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China, World’s Biggest Polluter, Hits Carbon Goals – 12 Years Early

58 points by Leary 8y ago

scruffyherder 8y ago
Boy do I have a bridge to sell you! Forecast for today haze with extra smog in SE China.
throwaway5752 8y ago
I bet local and provincial officials have reported resounding success!
strictnein 8y ago
Is this completely based on 2016 numbers? 2017 saw an increase from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-... https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to-rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-se...
jernfrost 8y ago
What would be the Chinese incentive to lie about this? How hard is it to check the validity of their claims?
- mikestew 8y ago
  "Their claims"? I'm not saying ya didn't read the article, but you might have missed this: "Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Guan and his colleagues estimate..."
coldtea 8y ago
Nobody bothers to read TFA before making snarky remarks? "That’s the conclusion reached by scientists who looked at the country’s estimated carbon output between 2007 and 2016, as the country’s rapid industrialization slowed and its consumption of coal declined. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience" The research was done at the "University of East Anglia in Britain" -- it's not merely some report out of China...
bilbo0s 8y ago
To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three Gorges because you don't care about the people jumping up and down saying "No". You can also mandate the use of solar and wind energy in a way that you just can't mandate things in other nations. You don't care about the other branches of the energy sector that might be hurt by your policy of "playing favorites". You can swing a pen and hundreds of thousands in carbon heavy sectors are, all of a sudden, out of work. It doesn't matter to you, because you don't have to win elections. I don't doubt that China is ahead of schedule. In fact, I'd be shocked if China was not in the lead globally on adjusting our energy generation mix. They'll have really clean looking dispatch stacks long before we do in the US, but at what cost? (And I'm not just talking about financial costs here.) That's what we have to keep in mind. The fact is that addressing climate change is usually much more than a technology problem. How easy those non-technology aspects of the problem are to overcome greatly depend on what you are willing to tolerate from the authorities charged with addressing the climate change issue.
- mempko 8y ago
  What a bunch of nonsense. China is responding to it's people's concerns. If the US had a functioning democracy, it would also have dramatically reduced carbon emissions.
- mcv 8y ago
  Maybe it is easier to address various problems in an autocracy, but there's still way more that democracies can do to tackle these and other problems. In fact, there are plenty of democracies that are doing a lot to curb carbon emissions or fight other problems. And in the end, reducing carbon is just another problem that requires political action. I suppose it's true that in an autocracy, there are less people that need to be convinced that something is a problem before something can be done, but it's not like democracies are doomed to indecision. We have been able to take action before, we can take action on this. It's not that hard. But we do need to stop making excuses.
- dnomad 8y ago
  The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pure racist nonsense. It gets spouted and accepted uncritically on HN because but it has no basis in reality. In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing. HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model. [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-on-the-rise-in-china/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...
sct202 8y ago
FYI, this is based on a paper published in Nature : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_name=subjects_energy-supply-and-demand https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_na... , and not a government announcement. I don't have access to see what they're using as their data sources, so I'm curious how much they relied on official Chinese government data.
jamhan 8y ago
Is it a coincidence this report appears a month after it was revealed that China was the source of massive amounts of the banned chemical CFC-11? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952

58 points by Leary 8y ago

scruffyherder 8y ago

Boy do I have a bridge to sell you! Forecast for today haze with extra smog in SE China.

throwaway5752 8y ago

I bet local and provincial officials have reported resounding success!

strictnein 8y ago

Is this completely based on 2016 numbers? 2017 saw an increase from China: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-carbon-emissions-hit-record-high-in-2017-idUSKBN1GY0RB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-carbon-iea/global-... https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-set-to-rise-2-percent-in-2017-following-three-year-plateau https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-co2-emissions-se...

jernfrost 8y ago

What would be the Chinese incentive to lie about this? How hard is it to check the validity of their claims?

mikestew 8y ago
"Their claims"? I'm not saying ya didn't read the article, but you might have missed this: "Dabo Guan, a professor of climate change economics at the University of East Anglia in Britain. Guan and his colleagues estimate..."

coldtea 8y ago

Nobody bothers to read TFA before making snarky remarks? "That’s the conclusion reached by scientists who looked at the country’s estimated carbon output between 2007 and 2016, as the country’s rapid industrialization slowed and its consumption of coal declined. The research is published in the journal Nature Geoscience" The research was done at the "University of East Anglia in Britain" -- it's not merely some report out of China...

bilbo0s 8y ago

To be completely fair to everyone else here, it's easy to do something like that in an authoritarian environment. You can build something like Three Gorges because you don't care about the people jumping up and down saying "No". You can also mandate the use of solar and wind energy in a way that you just can't mandate things in other nations. You don't care about the other branches of the energy sector that might be hurt by your policy of "playing favorites". You can swing a pen and hundreds of thousands in carbon heavy sectors are, all of a sudden, out of work. It doesn't matter to you, because you don't have to win elections. I don't doubt that China is ahead of schedule. In fact, I'd be shocked if China was not in the lead globally on adjusting our energy generation mix. They'll have really clean looking dispatch stacks long before we do in the US, but at what cost? (And I'm not just talking about financial costs here.) That's what we have to keep in mind. The fact is that addressing climate change is usually much more than a technology problem. How easy those non-technology aspects of the problem are to overcome greatly depend on what you are willing to tolerate from the authorities charged with addressing the climate change issue.

mempko 8y ago
What a bunch of nonsense. China is responding to it's people's concerns. If the US had a functioning democracy, it would also have dramatically reduced carbon emissions.
mcv 8y ago
Maybe it is easier to address various problems in an autocracy, but there's still way more that democracies can do to tackle these and other problems. In fact, there are plenty of democracies that are doing a lot to curb carbon emissions or fight other problems. And in the end, reducing carbon is just another problem that requires political action. I suppose it's true that in an autocracy, there are less people that need to be convinced that something is a problem before something can be done, but it's not like democracies are doomed to indecision. We have been able to take action before, we can take action on this. It's not that hard. But we do need to stop making excuses.
dnomad 8y ago
The idea that this is how China works, that the President issues a dictate and a billion plus people just immediately jump to it with no questions asked, is pure racist nonsense. It gets spouted and accepted uncritically on HN because but it has no basis in reality. In fact what's become clear in just the last five years is that the environment is a huge issue in China and the government is primarily responding to the people's demands for cleaner air etc. Polls of the population [1] have been revealing for a while that it's a primary concern, only behind corruption and price inflation. More importantly most of the environmental efforts here aren't directed by some central authority in Beijing, instead what you have are the regional municipalities like Shanghai aggressively targeting metrics much, much tougher than those imposed by Beijing. HN's view of China is truly toxic and even on positive articles we get this sort of fantasy commentary (also see the majority of comments below) but the Chinese investment in pollution reduction is really good news and puts to shame what's happening in the US where, just today, coal regulations were wiped out. We can only hope that more countries will follow this model. [1] http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-on-the-rise-in-china/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/19/environmental-concerns-o...

sct202 8y ago

FYI, this is based on a paper published in Nature : https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_name=subjects_energy-supply-and-demand https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0161-1?WT.feed_na... , and not a government announcement. I don't have access to see what they're using as their data sources, so I'm curious how much they relied on official Chinese government data.

jamhan 8y ago

Is it a coincidence this report appears a month after it was revealed that China was the source of massive amounts of the banned chemical CFC-11? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44738952