It’s fun to blame India and China, but at least China is pumping out renewable capacity at a crazy rate. They should be doing better, but this isn’t an US vs THEM problem.
The US might be using less coal, but it is replacing it with just as much natural gas, which is slightly better, but still bad.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care for the government of China. That being said, all the papers I have seen on them building coal power plants, seem to indicate that those power plants are replacement plants, and mostly stopgap measures. So they are building a new coal power plant to replace an old, and much dirtier, coal power plant, with the intention of spinning down the new plants as soon as their solar and hydroelectric capacity can take over. That isn’t great, but they are also testing out the nuclear power plants that we designed in the '60s and '70s that never got tested because of Western beaurocracy. If they can get the molten salt reactors working, I suspect they will abandon coal and gas rather quickly.
It’s fun to blame India and China, but at least China is pumping out renewable capacity at a crazy rate. They should be doing better, but this isn’t an US vs THEM problem.
The US might be using less coal, but it is replacing it with just as much natural gas, which is slightly better, but still bad.
I credit China for their efforts on renewables and criticise them for their efforts on coal, and give shit to india for sucking.
But I hear “we’re doing too badly” too often around this place and not enough credit where credit is due
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care for the government of China. That being said, all the papers I have seen on them building coal power plants, seem to indicate that those power plants are replacement plants, and mostly stopgap measures. So they are building a new coal power plant to replace an old, and much dirtier, coal power plant, with the intention of spinning down the new plants as soon as their solar and hydroelectric capacity can take over. That isn’t great, but they are also testing out the nuclear power plants that we designed in the '60s and '70s that never got tested because of Western beaurocracy. If they can get the molten salt reactors working, I suspect they will abandon coal and gas rather quickly.