https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...
For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.
So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"
You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.
The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.
Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.
Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.
Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.
They're making insane progress and they are decarbonizing in terms of their energy mix. Can you and others please stop with never letting china receive any praise for anything? it's so annoying when people seem incapable of pointing to ANYTHING in china and being like "nice". Is there anything positive you'll credit china with in this space or just nitpick?
cool now compare the population difference.
In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.
So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?
No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.
More details are in this comment [1].
Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?
Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).
The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.
> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.
Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.
It was providing a lot of raw materials.