China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total::China installed more new solar capacity last year than the total amount ever installed in any other country.
Currently seeing the US climate narrative shift from “why should we stop burning fossils and get our shit together when China won’t? >:(” to “why should we stop burning fossils and get our shit together when Senegal won’t? >:(” Can’t wait for 20 years from now when we’re balls deep in climate disasters, Senegal gets its shit together, and the US narrative moves to
hondurasEl SalvadorUgandacomparing itself to the Philippines.Holy crap you guys, it turns out that the narrative that the developing world is going to burn an ass-ton of fossil fuels is a lot weaker than I thought. It looks like there’s a fuckton of equatorial and global south countries with renewables/hydro power, Honduras is even adding Geothermal. God damn it, USA, get off your ass and fix your shit already.
We’ve moved from 17% to 40% of total energy production coming from renewables since 2020. Thanks to Biden policies. Even though according to reddit he’s an incontinent dementia patient.
Source? I haven’t seen final numbers for 2023 from EIA yet, but 2022 was like 22%. The growth is accelerating as economics change, and in large part the IRA (thanks Biden), but it’s not 40%. I’m speaking of electricity production, but I can’t think of a reasonable metric that’s anywhere near 40% nationally. Let’s try to stick to reality here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States
You said renewables are 40%, which is wrong. Then you sourced articles showing that carbon free sources are 40%, which includes nuclear. Nobody calls nuclear “renewable”, so I suggest getting your language straight so as not to confuse.
to be fair nuclear nuclear is much much better than keeping up with all that fossil fuel burning.
in fact id rather see (properly maintained!!!) nuclear than waiting until actual renewables can cover all of the world’s demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_renewable_energy
You are a total douche, btw.
We’ve moved from 17% to 40% of total energy production coming from renewables since 2020
This what you said. You’re comparing a 2020 number without nuclear to a 2022 number with nuclear. That’s dumb and misleading. That doesn’t make me a douche, it makes you wrong and petty. Grow up and just try to get your numbers and facts straight.
The US DOE puts the US at 20% renewable energy.
Pretty easy to argue nuclear is renewable and is carbon neutral. Ergo, 40%.
Except when you leave out nuclear in 2020 and add it in 2023 you’re not pointing out anything about Biden (or anyone else’s) policies. You’re just demonstrating that shifting your metrics mid sentence leads to a nonsense conclusion.
I mean… It can all be true, right?
Listen to Biden’s interview on Conan O’Brien’s podcast then come back here and tell me he’s demented. I’ll wait.
I also had sweet dreams last night
Same with EVs. After BYD became the largest EV manufacturer, suddenly EV is not cool anymore. Maybe if car manufacturers focus on making EV affordable instead of cramming more and more luxury features, maybe EV sales in US won’t dwindle.
The anti-EV sentiment has been building much longer than BYD becoming the big boy on the block. About 8 months ago my state passed the equivalent of about a $100 per gallon tax on EV charging.
That sounds bad, but how would they know you are using electricity to charge your EV?
It’s a DC charger tax.
Mine requires you to pay an extra like thousand dollars when buying your plates as an EV tax, they try to justify by saying they’re missing out on your fuel taxes for the next decade so they want to collect it up front.
Then they go and spend it on hunting down women getting abortions and black kids existing…
China needs a fuckload of power, they are building more of everything including coal. The only reason they aren’t building more coal is people like seeing out their windows.
The US is actually winding down coal use. China is still expanding, this is a problem. The fact China also added a ton of solar panels is a nice distraction.
I seem to have been working on old info, as China has decommissioned 70 GW of coal plants, but it looks like they also just approved a whole lot more of them.
In the third quarter of this year, however, China permitted more new coal plants than in all of 2021, according to Greenpeace, even as most countries have stopped building new coal-fired power and are phasing out plants.
Well, shit.
Anyway, I’m glad for the solar and nuclear capacity (LOTS of it!) that China’s been building. I’m glad to hear that we are spinning down coal capacity, but I’d be interested to learn what we’re replacing it with. It seems like natural gas is all the rage these days, and that still produces GHG emissions.
the coal is approved because on how power plants function. dirty energy is usually used to level out power spikes in demand, but not as a main source after you have a remeweable source. its a tually very hard to go 100% renewables.
It’s why I’m a bit disgruntled many places around the world aren’t getting their arses in gear and developing and building storage.
Even if that storage is woefully inefficient (liquid air energy storage, for example) it would be hugely beneficial. In Queensland, Australia, for example, barely any new solar is being built because energy prices are negative in the middle of the day and plants are being curtailed.
We need storage, any storage, a butt-tonne more of it, like now.
It’s less about balance and more about raw needs. Providing power to a billion people is hard and they are building everything to meet the growing demand.
Balance is what determines the supply mix else everyone would just run nukes. Previous commenter is right about why fossil fuels are still used, we don’t have tech to replace their capabilities, which are necessary for reliability of the transmission grid. Energy storage is an area of huge investment right now because of this, with batteries and flywheel storage pilot projects to try and mature this technology. SMRs are another area of research. Programs like demand response to incentivize heavy consumers to change their usage patterns.
Without the ramp rate of fossils to respond quickly to grid conditions, there would be constant frequency drops and spikes across the transmission grid. Turbines would become out of sync from the frequency on the lines and things would start tripping and we would have a blackout. This is even more complex with unpredictable renewal integration where fossil becomes even more critical for its capabilities, while slightly less for its capacity.
I thought China’s population has stopped growing and is actually on a track to start shrinking rapidly?
But at the same time, quality of life is rapidly improving which means energy usage per capita will eventually ramp up to similar level with average western citizen’s energy usage.
That depends on whether it’ll keep its position as world’s cheap factory. Quality of life improving tends to affect that too. What energy China now consumes for production may not be required in 20 years.
I’m not so sure about that. China is about to ramp up solar even more. They build a lot of solar and battery-related factories and secured mining rights for solar and battery raw elements in Asia and Africa in the past few years, sometimes to the point of fighting with the displaced locals (China tend to bring their own workers from mainland instead of employing local workers).
Renewables may be more plausible for some developing countries because of lack of competency or administrative consistency (sometimes to the degree of stealing everything which isn’t nailed to the floor) for centralized grid with a few big producers, and weak infrastructure in general.
But of course it would be good if some things weren’t stagnating in countries without such factors.
It’s also easier to justify adopting newer tech in places that are less developed. If you made a billion dollar investment and are still paying for it, it’s harder to scrap it and pivot.
It’s more because developing countries don’t attract the interest of corporations so much that they won’t devote much energy to sabotage the installation of renewable energy.
Maybe, but it’s rather that this lack of interest allows local establishment to take the niche and the power in their countries associated with it. So they use the opportunity gladly.
Good news for one of the planet’s most polluting countries.
That is producing for the rest of the world and especially for the west. It’s hypocritical to blame china while buying stuff that had to be cheaper and cheaper.
The average consumer doesn’t actually have a choice in the matter. Unless you are wealthy enough to purchase only local artisan made goods near everything you can afford is made in China or made in China adjacent.
That’s not really the point. The point is their emissions will be higher because they’re producing all the stuff everyone else purchases. The production is what creates pollution. If they stopped producing then other countries would and they would increase their pollution.
It’s not saying don’t buy products from China. It’s saying China polluted because things are bought from them. The pollution would be wherever production is taking place.
That is exactly my point. Thanks for elaborating it!
Did you forget about the existence of regulations to control the pollution that manufacturing is allowed to produce? How about the countries who are allowing pollution to happen on a ridiculous scale fix their environmental regulations? It’s not like they are under the rule of the USA and have to pollute because we say so.
You could simply not purchase as much crap. Half of the factories that supply the West’s goods would go out of business if people stopped buying new phones and shitty plastics every full moon.
Oh no, that’s the freedom way. Gods forbid, they’d be living like the bland Soviet blocks otherwise.
Gods forbid, they’d be living like the bland Soviet blocks otherwise.
Please don’t exaggerate, to live like in late USSR you’d have to literally outlaw local non-state production.
They’d be living just fine. Everything would be more expensive, but with the way prices are connected to power balance and cheap Chinese workers affecting that balance on the side of producers, maybe not as expensive as people imagine.
They do. I boycott Chinese made goods, and I don’t make much money. It just requires a small amount of introspection on if I need the item. It has actually turned out I buy much much less because what I do buy is of quality and lasts.
Cosmetics, Household goods and food are easy and generally fairly locally made and produced, unless you insist on buying exotic fruits or stuff way out of season.
Clothes, shoes, anything fabric, again easy. Massive market of quality eco-friendly EU/US/UK made stuff that means I pay $30 for a lovely shirt that will last me decades than $5 a shirt that was made by a child in Myanmar and fall apart within the year. So I am slowly developing a modest wardrobe of high quality natural fibres.
You don’t really need much else. But it just takes a moment to Google and consume conscientiously.
Some stuff is nearly impossible and is actually outside of your control like fuel and SOME electrical devices. But nothing can be perfect.
Then you cannot complain about corporations moving jobs overseas. Clearly was the only way for the society to survive.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
If I don’t need it to work or live I don’t buy it from places I know have a slave labor issue or any other ethics concerns.
Another thing that help, ad block. Honestly advertising is brain rot and why a lot of people feel a compulsion to buy land fill filler.
Just remove “made in China” from your basket. And buy just what you need. It’s my a good beginning.
I don’t think that absolves China of any blame. They’re still choosing to produce cheap goods at the expense of the planet, because it’s good business for them too.
If not them then it’d be someone else. Clearly they’re starting to take polluting seriously.
If you look at CO2 emissions per capita then China is actually doing better than countries like Canada, the US, and Singapore. Assuming I haven’t completely misread that table.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
This is a list of sovereign states and territories by per capita carbon dioxide emissions due to certain forms of human activity, based on the EDGAR database created by European Commission. The following table lists the 1970, 1990, 2005, 2017 and 2022 annual per capita CO2 emissions estimates (in kilotons of CO2 per year). The data only consider carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement manufacture, but not emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry Over the last 150 years, estimated cumulative emissions from land use and land-use change represent approximately one-third of total cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Emissions from international shipping or bunker fuels are also not included in national figures, which can make a large difference for small countries with important ports. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report finds that the “Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU)” sector on average, accounted for 13-21% of global total anthropogenic GHG emissions in the period 2010–2019.
CO2 emissions are carefully curated and we are not even that good at calculating them. I wouldn’t trust any of this info coming from China let alone from any nation.
Do you have a better metric?
Big dog 2 months… If you knew how companies figure out their pollution metrics you would be very sad.
As for a better metric, I don’t know. Everything is tied to cost so it’s really dumb
Not sure why you’re so hung up on dogs or 2 months. The thread still shows up in searches and you’re clearly getting updates on it. Unless there’s some evidence to suggest the information in this thread is now obsolete, there’s no reason not to respond.
@esteeyou@lemmy.world made a claim and provided evidence. Unless there’s better evidence to the contrary it’s reasonable to accept the claim. My children sometimes still respond to arguments with, “Nuh uh.” I generally expect more from adults.
You‘re right. We should move production to cleaner countries.
Production will always have some waste and pollution. China has high pollution because we do a lot of production there. As I pointed out above, on both a per-capita and a per-production basis China pollutes less than many industrialized nations (US. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Taiwan) and many developing nations (Singapore, Malaysia).
Given current manufacturing data, moving production out of China to other countries would likely increase pollution.
No, it’s not hypocritical. Yes, anyone with half a brain knows China makes a huge chunk of the world’s stuff.
A nation can make choices as to what energy sources they use and China went balls to the wall with coal. That wasn’t a choice the buyers of Chinese products made.
Lol look what they are spending the money they earn from those industries. At least they are not solely funding decades long genocide but actually doing something about the emissions they take on.
Tibet
Uyghers
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Only way many western countries were able to slow their rise in CO2 emissions. Despite outsourcing their emissions to China, the US still emits twice the CO2 per capita compared with China.
Lots of that is cattle for meat, BTW, not just energy production.
And why are they one of the most polluting countries?
Bad manufacturing practices that exploits a poor labor force. They use this to their advantage to persuade western companies to provide cheap service at the cost of their workforce and sustainability. They then turn around and make these grand plans of Eco friendly targets while their populace regularly burn their trash with little regulation. Then some regulation agency comes in and turns a blind eye to some foul shit as long as they are paid accordingly to play ball.
When you look at the data China pollutes less than the US both on a per-capita and a per-production basis.
Big dog why are you going back in time 2 months to respond to this
Why not? Have the facts changed since then?
I don’t even know what you are responding toqnd don’t care to look
So you’re just going to spew out words without even checking the context of those words?
Brilliant!
Because they pollute a lot
Actually they are poluting for you to buy your stuff cheaper, who is responsible for the polution of your stuff? Dowa not make any sense to blame them for factories that the west choosed to put there.
They could always say no
polluting to meet the online shopping demands of western countries
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A lot of people don’t realize how quickly China is changing. Things that were true just a few decades ago are often no longer true.
Once China decided that pollution was a problem they went all in on addressing it. China has massive reforestation projects, huge incentives to switch to EVs, and much tighter energy efficiency standards.
Solar isn’t even their only renewable energy source. China gets about equal amounts from solar, wind and hydro https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/013124-coal-still-accounted-for-nearly-60-of-chinas-electricity-supply-in-2023-cec
together they make up a little less than half of their total energy production and the ratio keeps improving.correction: those are projected ratios, not current ratios.Of course, on a per capita basis, China isn’t even close to being a top polluter. Unless you think that people in smaller countries deserve to pollute more, per-capita is the better measurement. China looks a little worse if you do that but it’s still far from a top polluter by that metric.
Fantastic. Remember guys, we’re all on the same side on this one. This should be a signal for the US to get its ass in gear to do the same, but it’s not like China expanding its renewable energy capacity is anything but great for everyone.
There’s a reason the US is targeting China from various fronts (trade restrictions, sanctions, etc.). China is a powerhouse and the US is terrified of being left behind.
I don’t get why you’re getting dowvoted. I guess there are a lot of Americans over here. But your statement is absolutely true. The US attempts at restricting China’s access to various technologies only make sense if they feel threatened by them.
It just could be, maybe, military posturing.
Because I don’t remember any restrictions for as long as China didn’t intend to start the WW3.
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china is not the country participating, directly or indirectly, in a handful of pretty destabilizing wars right now.
dunno why they are the ones being accused of wanting to start ww3
We’re watching The Thucydides Trap unfold in real-time
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Thucydides Trap, or Thucydides’ Trap, is a term popularized by American political scientist Graham T. Allison to describe an apparent tendency towards war when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon. The term exploded in popularity in 2015 and primarily applies to analysis of China–United States relations. Supporting the thesis, Allison led a study at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs which found that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivaling a ruling power, 12 ended in war. That study, however, has come under considerable criticism, and scholarly opinion on the value of the Thucydides Trap concept—particularly as it relates to a potential military conflict between the United States and China—remains divided.
good bot
China is doing a lot of shady stuff though.
If the US really wanted to resolve it they would do more about patient infringement and spend more money on research.
Good for them
Good. I assume it helps that most of the world’s solar panel manufacturing is based in China.
The rest of the world should be ramping up production, not relying on China for cheap labour.
I keep seeing more and more about the solar production in Georgia, USA ramping up!
It great to see the world really going into green industrialzation.
Cool part is we’ve got a functional safety system like OSHA so everyone goes home with all their fingers and toes, and the EPA keeps the nearby creeks from getting contaminated.
Can’t say the same for other countries, troubled and fucked up as our country is.
Other countries are Asiatic hordes, nothing but lawlessness and savagery. Only America make clean safe technology! 😜
You know how when you’re the first to do something, you’re also the first to make mistakes? Look at the Hanford site, for example. First place to ever process uranium and plutonium.
Imagine knowing the results of being careless, and being careless anyway, after the fact. 😂 What’s wrong with you??
To be clear: I believe most people anywhere want to be safe, and do a good job. Their administrators and governmental reps are the pieces of dogshit, ccp included, that ignore safety and individuality. The US has serious problems too, but again, we have safety organizations with teeth here.
its obviously good for the rest of the world to industrialize, but they would just be moving carbon emissions from china to themselves.
they themselves would need to transition to renewables if we want this move to be good for the climate.
That would be the point of making panels and wind turbines themselves.
Ideally you’d want enough manufacturing capacity to power your whole country with renewables, in the time it takes for the first bits to start needing replacements.
Think about Uyghurs.
well arab countries have visited them and found no problem and mass refugee movements arent happening. i think they should be fine.
what did i say that was remotely related to them on my post?
I trust the Arab countrys as far as I could throw them. Get the Irish in there and I may take such claims seriously.
the conspiracy is that the arabs are complicit with their own secret genocide then? what do the irish have to do with an arab genocide? 🤣
What do Arabs have to do a Turkic genocide? You are conflating Muslim and Arab.
by all means, get the irish to show us whats happening there then.
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The irony of your propaganda account posting about propaganda is full flavored.
Oh my God, that’s awful!
I hope the US responds by installing more solar panels this year than China ever has!
Let’s install solar panels on the moon! That’ll fucking show them. Beam the energy back to earth with giant fucking microwave dishes. Ohhh that would really piss off them damn reds
We can do it, not because it’s easy, but because it is hard.
Wait what? That’s an awful reason to do something.
Doing the hard thing is a learning experience.
Until it’s a new moon…
Actually that raises an interesting point…the best time for solar, on earth, is when the panels are most directly hit.
So since the moon is tidally locked to the earth, that means that there would be better ideal tilts at each longitude, so that whenever the sun is out, they are tilted to receive as much light as possible. But that also means that the panels only even receive light for half of the lunar cycle, at most.
Right? Am I overthinking this?
There are craters towards the poles that receive sunlight all the time. But you’d still have to build extra panels for the lunar cycle. Equatorial stations might be better, and if you built 3, 2 would be in direct sunlight almost all the time.
Which is fine! Gives you time to do maintenance without any additional losses.
Not really…you don’t want to be out doing maintenance at lunar night. We’d have to have some serious improvement in EVA suits, mechsuits, or robots.
There’s a reason every Apollo mission landed at lunar dawn.
That’s it. We’ll need to invent sun lamps. Lamps bright and hot enough to illuminate and warm the Martian surface at night, to enable maintenance.
Well, someone has to make use of renewable energy I guess lol
And opened more coal plants too lol, don’t be quick in praising the CCP, there’s always something shady in the background…
And systematically genociding their minorities too. Let’s never forget that.
tankie army has been activated
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I still can’t wrap my head around the case for genocide in China. Political and religious oppression is evident, but aside from grainy photos of some prisoners, but I haven’t seen evidence of genocide. People are saying it though so… I guess it could be true?
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This is not just a theory. There are evidences. Until you relay CCP propaganda.
they are from .ML, a major tankie instance, with major love for Pooty/Russia and Pooh Bear/China and irrational hatred for anything Not Russia/China. Soooo… Yeah.
are there?
is there credible evidence beyond pictures of random prisioners?
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all i see is articles from corporate us/uk media making extraordinary claims without extraordinary proof. nothing being said in my native tongue about it that isnt direct reference to the aforementioned outlets.
tell me, fascist, where is all that proof?
Tell you what. I’ll deny there is any genocide in Gaza on the exact same basis that you’re denying it for the Uyghurs. Does that work for you? If it really has to be “extraordinary”, then it has to be applied equally.
Or is this not something like, say, UFOs or homeopathy where we actually need extraordinary evidence?
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Bullshit, I’ve already seen pictures and videos of it, a few years ago. Lots of us have too.
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preceding the points you mentioned, i stopped believing it when the league of arab nations went to investigate and found nothing.
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China’s CO2 output is expected to fall in the coming year, and for structural reasons, stay that way for years to come.
China is doing something good: here’s why it’s bad.
China is still developing and allowing European countries and the US to pollute unchecked but clutch your pearls when China and other countries do the same is ideological.
This article is evidence that China is putting effort forward on renewables. Meanwhile, Germany is opening coal plants and the US can’t get a handle on anything at all.
It’s not really shady now is it? There is no way solar can provide enough power for the entire country of china.
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You can thank conservatives for that. They are beholden to fossil fuel interests so they attack everything else whether it be solar energy or ev
“JESUS WOULDN’TVE INSTALLED SOLAR PANELS!!11!1!1”
hahahaha this is why I pay my internets
The rise of China is democratizing access to technology. My home government, supposedly a longtime partner of the US even doing its dirty work in Yemen, has struggled for years to get any tech transfer deal with the US, too many hoops to jump through. But were able to get many tech transfers from China recently. It was a major win and that technology includes solar panel manufacturing.
Too many hoops, like stop funding the terrorist groups that attacked The US on 9/11? Yeah, I can see how MBS might have some trust issues coming from The US.
Funny you accuse the Saudi government of what was an inside-job. The Saudi government exiled Bin Laden in the 1990s, revoking his citizenship, while the US was still working with him. Either way we don’t need it from you. China is making you irrelevant. You can’t withhold technology to bully the rest of the world. You can go pound sand.
Also funny coming from a nation where a genocidal maniac is the lesser evil, someone who is bypassing Congress to send weapons to Israel and bomb Yemen. You keep your electoralism, and I am keeping our free healthcare, free universities and high speed rail.
FYI, the US is guilty of multiple war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are guilty right now of war crimes in Palestine. It is really tiring how you pretend to be the good guys. You are Homelander not Superman, and you are no longer the only player in town.
Bro… the current leadership of China committed genocide on their own soil and have been attempting to expand their borders for decades.
China is not a good partner for playing the lesser of 2 evils game. You’d be at it all day with the whataboutism.
still better than the us
Bro the US wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for genocide and slavery. The US right now occupies oil fields in Iraq and Syria and is stealing the oil. The US right now is sending weapons to Israel to massacre Palestinians. No one cares about your virtue signaling.
China is a much lesser evil. They don’t try to push us to normalize with genocidal maniacs (Zionist usurpers) as a precondition for even the most basic of technologies.
If you think China is so bad just compare the policing of Hong Kong protests with the policing of George Floyd protests. The emperor has no clothes.
FYI: the US is also expanding https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-22/us-claims-huge-chunk-of-seabed-amid-strategic-push-for-resources and it is also helping Israel annex Syrian and Palestinian lands.
Yeah, we know. But again… the whataboutism. Countries exist because of war and oppression. It’s time to move past that as an excuse.
This is a joke, though, as you are just projecting and doing what you’ve accused me of. Just don’t bother. Rounding up and sterilizing your citizens. And China famously gunned protesters down in the streets. So I don’t want to hear about how we handle protesters compared to China.
What about USA this, what about USA that. What about the assassination of Kashoggi? What about the killings of innocents for protesting in the Arab states?
If you are bringing up journalists then you should care about Palestinian journalists being slaughtered by US weapons
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-war-in-gaza-has-been-deadly-for-journalists
Grow up. Your bias is shining too strongly.
Shit were guilty of war crimes inside the US. Tell me something I don’t know.
Thing is our government occasionally fucks up and does some good shit. MBS, and Ji Jinpooh don’t give two fucks about their own people or any others.
MBS is still funding terrorist groups 24 years later, and murdering journalists.
The US Government may be a soulless corporate structure bent on enriching itself. MBS is a parochial dictator that is just pissed off we don’t need his dino juice anymore.
Democracy and technology? You’re thinking of Taiwan.
Which is a part of China according to even the US
Except in any defacto way, mainland has 0 control on the rule of law in Taiwan. They have their own taxes, military, laws, elections, etc, and again pay no taxes, follow no laws, they don’t partipate in mainlands gov, and don’t serve in their military.
There is even some international recognition, but mainland does it’s best to hinder their diplomatic missions.
ربي يعطيك على قد نيتك
Taiwan is an independent and democratic country, unlike the totalitarian and pseudo-communist state that is China.
China’s govt has been trying to make their country as self sustaining as possible, this is part of that initiative. No one can tell you shit if you’re don’t rely on anyone for external things.
Ya, it makes sense considering China imports 2/3 of their oil. Solar and EVs make a lot of sense when you don’t have much in the way of fossil fuels. Not even considering the environmental benefits
But they still have their crazy mines that polute right? No number of solar pannel will change anything if you don’t stop what you are doing that polutes.
Same for all countries btw…China pollutes so much because the biggest consumer economy in the world deindustrialized and outsourced manufacturing to them.
China pollutes so much because George HW Bush and Bill Clinton pushed American jobs to China so CEOs could make bank on huge profits on cheap labor, unsafe work places, and near zero environmental regulation that was impossible in the United States. We built China by disregarding worker rights and the environment and we are paying for it dearly.
Why are we even bothering blaming politicians? Companies moved production over to cut costs and Americans wanted cheap shit. We could have all just bought made in America in the 80s if we cared, that would have been the time to make a stand while the transition was still happening.
It is government’s job to make sure international trade is done according to some basic rules, including labor and environment. Business’ only metric is profits.
The idea that businesses are only responsible to make profits is a newer one (can’t say new it’s been decades) and one that is trending away imho
You mean the boomers consumers are to blame?
You’ve never bought anything with “made in china” on the label?
Of course I have. Those were the best pencils for poppin’ in elementary school.
I’d say the 70s was the pivotal decade there with the oil crisis, the party was effectively over for the Democratic FDR post-war reality, and the economic anxieties resulting from deindustrialization began to have impacts in the rust belt. Mao’s death effectively ended China’s Cultural Revolution, and Deng implemented economic reforms to open the country to capitalism, with a huge industrial push and creation of economic zones. While labor power in the US had achieved a great deal in to the 60s, the Taft-Hartley Act from back in '47 kneecapped the ability for labor to fight the death of the US industrial manufacturing core. Because of course capital is gonna capital, and if they can’t exploit workers as well domestically they can in some other country. Especially when they use their hegemonic influence to keep other countries open to private capitalist exploitation, like arming fascist coups in even moderately socialist countries in the global south. The global fight against communism is a backdrop to all this.
And here we are today as these routes of externalizing the exploitation necessary to maintain this standard of living and consumer economy dry up, and this economic reality turns inward.
So did the US Presidents force China to not implement any environmental safeguards for their manufacturing? I don’t think so.
Sure the corporations send the orders to China, and they pay for them, putting the money into China’s economy. But China as a sovereign nation is still responsible for the pollution that it creates. They should implement strong environmental protection regulations to fix that.
I would prefer if American corporations sent their manufacturing orders to American factories, but I have no control over that or China’s environmental regulations. They should both do better.
China is installing more energy production than any other country. Wind, solar, coal and nuclear. They are installing everything.
Can’t wage war if you depend on oil ships
Don’t have to wage war if you don’t depend on oil.
BuT At wHaT CoSt
Turns out at the same cost as always… since they’re also still firing new coal plants.
In the third quarter of this year [2023], however, China permitted more new coal plants than in all of 2021, according to Greenpeace, even as most countries have stopped building new coal-fired power and are phasing out plants.
The enslavement of the Uighur people? I work for an American renewable energy company and a lot of contracts were disrupted by the US’ Forced Labor Prevention Act. I suspect that the sudden jump in domestic Chinese installation is partially caused by Chinese exports being restricted by western nations.
We’d have more if these right wing assholes would get onboard. You know they’re assholes because they’re attacking China in the comments rather than acknowledging this awesome milestone
