Xi is pushing climate, study shows
Enabling climate acceleration are economic sectors such as land use, China coal, Saudi Aramco, Coal India, Gazprom (Russia), National Iranian Oil — in that order.
Since 2021, China coal sends more carbon in the air than NATO equities and Arab states combined. The China coal sector is increasing capacity and is delivering 12.7 GtCOe in 2024.
The #GreenhouseForcing results are published at: http://data.yt/projections/2024-results.html @climate
These things only become meaningful when you look at emissions per capita AND remember that China manufactures large amounts of the world’s stuff. All your iPhone emissions count as China’s because it was manufactured there, but they really belong to your country. Same for loads of other stuff. Careful you don’t fall for the tenor of this article, because it’s probably intended to distract you (“Why should I bother when China is really bad?”) and keep you consuming
Yeah, but the energy for manufacturing comes from a just large percentage of coal power plants and it seems they even want to build new ones.
So yes, they are the world’s factory and it’s unfair to just blame them for building stuff for us. But how they do it needs to be criticised
Eh, this is a little simplistic. While it is indisputably true that you have to look at per capita emissions and that chinese manufacturing makes loads of the stuff made that second point needs more exploring.
Because capitalism is a garbage, nightmare system manufacturing gets sent, in general, to the cheapest manufacturer. The fantasy is this represents the most awesome, magical, and clever business but IRL it usually has more to do with loosest tax, safety, and environmental laws.
So you can’t view the manufacturing as some selfless sacrifice of emissions, there may be government policies in play meaning idk dirty power is really cheap or whatever.
I basically think country vs country is a fucking stupid lens to view this through in general, because for all some fakelandian business might dump uranium in a river fakelandia is probably the way it is for reasons that non uranium dumping countries aren’t guilt free in.
our global system has produced these problems, not moustache twirling villianous defectors.
I love Lemmy. I often come in here thinking about the downsides of an article and it’s usually the top voted comment. Contrast with the… other… site… where the top comment is probably racist posted by a bot.
They’re still barely over half of US GHG emissions per capita. Fine they use more coal per capita, still much better than the US overall.
You picked one of the worst countries on the globe.
China has managed to surpass fucking Germany in emissions per capita, one of the worst polluters in Europe with an enormous fossil fuel car & coal lobby.
And yes, just like China, Germany exports more than it imports. Any outsourced emissions are offset through this.
Not to mention they’re installing more solar than the rest of the world combined. They’re definitely putting effort into transitioning.
Yeah, the only reason coal emissions are going up is because they’re growing too fast for even renewable energy buildouts to match increasing demand, so coal is their only option to keep up with power and steel production. The alternative is to slow development, and they’re understandably not willing to do that with the US breathing down their necks and India right next door growing just as fast.
This is a situation where the conclusion you can draw is based on the metric you choose. If you instead choose GHG per unit GDP, they’re far worse than the US. That’s a measure that’s less diluted by their vast population.
Why should how wealthy you are factor into how much you pollute? Per capita is the only sensible measurement here.
The idea is GDP is a measure of activity. So using per GDP allows you to see the efficiency which you are producing “value”. That’s not a terrible idea in general but it accepts a very narrow definition of value.
GDP is a really flawed measure of how well a society is performing. I wonder what it would look like if we used Gross National Happiness or Total Quality Life Years. Could also think about ecosystem health or biodiversity as a valuable output of a country but that’s highly linked to CO2 emissions so wouldnt be meaningful.
Also worth saying whilst per capita is absolutely important as a measure for us to understand the performance of human economic systems the earth systems only respond to gross total emissions.
Creation of value means nothing in the context of climate change. The atmosphere doesn’t say “you’re less at fault because you made so much value for the shareholders”.
The only measure that means anything is absolute emissions, full stop.
I acknowledged this in my last paragraph. We should care about value though and we need to fight for that value to be something positive and meaningful (human and non-human health and wellbeing is a good start imo) not just shareholders.
Ultimately, there is a lot flawed in carbon accounting systems but we do need measures that allow us to assess if individuals, organisations and nations are doing enough and importantly articulate what pathways to zero emissions look like and that does mean trying to work out which processes are producing something we want with low or no emissions or not.
I guess it should be the other way around. More money (per person) means you should be able to afford reducing GHG. For example by better isolating your home, using cleaner sources of energy or constructing more power efficient machines.
It can’t be, that totalitarian regime doesn’t give f about climate, people and many other things that are more important than money etc. But hey, tankies will still love Xi bc he is dictator on the other side of barricade between dictatlr’s war.
What a wonderful moment to witness! A message finds the receiver it was intended for. Turns out it‘s not only a receiver but a repeater, too.
NATO equities? What?
“G/year” “GtCOe” Be careful of feeding the “science is wrong” trolls by misrepresenting units of measure.
Thank you for your feedback. Let’s suppose that we do not wish to indicate tonnage (of CO2-equivalent over 100 years) but flux (tonnage of CO2-equivalent over 100 years per year).
I wonder if we would use the unit often found in the literature: “GtCOe.y-1”.
I do not contest that it is scientific but i propose that it cannot be understood without a degree in math.I do not worry about trolls: my purpose is to be understood by non-trolls. What do you think?
Honestly, that unit reads like bullshit to me, when stated out of context- I did used to work in energy and emission forecasting, but never that deeply into the academics so feel free to disregard my comments on that basis - we relied on scientific advisors for that stuff.
Personally I’d hope that all the papers quoting such a thing should have a simpler literal maybe step by step explaination of what the fuck they’re trying to measure . But i really did hate academia generally for its introverted tendencies, I don’t think they write those papers to inform oiks like me.
If the unit is supposed to be a scale for the long term average net flow of greenhouse gases from the planet’s surface into the atmosphere, then that is a complex thing; I think it deserves a load of words to explain the what is being described - more than a few of letters and numbers.
Here’s my attempt at what I think the abbreviation is trying to say: “Average mass of greenhouse gas emissions with equivalent potential to warm the planet as a gigatonne of carbon dioxide, less any amounts absorbed back into the earth, per year over the last 100 years (GtCO2e)”
I dont feel the “y-1” adds anything since the unit is dimensionally a number of tonnes - unless I’ve misinterpreted -which seems likely.One shouldn’t just use an abbreviation if one want’s to communicate to non-specialists. I’d always advise to spell it out in real words and sentences. If complex, try to break it down into simple parts. Then after a full explanation, you can later reply on the abbreviation - for example in a graph label.
If the measurement or estimate is important, then the audience deserves enough words to explain it. If the measurement or estimate does not come with enough words to explain it then in my opinion the author doesn’t care enough to try to explain it so it can’t be that important. It may be just a rhetorical grph or it just looks good - no real meaning.
The only exception for me is the “standard units”, metre, kilogramme etc. as we can rely on S.I. for those standard measures overing the main material dimensions.
Look it proably really is all just me being an asshole, but I get very sick of hearing vague, imprecise bullshit like “Carbon” being used as a term for “greenhouse gas emissions”. I did have a job where the difference between C and CO2 caused a factor of 0.278 discrepancy in some arguably important figures. High school fucking chemistry. Those people should have known better and resolved their unit of measure ahead of time.
I get that some people had a hard time in school, but I think it should be about trying to help them understand more and learn , not dumbing stuff down to imprecise terms because we’re so scared of confusing someone . If a person doesn’t know the basics, say the difference between an element, an atom and a molecule; we should help them learn that before going on at them about complex atmospheric concentrations and global warming equivalent potentials.
@oo1
I think that you have been working to make the paper clearer. So i am using your definition draft and adding a section after the “Abstract”. It goes like so:Unit of measure
-–Exposed data are annual throughput of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions. The unit is giga-tonnes of CO2-equivalent/year, or Gt/year for short. For any greenhouse gas, the number represents the mass of carbon dioxide that would warm the earth over a hundred years as much as the mass of the gas newly-sent.
Cool, that looks great to me.
