> You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their

> You're making an odd, apples-to-oranges comparison. China doesn't use coal for energy, only free market countries? China burns more coal than the US an their air quality is far worse. China is building 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years (more than the entire rest of the world has built in the last 35 years) [1] and is adding solar capacity faster than anyone on earth, going from 0.1GW in 2007 to 307GW in 2021. [2] > While it's a shame the US doesn't have a decent rail network, thousands of miles of high-speed rail in China are unsupported by ridership and is riddled with safety problems. For now. Safety problems will be resolved and people will move to live alongside the rail lines, which is a chicken-egg problem the US refuses to solve. It starts to look a whole lot better 10 or 20 years down the line. [edit] @elosius: They've more than tripled nuclear generation in China since 2014, going from 100TWh/yr to 350TWh/yr - from 1% of power to 5% of power. Also, they've made huge strides in terms of air quality. Stop looking backwards, and start looking forwards. Air quality improvements will follow. [3] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China [3] https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-blue-chinas-air-quality-transformation/ https://epic.uchicago.edu/news/from-airpocalypse-to-olympic-...