> a boom in solar that saw the country [China] add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.
Does China use a lot of windmills? The US president has a big concern with windmills, perhaps rightly so, which perhaps explains the rise in emissions.
Back when I worked in EDF, biggest nuclear energy producer, I was astonished to see how fast China was developing its nuclear power.
it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.
That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
China has significantly slowed their nuclear build out. They're still building them faster than anyone else, but the primary cause of the headline is solar.
They're doing clean coal by idling their coal plants. The capacity factor of their coal plants is dropping steadily, and is now below 50%, meaning they're not running more than they're running.
A coal plant that's not running is clean. Still useful for occasional emergency power.
The US, like most democracies, is worse at long term planning. It needs robust incentives to counteract short term instincts.
A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
> A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
I guess in democracies, because we have freedom, then you need to make change desirable.
In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.
Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.
I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.
Speaking about long term planning and short term instincts it is obvious (for me personally) that any and all so called "carbon taxes" or "carbon credits" are simply a bullshit greenwashing schemes, doing more harm than good in the real long term. They are politically motivated and short term pseudo "solutions" doing nothing but shifting emissions to some "other" party or country or region. Dollars or euros or yuan paid as a fine or incentive for emissions doesn't combat those same emissions, not even a little bit.
The US is likely particularly bad at long term planning, even relative to other democracies, at least partially due to the strong executive. It's really easy, and almost expected, for long-term projects to get changed or outright scrapped when control of the executive changes; this is less common in parliamentary democracies (and in oddities like the French system).
U.S. already migrated massive amounts of its energy sector from coal to natural gas over the last couple of decades, which reduced emissions from that replaced capacity by 60% years ago. If and when solar truly makes economic sense to justify the switching costs, it will happen, period. A lot of it is. Solar is growing healthily in the U.S.
Problems with solar remain, however. It's neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid. You must overbuild capacity on solar, because weather happens. No energy is generated at night. Therefore you have to factory battery install cost as well. Finally there are black swan weather events that DO happen in nature that NO ONE can prevent:
Regular reminder that it is an ESTIMATE of emissions across an enormous variety of industries, businesses and individuals over the whole year. A real factual and measurable metric is not some calculated rate of change of a value, but a measure of a value itself - in this case an amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Go to https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/, open "Full record" and see an objective and factual data (and not some politically motivated estimates) - amount of actually emitted gas is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating both for lowest points and highest points.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadChina’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987548 - August 2025
population aging -- older people use less fossil fuel.
reduced household formation, in part driven by increased youth unemployment. It's impossible to get figures for this.
That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pollution...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
Maybe China is in an economic slowdown, so its economy cannot afford to buy as much coal from Australia and petroleum from the Gulf as it used to.
it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.
That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
A coal plant that's not running is clean. Still useful for occasional emergency power.
A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
0: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.
Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.
I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.
Problems with solar remain, however. It's neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid. You must overbuild capacity on solar, because weather happens. No energy is generated at night. Therefore you have to factory battery install cost as well. Finally there are black swan weather events that DO happen in nature that NO ONE can prevent:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Whereupon solar would be rendered useless precisely when humanity would need power the most.
Scroll to the bottom, China fell from 30.98 in 2024 to 29.75 MtCO2. The US rose from 13.55 to 14.92 MtCO2.
Go to https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/, open "Full record" and see an objective and factual data (and not some politically motivated estimates) - amount of actually emitted gas is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating both for lowest points and highest points.