Related:
China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987548 - August 2025
China’s Decarbonization Is So Fast Even New Coal Plants Aren’t Stopping It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987548 - August 2025
population aging -- older people use less fossil fuel.
reduced household formation, in part driven by increased youth unemployment. It's impossible to get figures for this.
That's an insane stat. China added 92GW of solar in May 2025 alone.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pollution...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
> International Energy Agency (IEA) figures show Chinese coal consumption falling 2.6% in the first half of the year, largely due to a boom in solar that saw the country add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
Sadly shows China going up, sharply until 2011, then more modestly. The latest 2023 data shows 8t/capita where the EU average is about 6 (not every EU country is rich, but sounds like that ought to be enough for a decent lifestyle) and US 14
- population & GDP growth - increased A/C usage - AI/bitcoin/data centers
GP no doubt complaining about Chinese emissions via their made in China smartphone.
This is capitalism in action: solar is cheaper than anything else per kwh. The obsession with fossil in the West is due to the fossil fuel lobbies, not because of the rational market forces. China doesn't have that.
The US outsourced massive swaths of its manufacturing to China and with it, the emissions from those industries.
Talking in absolutes without context, nor the trajectories is rigorous at best and disingenuous or worse.
From the article
> International Energy Agency (IEA) figures show Chinese coal consumption falling 2.6% in the first half of the year, largely due to a boom in solar that saw the country add 92 gigawatts of capacity—that’s 92 billion watts—in a single month in May, compared to all-time U.S. installations of 134 GW.
So in one month, China added 68% of our total solar capacity to its grid.
And did I read the article’s headline wrong or isn’t the article about China actually decreasing their absolute emissions.
edit: corrected the figure from 3% to 9% after noticing that I looked only at the left number and not the right one on that second graph. Forgot about all the women in the country, whoops
> On average, it takes between nine and 12 years for solar panels to pay for themselves.
https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/spending/art...
But you have to know enough statistics to be sneaky with it.
It might be extended in the future, though.
Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.
If you are trying to use American made panels near population centers in the Northeast or the Midwest, the economics become much more challenging.
Looking it up... 16 GW onshore and 15 GW offshore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd... This graph looks like it started in earnest in like 2005, so 1.6GW/year on- and offshore combined, peaking in 2017 with 3.5GW in one year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
It's simply a matter of will (or in the case of the US, lack thereof).
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35097.pdf
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/how-much-land-power-us...
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31072025/inside-clean-ene...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://electrek.co/2025/06/20/batteries-are-so-cheap-now-so...
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/26/there-is-one-clear-winn...
China gets its oil from Russia and Middle East. Russia is unstable partner and Middle East can get cut off by US Naval power for now.
China developed and built many UHVDC transmission lines to deal with it.
citation? You don't even say why he has a concern, so how can you say they are correct?
it had to build nuclear reactor, solar panels and also diesel engines because they just need so much energy but the sheer amount of money spent on nuclear reactor is unthinkable.
That was 10 years ago already, I’m glad to see it’s having an impact. Soon enough, the picture of polluted air in China will be gone and we’ll see that instead in the USA.
Americans (and other Westerners and developed countries) emit carbon to drive SUVs and eat burgers and steak. They tell everyone else to stay poor lest they emit carbon. Then also shame them for needing aid.
I'm glad China's at least making something useful with their emissions.
I'd have more respect if they were honest about this.
Much of this solar was rushed construction to get them in before the new electricity pricing policy goes into effect. It isn't known yet how much the buildout will drop off for the remainder of the year but it is pretty conceivable that some fraction of the construction for the rest of the year was "pulled" forward and rushed to get it in before June. I'm hopeful China's insane buildout will continue but we probably won't see numbers like May 2025 for awhile at least.
The short summary: if a renewable project was built and finished before June, it gets the old, more profitable electricity rates, but if it is finished after June, it is less profitable.
More details on this here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-chinas-renewable-p...
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I don't think it's that simple.
China is a signatory to Kyoto and Paris.
They do care about reducing pollution, and have managed to do so quite significantly in many cities.
China also has quite a bit to lose: many large cities on the coasts, and worsening water shortage problems.
National security probably plays a large role, and I reckon they would prioritize economy over climate, but the evidence implies that they do also care.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#...
And they onboarded more coal plants in 2024 than any time in the prev 10 years:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
US coal plant phase out tracking at https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map and https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64604 | Europe at https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/
(existing coal is more expensive than new renewables and storage in the US and Europe, I cannot speak to the cost in China)
1. it's not a representative month. Building a solar farm for two years and having it go online in one month, leads to big jumps. If you look at the previous year, in 2024 China added 277 GW, so 23 MW per month.
2. At the end of 2024 the US had 239 GW installed. So about the same order of magnitude as China added in 2024 (277 GW, or 15% more).
3. The fact China added in 2024 a similar amount of solar capacity as the US in its entire history, is partly a function of exponential growth in solar in general.
For example Spain doubled its capacity in 2019 versus 2018. Then doubled it again two years later in 2021. Then almost doubled it again two years later in 2022 etc.
In other words it's not so strange in solar actually to see you add in a single year, the same capacity as you've built in all the years prior, regardless of whether it is China. Spain doubled in 1-year period, and then doubled twice in a row in a 2-year period, in the most recent years.
Still it's an insane stat, just wanted to add some nuance. -- The fact we have a president who utters nonsense about wind and solar and is actively working against it, is insane and sad.
(average age of farmers is ~58 years old, and with the decline in labor for ag, now is an optimal time to lease and lock up this land for renewables for the next 25-30 years [at which point generators can be repowered or the land returned to its previous condition])
There Is One Clear Winner In The Corn Vs. Solar Battle - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/26/there-is-one-clear-winn... - April 28th, 2025
Ecologically informed solar enables a sustainable energy transition in US croplands - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2501605122 | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production. It’s no contest. - https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/04/new-study-compa... - April 25th, 2025
Impacts of agrisolar co-location on the food–energy–water nexus and economic security - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01546-4 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01546-4
HN Search: agrivoltaics (sorted by date) - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There's an interesting study that arises from a natural experiment based on coal subsidies in China[0]. It found that life expectancy in otherwise similar locations is 3 years lower where the subsidy is paid, and thus more coal is burned.
What do you gain from lying like this?
https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/#:~:tex...
However, the new coal plants are largely replacing old, inefficient, heavily polluting ones, so they're still a net positive.
The coal plants are known to be built to support economic growth for one (simple truth), and as baseload for renewable sources (you simply can't go renewable without this, at the moment). Coal plant utilisation rates have been dropping for two decades and are expected to keep dropping. [0]
[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DJUu!,w_1456,c_limit...
One of the benefits of being a pseudodemocratic centralized government is that you can kind of decide something is important without worrying how to get reelected in a few years. All it takes is a leadership that decides this is their vanity project to be remembered by, or perhaps to actually care about China in 100 years (the Americans obviously can’t think or see this far anymore). This is possibly helped by having a population with a culture of collectivism. For better or worse you don’t have to actually solve the “what’s in it for me?” question that seems to completely screw climate plans when the plan is, “it’ll suck for you but your grandkids will appreciate it.”
B) solar panels and wind turbines tend not to spill toxic waste into the ground around them. And tend not to be put up on your own land without your consent.
A $100/ton carbon tax would raise $490b(based on 4.9 billion tons of co2 emissions[0]) per year that could be distributed to lower income households (to offset the effect, making the tax progressive) and be used to fund green energy investment.
Solar is also economically better for China.
Secondly, I would strongly guess China ramped up production thinking that there would be more overseas demand. It isn't just low demand from the US; for example my "green" New Zealand is also not buying utility scale solar (oversimplified reason from horse's mouth: it is due to our major electricity generators colluding - the actual blocking reasons are more capitalistically complex).
There are very few situations in the world where cause and effect are clear: facile explanations of cause and effect are usually wrong in important ways.
"Lying by omission" means things not said. Facts deliberately left out to mislead.
> You omitted the fact that the majority of their power comes from the most polluting fossil fuel in existence: coal
And you omitted the fact that majority of cumulative carbon emissions come from developed countries. Not to mention you're spreading your lies on an article that's literally about them reducing total emissions, the final refuge for people like you ("America still emits less, the climate doesn't care about pe-capita blah blah"). Seriously, re-evaluate your priors. Consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, someone is doing something about the climate, and not even on purpose, while we just sit around.
> It's not building these plants for shits and giggles
Apparently they are because 80% of their energy growth doesn't come from those plants. I think they're part jobs programs, part backup plan.
China's economy is export-based and U.S. is its largest buyer. If it refused to export to the U.S. its economy would go into a freefall and the Yuan would hyperinflate.
Given how chaotic the world is, I’m not sure that is true or if so just how true it is.
Democracies are inherently more chaotic than Communist dictatorships because of their very nature - democracies don’t tend to aim for stability, because stability brings about some good things but some bad things like lack of innovation and reduced competing, though I am not saying those are aspects of China per se, just speaking generally.
If we were to speak about China we could bring up a few long term planning failures. 3 stand out in my mind: the One Child Policy, the mass killing and starvation of Chinese people under Mao which set China back decades never mind the suffering, and more recently perhaps over-construction and the resulting ghost cities and unused infrastructure.
We could point to American short term thinking problems too but we are broadly familiar with those.
All that is to say, there’s a lot of either fear mongering or propaganda, not sure which. “China is long term oriented better watch out!” Is the current media phenomenon but nobody seems to really look at their long term planning failures or ask whether such long term planning is even good or successful.
Though one area China has been great at for long term planning is making sure their kids aren’t addicted to TikTok like ours.
Like all the crypto climate deniers and True Bird Lovers* are fond of saying, the climate doesn't care about per capita emissions, only total emissions. And now China's total emissions have reduced.
* they oppose wind power
You can think about this as if China had access to the same oil reserves or oil markets as the US does, would they behave differently? Absolutely.
Separately I think eliminating pollution is more along the lines of their country just doing good things for their people. Climate change stances and whatnot I don’t think are the same, nor are the intentions.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/08/20/cnesa-chinas-new-energy-...
It is not just optics or energy independence. There is a genuine effort to reduce pollution. People forget in 00s media used to bash the smog in China. It was an unlivable air. They truly wanted to transform it - it just so happens that renewables solve a lot of problems simultaneously.
Which is a statistic missing the forest for the trees.
In 2025 the Chinese coal consumption has in absolute terms decreased while they have kept building.
New built renewables are able to both absorb all new demand and reduce coal usage.
Sure, it would be better to not build coal plants sitting idle and instead spend the money on renewables and storage.
Through selectively quoting facts you make it seem like China is expanding their coal usage which is incorrect.
You don't dogmatically order $1 trillion of something and sacrifice a functional independent, diverse, weather resilient, geographically distributed energy grid thats served the nation that invented the light bulb for over 125 years, because you read a clickbait headline about China.
Problems with solar remain, however. It's neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid. You must overbuild capacity on solar, because weather happens. No energy is generated at night. Therefore you have to factory battery install cost as well. Finally there are black swan weather events that DO happen in nature that NO ONE can prevent:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Whereupon solar would be rendered useless precisely when humanity would need power the most.
It does make me think about the failure to react to changes or ideas that we ill-advised from the very start. I think, at least partially, this stems less from the long time horizon when planning and more from the lack of dissent in a dictatorship. The Chernobyl TV series's "The cost of lies" concept feels very poignant.
Scroll to the bottom, China fell from 30.98 in 2024 to 29.75 MtCO2. The US rose from 13.55 to 14.92 MtCO2.
Already does. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/20201019...
> neither practical nor safe to build 100% solar grid
No one is suggesting a 100% solar grid. You combine solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear.
> battery
Battery prices have been in free-fall for a while, and there are a bunch of interesting tech for grid-scale energy storage. The vanadium redox battery is appealing for grid-scale energy because the energy capacity is determined by the amount of liquid you store in its tanks, so scaling that is trivial. Sodium ion batteries are appealing since they're made with abundant materials and their lower energy density compared to lithium ion isn't a concern for grid-scale storage.
> black swan weather events
Which is why no one is suggesting 100% solar. You do a mix like I described earlier.
If I'm learning anything from Russia, its that fossil fuel plants are hella vulnerable in a war. Solar would be much safer.
Fossil Fuel Plant: Knock out the right machine or building and you knock out the plant. The plant is literally storing explosives. The plant must be resupplied which leaves supply trucks/boats/pipelines vulnerable.
Solar: Distributed over a large area. Made of many independent complete power-generating devices so if you knock out 5% of them, all you've accomplished is reducing power output by 5%. Does not need a constant flow of supplies.
All in all, China can't be reduced to 'a dictatorship'. It's an oligarchy for sure (90 millions vote, less than 1% of the population) but it has too much political life to be reduced to that.
1. China is still trending up and the US is still trending down. It's dangerous to make straight-line projections but they are on trend to meet at some point.
2. The US per capita emissions appear to be on a steady downward trend since 1850. This is even more obvious if you discount the anomalous periods of the civil war and the Great Depression. You have to admit, that's something that demands unpacking.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s4fy286y7gwpqgmeltark/Screens...
Edit: Looks like Mongolia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE have the honour of being at the top actually. Might not be a comprehensive list.
I mean: Trump is a clown, and the US under his rule is becoming a circus.
The carbon tax is supposed to be a three tier system: tax, rebate & tariff. There's supposed to be a tariff on the carbon content of all imports from any jurisdiction that doesn't have comparable carbon policies. It's the "carbon club" that William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for. It sounds like Canada was close to setting this up with Europe, but the sticking point was the US -- nobody wanted to piss of the US by putting a tariff boundary with the US. Of course hindsight is 20/20 here. We should have slammed it in place the instead Trump starting being Trump, but by that time the carbon tax was gone. With the carbon club system, Canada's exporters wouldn't have been hurt by the carbon tax so badly.
Better is to distribute all of it back to the people with everyone getting the same amount regardless of income. People who are using less carbon than the per capita average end up getting more back than they spent and people using more than the average end up paying a net tax.
A coal plant that's not running is clean. Still useful for occasional emergency power.
Who said we are sacrificing anything? We only gain, and we gain a distributed, diverse, < $1watt of generating capacity.
Your comment makes no sense.
If everyone could emit each year as much as they wanted the total would go over whatever cap we need to keep it under to prevent catastrophic warming and sea level rise. Since only the total matters to nature then every ton of CO2 one person emits anywhere in the world has exactly the same impact as every ton of CO2 any other person emits anywhere else in the world.
In effect whatever cap we decide on for annual emissions act like a finite consumable for the year that is shared by everyone on Earth.
Unless you can come up with a good argument why some people should have a right to bigger share of that consumable than others, each person should get the total annual emission cap divided by the population Earth. Let's call this amount 1 share.
A government is doing its fair share to address climate change if it can get the emissions of the people under its jurisdiction down to 1 share per person.
Since nature doesn't care where emissions come it is OK if some people use more more than 1 share as long as others use less to balance it. A government just needs to get the average from the people under its jurisdiction down to 1 share per person.
> Prices are ‘WAY DOWN' in the USA, with virtually no inflation. With the exception of ridiculous, corrupt politician-approved ‘Windmills,' which are killing every State and Country that uses them, Energy prices are falling, ‘big time.' Gasoline is at many-year lows. All of this despite magnificent Tariffs, which are bringing in Trillions of Dollars from Countries that took total advantage of us, for decades, and are making America STRONG and RESPECTED AGAIN!!!
Wrong, it's simply true. Solar panels use land poorly, the MW per unit area is poor.
>You can grow crops and graze under the panels
Agrovoltaics accounts for less than 0.5% of commercial solar installations in rural lands. Effectively no one is doing this, it's not cost effective. You can't fit tractors/combines between the panels.
>And tend not to be put up on your own land without your consent.
What do you mean? No one is putting pump jacks on property without the owners consent.
So, similar dynamic. If the oil fields, coal mines etc would be sitting on prime land, you wouldn't have it this cheap. If there weren't subsidies, they wouldn't have been this cheap. It's very hard to compare different energy sources because of this. But solar being cheap isn't only a Chiblnese phenomenon. India, Spain etc all prove this. It's cheap when you have a lot of empty land and sunshine.
In this case, you simply need to make renewable energy cheaper and the market will do the rest.
Governments can achieve this through R&D investment, tax incentives for such R&D, subsidies to enable scale if that’s where it’s heading, building infrastructure to reduce cost bases etc.
I guess this also requires _some_ medium term thinking. It also requires genuine desire from governments to improve the lives of their citizens and their countries, and I think that is severely lacking now that the west is in decline. Ruling parties are more likely to help themselves than to build a better future.
Go to https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/, open "Full record" and see an objective and factual data (and not some politically motivated estimates) - amount of actually emitted gas is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating both for lowest points and highest points.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economists%27_Statement_on_Car...
It's like taxing drugs more and more, we have already done this, taxing nicotine. It really didn't work until governments started banning some products across the globe. Before that it was just as deadly as usual, but more expensive with each new tax hike. And that is a luxury product, non essential one.
Taxing emissions too much to actually make a difference would mean taxing business so much that some low marginal ones would go bankrupt. And among those low marginal emitting businesses I'm pretty sure are a lot of truly essential ones, which we can afford to just rapidly close with no recourse. So they won;t be taxed as much or alternatively they will be subsidized after being taxed (yay, double the paperwork and double the options for corruption). And so emissions will stay around the same order of magnitude.
I would silently accept existence of the credits and taxes even if they were pointless, if in parallel governments had acknowledged and implemented actual research and later action to really combat climate change (DAC tech, sun shields, sulphur seeding etc.) at scale (important). But no luck :(
On the other hand, rebuilding a road to physically slow down cars, work even without extreme fines. Providing a complex set of prevention, therapy and replacement activities for the drug users also mostly works.
Same with carbon tax, but worse - drugs or even speeding in cars are non essential. Emitting industries on the other hand often are essential. So they have even less incentive to close or downsize if fined. Instead they will do anything to continue while being taxed. Maybe they employ shifting production elsewhere, maybe bribe officials, maybe just hike prices and pray that their monopoly position will keep them in business. Point is, it won't reduce actual emissions.
China is taking over as the more stable and reliable partner for so many counties - I don't like it really but what can you do
GDP PPP is probably the more appropriate comparison here, by the way (a big part of the cost of solar isn't buying the actual panels), and China's GDP PPP is 10x the UK's.
I mean, on a global basis, sure, not really. But if you currently get your water supply for your megacities from rivers A, B, C and D, then yeah, that's vulnerable, and that river E on the other side of the country with no infra has increased in flow will be little consolation.
Scroll through the last 72 hours here and you can kind of see it in action: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CN/72h/hourly
Now, clearly, there's a long way to go, and China does still have a lot of baseload coal. But it's not building much if any _new_ baseload coal.
Think that's weird? France has load-following _nuclear_ plants (it more or less has to, given how much of its grid is nuclear).
So far as I know, oil production increased coal consumption, and indirectly production, in the early twentieth century.
You may not owe utter fucking double idiots better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
If Fox News spends $200M of screen time telling everyone that the tax is making all the prices of everything go up then that will be the predominant talking point.
That's the whole issue with "post truth" - perception _is_ reality at this point, at least effectively.
