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Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.

ehhthing 24d ago
I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.
- ericmay 24d ago
  Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 24d ago
    Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower. The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
    - ericmay 24d ago
      > Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower. By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential. > The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway. I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs). When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
      - AnthonyMouse 24d ago
        > When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions. Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't. Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way. Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are. But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
      - omgwtfbyobbq 23d ago
        By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better. Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions. https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-fossil-fuel-companies-whos-to-blame-for-climate-change/ https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-foss... And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people. Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
red75prime 24d ago
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
- AnthonyMouse 24d ago
  > Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%. The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels? > China is building tens of nuclear power plants though. Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
  - red75prime 24d ago
    Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." > Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants. Yeah, it's because of the above points.
    - AnthonyMouse 24d ago
      > BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days. The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time. You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal. > Yeah, it's because of the above points. Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal? Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.

ehhthing 24d ago

I dont know why people bring this up. China has nowhere near the highest per capita pollution levels.

ericmay 24d ago
Per-capita can be bad and so can overall scale. It wouldn't matter if Norway was the highest per-capita because like 5 people live there.
- omgwtfbyobbq 24d ago
  Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower. The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
  - ericmay 24d ago
    > Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower. By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential. > The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway. I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs). When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
    - AnthonyMouse 24d ago
      > When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions. Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't. Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way. Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are. But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
    - omgwtfbyobbq 23d ago
      By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better. Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions. https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-fossil-fuel-companies-whos-to-blame-for-climate-change/ https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/02/fat-cats-and-foss... And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people. Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.

red75prime 24d ago

Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.

AnthonyMouse 24d ago
> Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%. The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels? > China is building tens of nuclear power plants though. Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
- red75prime 24d ago
  Predictability will not get a plant through the night by itself. BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." > Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants. Yeah, it's because of the above points.
  - AnthonyMouse 24d ago
    > BTW, it's about 7 units of wind energy to 1 unit of solar energy plus significant overcapacity plus increase of the grid transmission capacity plus additional measures for grid stabilization (like synchronous condensers) to get to a "fairly modest amount of storage." No it doesn't. You install 12 hours worth of batteries at the factory and "there is no solar at night" is solved, and doing that is already cost competitive with coal on the majority of days. The problem comes when generation is low not because it's night but because it's cloudy for an extended period of time. But that only happens a small minority of the time, and doesn't require you to burn fossil fuels the other 90% of the time. You also don't need things like synchronous condensers when you're using a non-trivial amount of nuclear or hydro, neither of which is coal. > Yeah, it's because of the above points. Then how do so many other industrialized countries do it without that amount of coal? Canada and Spain are each only ~22% fossil fuels. France is <5%. The UK is 31% and only 0.1% of that is coal.