. There was also a resurgence in shadow banking after deleveraging campaign was cut short due to trade war.
Globally
8. Exporting infrastructure capacity means more coal plants along Belt & Road.
I'm of mixed feelings, cheap goal -> development. Eliminating poverty and development is more pressing than climate change. There isn't a climate change strategy that can handle uplifting the developing world into developed status. I think that's like 3/4 of the world. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in the mean time to figure out how to mitigate, but ethically we should be working towards an end goal of X universal consumption baseline. X being much higher than global average now and probably much lower than western levels. If that's beyond global carrying capacity then I guess WW3.
Just wait til India gets their coal expansion in gear. China is already the largest co2 emitter, India hasn't quite arrived yet. But India has no shortage of coal to prevent joining the party, and 300M+ people still needing basic electric service.
I just can't take this article seriously. Publication that has supported neoliberal free market values uncritically since its inception claims we can't meet our targets. Of course we can't with the free market bs it champions!
128 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] thread> Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.
this kind of thing makes the reporting feel questionable. A shame because the message is really important.
China has 43 GW of nuclear built, 11 GW in construction, and another 36 GW planned. I guess it's not a huge figure compared to 148.
By that measure, China emits about twice what the US does, 0.6 vs 0.3. However China has done about twice as well as the US has in reducing this number, which is why China is on track to meeting their Paris commitments and the US isn't.
Not letting China totally off the hook, just suggesting that there is an economic force driving them toward the bottom of the barrel for cheap energy. California gets up to 50% of its power from solar during midday, but it also does a lot of much higher margin work like software, design, skilled manufacturing, etc.
The world CO2 per GDP number is falling, which is a good sign:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pp.gd
Just a quick comparison of the share of industry in each region's GDP:
It's a false belief to assume these manufacturing processes would return to EU/USA should China increase their regulations. Instead, there would be other nations with lower regulations that these manufacturing processes would move to in order maintain a satisfactory profit.
This is why I said manufacturing would move to somewhere with fewer labor/environmental regulations. Things may cost more in the short-run, but that's just before some new, enticing land of opportunities pops up.
We should be tariffing nations who don’t live up to our human and environmental rights standards if we actually care about the issues. We should be forcing corporations to be ethical to do business here.
The drug dealer is taking advantage of existing social decay but not necessarily creating it; but some do (opioid epidemic for example).
Also, you have it backwards. CCP had the option to create an export-driven economy, as well as the option on how to power it. Nobody held a gun to their collective heads and said "You must produce cheap goods for western countries, and you must power your economy in the cheapest and most polluting way possible."
The Chinese government has a lot of agency, and a lot of culpability, in this.
What it does show is that China’s CO2 use is mainly industrial while in America it is much more personal
No, but experience has shown that that is the surest path to economic development - probably the only viable path for a country the size of China. A small city state might be able to develop by establishing itself as a financial or shipping hub, but for a giant country of 1.4 billion people to go from utter poverty to wealth, there's a good argument that it first has to turn itself into the world's factory.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
They'll also cut CO2 emissions as a side effect of an attempt to corner the market on green technologies.
- greatest polluter of air via coal
- greatest polluter of water via plastics
- greatest polluter of disease via swine flu, pig flu, and now recently, contagious Black Death
- greatest supporter of dictatorships around the world. Umbrella for Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc
- greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
- greatest tech surveillance exporter to the dictatorships around the world
We need to decouple from this evil regime as soon as possible.
In 50 years, the ruling Chinese party will be viewed as the Nazi government of our time.
> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
But isn't this just the nature of globalization? And aren't the corporations in the countries you mentioned complicit in choosing to cut costs by moving production to cheap countries? And aren't we as consumers complicit in continuing to buy cheap goods like it's going out of fashion (wishful thinking lol).
We made a lot of effort to make sure that it was done in a way that was great for the bottom line of multinationals, though.
[1] Or, more specifically, our politicians.
The bottom line was the only thing that ever mattered.
> - greatest polluter of water via plastics
Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky. But why blame the ones in charge on our side that made that happen and kept doing it for years? It takes effort! and what if they actually stop? There'd be one thing less to shit on China about!
> - greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
Yeah same thing, why blame the companies that actively move production and jobs over to China? Much easier to just go "took our jobs", like some evil Chinese came here with big suitcases, stuffed all our jobs in there and left.
> Which totally isn't in large parts due to the whole West exporting their trash there for years for "recycling", fully aware of the fact they just dump it in the ocean or burn it under the bare sky
There was /not/ much awareness about this in the West. People would not be so good about recycling if there was, as people generally thought they were doing a good thing by recycling and wouldn’t have bothered otherwise(at least in my experience). And nothing excuses fraud, which is what it’s called when you lie about what you are doing. China committed fraud in the recycling business and that’s not okay, no buts about it.
The Chinese “took our jobs” by not following the rules we have about how those jobs should be done. We should have tariffed them for not living up to our Environmental and Occupational Safety standards, if our government was principled in its ethics. It’s not the corporation’s fault the US government is cool with externalities in other countries.
As for the greatest exporter of tech surveillance, I believe that would be Israel, followed by Silicon Valley, the greatest supporter of dictatorships (by number) would probably be the US, while the greatest destroyer of blue collar jobs would be the computer, through automation. The greatest per-capita polluter in the world is left an an exercise to the reader, but it should be noted that China isn't even in the running for that one.
As for pollution, it must feel good to have offshored all of our polluting industry, and then blaming the developing world both for polluting, and stealing all the jobs. I don't think China was driving the pro-globalization rhetoric that lead us to this point...
But its easier to blame the foreign boogiemen for all of those things... Attacking China, is free karma, after all.
Consider tariffs on Chinese goods. There are other countries in Asia that could serve as manufacturing bases for international companies which are not led by brutal dictatorships and better align with Western ideals. Tariffs can be effective in convincing companies to move out of China into these other more appropriate countries.
Cue the usual apologists saying “but per capita...” as if that makes the slightest difference
One simple way to see this is to consider what would happen if China were to split up into 100 separate smaller countries, each with the same per capita emissions as before.
Under a per country measurement, you get the absurd result that emissions have massively improved, even though the amount actually emitted into the atmosphere has not changed at all.
Again, irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the emissions under control of any one government. There is no realistic probability of China breaking up so that is a complete red herring.
China’s government has made the policy decision to increase its emissions and I wonder if everyone will be happy when “per capita” they match much less populated countries. It isn’t required under the Paris treaty to take any action for 10 more years by which time “per capita” it will vastly outstrip any Western country, both in absolute terms and “per capita”.
Looking at it “per capita” is just the politically correct version of climate denial.
Why is this the case? Global warming does not care about the number of governments in the world.
> greatest blue collared jobs/ communities destroyers in Italy, France, Spain, UK, US, Japan
Oh come on. You are basically saying a poor country doesn't have a right to get rich. This is hardly evil - in fact a net good thing for the world if you valued a Chinese citizen the same as one in a developed country.
This is like saying California is bad because it has the most crime and most poor people, ignoring the fact that it is the most populous state.
The CPC could definitely be better, but you would have these problems regardless, and if China ever cleans up its act, there is always India whose problems are probably going to be much worse.
(also to India and other countries)
And I find this troubling. On what moral authority the west think it is ok to kick the ladder?
Climate change is a problem, and we have to deal with it, but the west blaming India and China when the US has the largest emission per capita by a mile and more is not going to get us anywhere.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-india-wto/india...
What I think is often missing though is considering how we are contributing to the co2 output of those developing countries. A big share of their power demands is through production of goods for pretty much the rest of the world. It really grinds my gears how so many people suggest we can completely ignore that we are creating that demand in the first place, exploiting cheap production costs in China, which is in part because regulations regarding pollution are so lax over there, while at the same time patting ourselves on the back for reducing co2 output here, when you really just move more and more production to other counties.
And I don't have a good idea how to fix this either. Clearly, consumers don't care enough to vote with their money, or pressure local politicians. But turning a blind eye on our contribution entirely and conveniently pointing out how China is so horrible and we're so great isn't going to fix anything either.
Most of the West doesn't think it is OK to kick the ladder. That's why the Paris agreement included the developed countries providing a lot of aid to countries like India to help them meet climate goals without having to give up on development.
1. Ban all air travel 2. Ban all consumer goods made in developing nations. (a large contributor to China and India's carbon footprint) 3. War with countries producing a large carbon foot print if they refuse diplomatic efforts to meaningfully curb emissions. 4. Eat only plants and insects. 5. No cars (battery or otherwise). 6. Culling or otherwise slowing the population.
If one is not willing to adopt all of these (and more unmentioned) as part of their own lifestyle and political views one does not truly believe climate change poses as great a danger as it is made out to be.
In fact, it is proof there is a particular political end in mind and climate change is a convenient excuse for those in power to meet their own political ends.
This is going to be the most cynical possible of takes, but I just don't see how this is politically viable in a place like the United States. The government is gridlocked and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, the United States military is a massive CO2 emitter, so this would likely drive the dual deficits into even more dangerous territory because, let's face it, we're not going to demilitarize in any meaningful way.
What is done with the revenue from the carbon tax? That's up to the policy, it could be revenue neutral w/ a progressive rebate that helps the poor, or the revenue could be used to support EV chargers, renewables, efficiency upgrades, it's all up to the policy makers. In WA, USA, they tried to pass a carbon tax, but it failed because some moderates/GOP wanted revenue neutral w/ taxpayer rebates, whereas the left wanted climate equity and green-new-deal-type policies. So, there is real, carbon-tax-killing debate over what to do with revenues.
It is of course easy to tweak them to make them even better, like directing some of the money to subsidize public transport.
I think the basic intuition is that to make luxury product X involves lots of poor people using carbon. If you only count the direct expenditures then it looks worse for poor people, if you trace each purchase back to its carbon then it affects the people who buy lots of stuff.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import...
"Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account."
Energy related carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007 in the United States [1]. They didn't just get hidden by imports replacing domestic manufacturing. Even incorporating imports into the national balance, US emissions are down from the peak. This is largely due to efficient combined cycle gas turbines replacing coal plants and -- to a lesser but growing extent -- a larger proportion of renewable electricity in the national electricity mix.
Chinese carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked yet. As of 2017 (referenced above), 87% of Chinese emissions are attributable to domestic consumption. That should moderate hopes that Chinese emission trends could be reversed by CO2 tariffs. It should also moderate anxiety that Chinese emissions are "really" the offshored emissions of Western consumers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th...
I'm relatively hopeful that renewables will simply be cheaper though, in part thanks to China. But we could still use tariffs for global co-operation on other sources of emissions (there was a story recently about China releasing CFCs for example).
Unfortunately, China appears to have some historical inertia and perverse incentives to keep mining coal and building/running coal plants even if coal-fired electricity isn't the cheapest any more [1]. The incentives to keep running economically dubious coal plants to maintain employment can be very strong in some provinces, even if that conflicts with national goals for reducing air pollution. Mining coal and running coal plants requires more workers per megawatt hour than solar power. And even if they were equal, it's not like coal miners can painlessly make the transition to working in solar manufacturing or installation.
I have also read about situations where e.g. a province gets revenue for every ton of coal mined, but would not get any revenue for every hour of sunshine collected, so there are localized revenue reasons for provincial authorities to prefer coal.
[1] Like Germany, Australia, the US, Poland, South Africa... and more.
A sort of reparation or settlement for western carbon output in the 20th century, which the same impact on the climate only differing in happening earlier, would help developing nations get on board. This arrangement could take the form of investment in a developing nations clean energy infrastructure or compensation in other forms.
Otherwise, developing nations besides China will probably continue buying legacy, retired coal fire equipment from China, which has been happening for some time now.
But the hypocrisy argument fails anyway because the renewable alternatives that exist today didn't exist a hundred years ago. It's altogether different to choose coal when the science is less well understood and no viable alternatives are known to exist than to do so today when that is not the case.
There is also a difference in scale. There are more than four times as many people in the developing world as there are in the developed world. If they used the same amount per capita then they would release more carbon in 10 years than we did in 40. Even if the First World hadn't burned an ounce of coal, they still wouldn't be able to do what we actually did. But they also don't need to today.
And it would be easier to pass tariffs than convince the population of the First World to send their money overseas. This needs to happen right now, not after people argue about it for another twenty years.
Here is the summary that I posted on my blog:
https://paraditedc.com/2019/11/22/pdc-10-chinas-real-progres...
The global economy needs China to keep on growing. Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending. A recession in the EU spells disaster for the rest of the world.
It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades (ie. at least since the 70S) to favor its own growth.
*(I'm not sure if this is on a "spot" basis or annualised to account for intermittency, but then it probably doesn't account for the negative externalities of coal either so let's chalk it up to a draw.)
Bullshit. Not at the scale they need. Solar might be "cheaper" in very confined, specific contexts. But China needs on-demand capacity for a billion people. Renewables + batteries cannot accomplish this.
Plus, solar is cheap partially because you don't need to source that much of it. Try to source that much solar and see what happens to the price.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0441-z
Besides the destruction of our planet. They must be stopped, even if it means tanking the world economy. One of my dissapointments in things like the Green New Deal is that it ignores international trade. We should ban Chinese trade until they align with climate goals.
How about the 10's of millions of their citizens being poisoned or dying from pollution related illnesses?
>The global economy needs China to keep on growing.
They run trade imbalances with almost the entire world. The Chinese are not the best consumers.
>Germany, arguably the most important economy in the world outside of China, India and the US is nearing recessions because of slowing Chinese consumer spending.
Huh?
>It's difficult to expect China to curb it's growth for the common good when more advanced economies ignored the science for decades
How is China not a 1st world nation? Or not an advance economy?
Their per capita income is 15% of Americans'?
The other 1/3rd live what are essentially first world lifestyles.
Whether or not you think China is a 1st world nation, a great deal of political logic in China evokes a historical animosity towards Western nations for actions during the Chinese "Century of Shame". China has certainly caught up in many ways but is still developing, and the biggest leaps in development are still only a generation or two deep.
Before you saying this, please update your source. Sorry, India is the most polluted country, and China is much better than lots of Asia countries, dear!
The CCP didn’t blink when tens of millions died in a famine they created. They will sacrifice any number to maintain their regime.
How about the world not ending?
That might be a more compelling argument.
The Party survived inflicting famine on its own people killing tens of millions. It is confident of surviving an ecological catastrophe and ruling over whatever’s left.
[citation needed]. China is on its last legs of growth. It's doing an exact repeat of what Japan did that led to their "lost decade". Either there will be a hard correction or well over a decade of no or little growth. Every year the growth rate has been going down. It's now estimated for less than 6% growth for 2019.
Apparently, the central government turned over permitting to provincial governments in 2014, leading to a massive surge in permits for coal plants, peaking in 2015 (see Fig. 3). Provincial governments wanted to promote growth above all else, so they went for coal. The central government was apparently alarmed by this, and imposed restrictions in 2016, leading new permits issued per year to drop by 80%. However, the new plants that were approved from 2014-2016 are still in the pipeline, which is why there are still new plants being built. The central government has slowed their construction and has proposed withdrawing a large fraction of the permits (for example, 150 GW of permits were canceled in 2018-19, while 8.5 GW of new construction was approved - see Table 4).
But just as in the West, there's a powerful coal lobby in China, which is pushing for already permitted projects to go ahead, for restrictions on new permits for coal plants to be lifted, and for the overall cap the government has set (1.1 TW) to be increased. Playing into all of this is the general economic slowdown in China, which of course puts pressure on the government to ease restrictions.
Despite all this, the trend in China is for less coal capacity to actually come online each year (Fig. 4). The question is really whether it will fall fast enough (Fig. 5).
1. https://endcoal.org/global-coal-plant-tracker/reports/out-of...
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/01/11/china-...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
China is simultaneously expanding its use of electricity from coal, renewables, and nuclear plants faster than any other country in the world. This is because China is the world's largest consumer of electricity and is still growing.
[1] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
Domestically
1. Perverse incentives in some provinces still reward coal production.
2. Diminishing incentives for solar and other renewable.
3. Pivot to interior development of interior regions, bureaucrats are adopting the same building + smoke stack strategies that worked on coastal cities. There's was some internal response - many of the proposed coal plants are being eliminated.
4. Keep in mind China is still at 60% urbanization rate. A lot of construction related CO2 is basically for modern housing stock - commonly referred to as "ghost cities" - but they get occupied eventually.
5. Renewable is still central to domestic energy security in response to US security competition. Previously, renewable was a response to air quality complaints, now it has to be balanced with security.
US-SINO trade war
5. Increased pressure for Chinese energy security - China has access to essentially infinite amount of domestic coal. Now that US seems to be withdrawing from Gulf security because US is energy independent from shale, there's more urgency in China to build up coal security at least short term.
6. Reliance on construction to maintain growth. Related to 3&4.
7. Related to #3, economic pressures from trade war might motivate more coal plants to be built. There was also a resurgence in shadow banking after deleveraging campaign was cut short due to trade war.
Globally
8. Exporting infrastructure capacity means more coal plants along Belt & Road.
I'm of mixed feelings, cheap goal -> development. Eliminating poverty and development is more pressing than climate change. There isn't a climate change strategy that can handle uplifting the developing world into developed status. I think that's like 3/4 of the world. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in the mean time to figure out how to mitigate, but ethically we should be working towards an end goal of X universal consumption baseline. X being much higher than global average now and probably much lower than western levels. If that's beyond global carrying capacity then I guess WW3.
E: typos