Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.

To power the factories that build the products we so desperately need for a price we can afford.

If we stopped buying shit we don't need, they could easily turn off a good portion of their coal powered electricity plants if they wanted.

Despite that I wouldn't be surprised if China ends up reaching 90% carbon-free electricity sooner than the US.

To manufacture products exported to the west. It's always this argument... You need to look at emissions by country of final destination of the products, not by country of manufacture. In an age where a simple t-shirt is made in Bangladesh with cotton from Afghanistan it's ridiculous to use the latter measure.

This is a large part of why I think we need to move manufacturing for domestic products back to the US.

The argument was always that the labor and regulations cost too much but the labor abuse and pollution are costing us more.

You don't think domestic manufacturers will abuse labor and pollute?

The same party that wants to move manufacturing back to the US also wants to deregulate as much as possible, roll back labor rights and repeal environmental laws. The cost of moving manufacturing out of China and to the US is that the few Americans who can get work in a mostly AI driven and automated industry will eventually get treated and paid like Chinese labor.

Some data:

China's share of of electricity production from coal is at 60% as of 2023[1] compared to 16% for the US[2]. That's down from 80% in 2005. It currently generates 35% of its electricity from renewable sources as of 2023 compared to 41% in the US. The US has been replacing coal with gas - gas was 19% in 2005 and 42% in 2023.

China first exceeded the US's annual carbon emissions in 2006 with both outputting about 6 billion tons. Since then the US has declined to a bit under 5 billion tons in 2023 while China has doubled to a bit under 12 billion tons[3] making it by far the largest emitter in notional terms per year.

While the Western world's carbon emissions have been in decline for years (with the US still the highest ex-China), China and India's emissions continue to climb at significant rates. It's true that China is building enormous amounts of renewable energy, but that can be further generalized to China is building enormous amounts of energy production across all sources, dirty and clean.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

> If we stopped buying shit we don't need, they could easily turn off a good portion of their coal powered electricity plants if they wanted.

If they wanted. China has a policy of overproduction, especially in raw materials like steel. While the US subsidizes consumption, China subsidizes production. It is not clear they would elect to scale back (and take the economic hit) even if Western consumers decided to voluntarily cut back (which also seems unlikely).

> China's share of of electricity production from coal is at 60% as of 2023[1] compared to 16% for the US[2]. That's down from 80% in 2005.

Yeah, but they're kind of leapfrogging from coal to clean energy. In 10 years, they are expected to be at 60% renewables.

> from coal to clean energy

The reason I'm skeptical of that framing is it implies coal production is being replaced by clean energy, rather than total energy production being increased.

Coal production continues to climb[1] and construction of new coal plants hit a 10 year high in 2024[2]. China accounted for 95% of the world’s new coal power construction activity in 2023[3].

Lots of countries announce decarbonization goals, but I will remain skeptical until the data show progress.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...

[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

[3] https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-responsible-for-95-of-new-...

I think that some domestic manufacturers will abuse labor and pollute, you will never have 100% compliance. However it is far easier to police things here then somewhere without our regulatory framework. If Nike could get away with child sweatshops in the US, why did they bother moving abroad?

Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to. And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that champions labor rights and environmental regulations want to move manufacturing back to the US? It's very easy to say you support factory worker rights when you don't have any factory workers.

And they don't have access to cheap natural gas so the financial incentive to switch to renewables is even stronger. Even more so given the inability of coal to flexibly produce power throughout the day, so cheaper renewables just completely kill the economic feasibility of coal.

I think you have that flexibility backwards. Coal can be ramped up relatively quickly and operates in nearly all weather conditions, but wind and solar are at the whim nature. Unless you're only talking hydropower and nuclear power which China is also building, but those like coal have significant upfront capital investments and minimum scale.

Either way, the idea that coal is economically infeasible is contradicted by the fact that China is building huge amounts of it[1]. For China energy production is an "and" question, not an "or" question.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

>Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to.

But we're going to. You know that's the deal.

>And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that champions labor rights and environmental regulations want to move manufacturing back to the US?

Both parties are strongly pro-business and pro-manufacturing[0], and the Democrats did campaign on reshoring just because it's a no-brainer, but they seem more focused on preserving labor rights and a living wage than do Republicans.

[0]https://www.americanmanufacturing.org/blog/what-does-the-off...

> Coal can be ramped up relatively quickly

That's exactly what coal is bad at. Anything less than a day is bad news for coal. Which means that all this coal capacity is building is going to be for rarer seasonal events, and going to be mostly sitting unused.

For a long time, basically since the passage of NAFTA there was a general sentiment that mfg. should go away.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/17/163074704/manu...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/manufacturing-jobs-are-...

Democrats just recently changed their stance based on Trump's win, which is great if it helps the avg. worker.

We need to figure out how to structure our economy to benefit everyone:

>And manufacturing in particular embodies something that seems to be disappearing in today’s economy: jobs with decent pay and benefits available to workers without a college degree. The average factory worker earns more than $25 an hour before overtime; the typical retail worker makes less than $18 an hour.

It's fun to look back at these articles talking about how retail is taking off....now all the big boxes are dying, we replaced storefronts with a few warehouses.

Sure, the amount of labor going into making something has shrunk but so has the amount of labor required to sell something. Honestly, it's not just going to be just an AI driven and automated manufacturing industry. Healthcare, education and everything else seems to be falling into the same dark spiral.

> The reason I'm skeptical of that framing is it implies coal production is being replaced by clean energy, rather than total energy production being increased.

I wasn't intending to imply that. It's entirely possible China might get to 90% renewable energy production without shutting down a single coal plant.

> Lots of countries announce decarbonization goals, but I will remain skeptical until the data show progress.

Sure, but that doesn't conflict with having more and more of your energy production being renewable.