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I think China themselves have targets to cut emissions and transition to clean energy [1]. They've been leading the charge on all clean energy tech so far. It
by safog 6y ago
I think China themselves have targets to cut emissions and transition to clean energy [1]. They've been leading the charge on all clean energy tech so far.
It looked like some of the dirtier industries are being moved on from China to SE Asia (Vietnam etc.) but there's a general push across the world to transition to clean energy.
I'm pretty confident we'll get out of the doom and gloom existential threat to humanity scenarios, but still think large portions of the world's populations will be impacted by climate change.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/27/china-carbon-pledge-put-energy-system-reverse-wind-solar#:~:text=China's%20President%20Xi%20Jinping%20stunned,to%20virtually%20zero%20by%202060 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/27/china-ca....
- allendoerfer 6y ago> They've been leading the charge on all clean energy tech so far. No, they did not. Germany did and China profitted.
- M2Ys4U 6y agoChina has brought more renewable power online than almost everyone else combined. (although they have also brought online a shittonne of coal power, too)
- allendoerfer 6y agoGermany was a first mover in solar as well as in wind energy. It does not make sense to compare the installed capacity of China to Germany. It is 17 times bigger than Germany. China was the second mover profitting from proven technology and prices that were lowered for all players by subsidising not German companies, but the installation of solar power (no matter where it was from).
- rebuilder 6y agoRe: doom and gloom, I'm less worried about the immediate effects of climate change than I am about the knock-on effects. By which I mean wide scale war. For example, large areas in India (and other hot, humid places) may see lethal wet bulb temperatures during heatwaves within a few decades. I'm not looking forward to seeing how things play out when nuclear powers like India and Pakistan have to deal with hundreds of millions of their citizens needing to relocate.
- safog 6y agoI'm pretty worried about this as well - esp. about heatwaves, but I don't think that would result in nuclear war in our lifetimes. Unless China messes around with rivers that originate in Tibet that is. Possibly my biggest worry is water - providing water for 1bn+ people (and agriculture, and industries) is going to get harder and harder. I'm a techno optimist, so I'm hoping some variant of desalination tech will pull through if things get really bad. The other big worry as you say is the heat waves. If we do get emissions under control, I think we'll also end up doing some form of carbon scrubbing and don't just sit around in a 2C warmer world. None of our current climate engineering approaches are enough to arrest global warming by themselves but I'm hoping we can eventually control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.